How to Draw Anime Style Food & Lunch Box

Posted on by animeoutline

This step by step tutorial shows how to draw an anime or manga lunch box with some food items commonly found in a Japanese lunch.

Anime food in lunch box drawing step by step

Lunch boxes are very common in many anime shows and manga, especially so in the ones that revolve around some sort of school life.

There is usually quite a bit of detail put into drawing anime food so this tutorial will focus on drawing nice looking and detailed food as well. At the same time it is not too difficult though it may take you a while to draw out and properly position all of the different food items in the lunch box.

Step 1 – Draw the Rectangular Shape of the Lunch Box

Start the drawing by first establishing the 3d rectangular shape of the lunch box. In this case the lunch box will be drawn in two point perspective.

If you are not familiar with perspective drawing what this means is that the farther ends of the lunch box will be drawn slightly smaller than the front corner.

For an explanation of perspective drawing see:

Perspective Drawing Tutorial for Beginners and How it Relates to Anime

Step 2 – Draw the Empty Lunch Box

After you establish the basic shape of the lunch box you can then draw its inner details and sections (only two in this case).

While most of the inside will eventually be covered by the food its still a good idea to draw these out with light lines and erase them later. This way you can avoid mistakes such as different parts of the lunch box not lining up properly.

For some common drawing mistakes see:

Common Mistakes When Drawing Anime & Manga

Step 3 – Draw the Outlines of the Food

Anime food in lunch box drawing outline drawing

The food items we will draw inside the lunch box are:

Rice
Tomatoes
Broccoli
Sausages
Eggs
Deep Fried Meat or Vegetables (with wax paper around them)

Start by drawing the basic shapes of these items without any of the smaller inner details. If drawing using paper and pencil be sure to make very light lines for the food items as you may have to erase some to tweak their size and positioning to make sure they fit nicely into the lunch box.

For advice on good drawing practices check:

Beginner Guide to Drawing Anime & Manga

You can see the fully visible outlines of each of the food items in this tutorial in the example above.

Step 4 – Draw the Details of the Food

After you finish drawing the outline shapes of the food add some smaller details for each item.

For the rice you can draw just a few hints of the individual grains.

For the other food items you can see the details in the example above.

Conclusion

Food and lunch boxes are a very common item in anime and manga. Though anime style food is not very difficult to draw it does take some time to go over each food item so drawing it may require some patience.

For more food related tutorials see:

For drawing other things in the anime/manga style check out:

For drawing actual anime characters see:

How to Draw Anime Characters Tutorial