Who Ilya Kuvshinov is, what to look for in his art style, and a 30-minute style-study plan built on real photo portrait reference.
Ilya Kuvshinov is a Russian illustrator, born in 1990 and based in Tokyo, known for the character designs of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 and the film The Wonderland (2019). Artists study his stylised portraits for clean shape design and economical line. The fastest way to learn from him is to train the real head structure underneath the style.
Ilya Kuvshinov was born in Penza on 20 February 1990, worked in the video game industry while doing character design on the side, and moved to Japan around 2015 to work full-time on anime ( Wikipedia ). He had about 2 million Instagram followers as of 2022, so his portraits are among the most widely seen stylised faces online.
He also directed the "Let You Down" music video for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022) and designed the characters for the game Guns Undarkness (2024).
When you study a Kuvshinov portrait, look at four things: how far each face shape is simplified, where the line gets thicker or thinner, how few lines describe the nose and mouth, and where the light comes from. These are observations you make on his published work. They are not a description of his private method, which we have not seen.
Use this checklist on one image at a time:
Shapes: trace the face and hair silhouette with as few lines as you can.
Line weight: mark three places where the line changes thickness.
Economy: list which features are drawn fully and which are suggested.
Light: find the main light direction and the darkest value.
A style study is private practice: you copy one piece to understand its decisions, credit the artist, and never post or sell the copy as your own. The learning shows up in the next step, an original drawing from your own reference that applies one lesson from the study. Our guide to using photo reference without copying covers the line between study and theft.
Stylisation is simplification of real structure, so a stylised face only reads well when the artist knows where the skull, eye sockets, jaw and neck sit. Practising heads from real photos first gives you something solid to simplify later.
Start with face reference for drawing and the construction steps in how to draw the head . Then push one shape at a time toward a stylised version.
This 30-minute session splits time between fundamentals and style. The timings are our own practice drill.
Published 2026-10-31 on the Refimages blog.