So what's wrong with my chibis?If your chibis look unappealing to you, my guess is that either you've outgrown your "anime style phase" and your current artstyle translates poorly to very exaggerated cartoon proportions, or that you don't have enough experience with the principles of cartoon style or chibi style to comfortably draw something stylized to your liking.
I can't help you very much with resolving style issues, because that mostly comes down to your personal preferences in art. To draw something that looks good to you, you first have to develop your taste, then apply it. This means studying other artwork in the style(s) you'd like to emulate, and picking out what you like about it, and what you don't. Figure out if you prefer simple or ornate chibis, chunky or petite ones, or just maybe - you might arrive at the conclusion you don't like chibis at all, in which case they'll definitely never look good to you.
That said, I can help you troubleshoot some common hiccups people run into with drawing chibis.
Problem: just drew a little guy instead of a chibi.If your character looks more like a
Bitmoji avatar than a chibi, you probably scaled down the body-to-head ratio, without really changing anything else about your usual style. Especially the more realistic your usual style is, this can end up looking a bit uncanny, but isn't necessarily a bad thing (if you wanted to draw Bitmoji avatars instead).
To chibi-fy your character more, you can try tweaking the facial proportions (larger forehead, rounder chin, eyes set lower in the face, larger eyes, etc.) and exaggerating the anatomy of the body more (thicker and bean-like body, rounder limbs, smaller leg-to-torso ratio).
Problem: the facial facial features, in particular the eyes, look "off".Because chibis are often drawn with gigantic eyes, set relatively low in the face, it can be hard to fit all of your character's facial features in their skull in a way that doesn't look weird or uncanny. Most likely, if you run into this problem, you are drawing the eyes too close together (example A), or they fail to follow the perspective and angles of the face.
In a semi-realistic face, the eyes are about one eye's length away from each other. Closer or further apart, a realistic face quickly starts to look uncanny. This means that if you blow up the size of your character's eyes, you may also want to draw them further apart, and closer to the sides of the face than the center (example B). If you do this, they'll also start to angle away to the sides (
like a prey animal with monocular vision) as opposed to being front-facing and on a shared plane (
like a predator animal with binocular vision), and you'll have to draw their respective angles accordingly.
As drawing chibis is all about exaggeration, this is no hard rule - you could draw eyes without any gap between them at all, or you could push them even further apart to amplify that weird chibi proportion thing. But if you struggle with it, then this is a good place to start fixing the proportions.
Problem: the body's proportions look bad in relation to each other.This problem is a little trickier: while I'd definitely prefer the second of these two chibis, none of the traits in the first chibi are a problem on their own. There are many different styles and proportions for chibis, all demorphed in different ways, and to make a chibi work, you'll have to find the sweet spot between traits that work together.
Arms that are shorter than the body (as opposed to their usual shoulder-to-wrist being as long as shoulder-to-crotch) will work better when the body is also very small in relation to the head (example:
Miraculous Ladybug).
A drop-crotch (the crotch being drawn very low, with stubby legs or even only feet under it) tends to lend itself well to furries, and up to a certain point, works better the lower you draw it (example:
Jewelpet).
Petite feet and hands (or even complete absence of them, like having little spears for feet and hands) tend to look better on chibis that have overall longer or slimmer limbs, so they don't end up looking like adult babies (example:
Aggretsuko). Or, they can work well on characters that are meant to actually be babies (example: Shugo Chara, again).
All of these things would look off on a chibi without the right balance of elements, but look perfectly proportioned all at once on
Pikachu. It's tricky!
Without prior experience of what elements work well together and which don't, you'll have to study your chibis very carefully and try to pinpoint what elements don't look right to you, possibly by keeping them side-to-side with an example of a chibi that you do like. Once you've determined what parts look off, you can try exaggerating them in a different direction and learn how to make them work through trial and error.
Problem: even entirely chibified, chibis look unappealing in my style.There could be lots of reasons for this, again, including that you just may not like drawing chibis. The anatomy of full-size vs chibi-size aside though, there are some other general things that don't translate well from one to the other. Because chibis are always cartoon characters, certain basic cartoon principles apply to them that won't necessarily apply as much to your art otherwise (though you may become stronger for studying them).
Cartoonisms are about simplifying and exaggerating. You'll want people to be able to quickly read what is going on in your drawing, and if there are too many unnecessary details, visual clutter, or your drawing is overly rendered in a way that doesn't clarify its visual information, someone won't be able to quickly understand what they are looking at. In a chibi, you exaggerate and emphasize a character's face and head, so you typically put highest level of detail there, and then simplify other parts as to not distract from it. Example A is not a bad chibi by all means, but probably not nearly as visually clear as it would have been as a full-size piece with its level of detail.
On the other end of the spectrum, you could have simplification down all nice and clear, but lack the exaggeration that makes a cartoon character come to life. Elements like clothing and hair don't need to adhere to real-life logic and gravity because they'll disappear in the piece and make it look flat. Example C looks much more stiff here than it would have at full-size, because of its more realistic volume. In this case, exaggerating pose, expression, and shapes further will make the character's body language clearer.
It can be difficult to find a middle ground between those two things that both suits your overall style and tastes, but it's all theory that can help you compose better pieces even outside of chibis.
Problem: I wasn't listening when you told me not to draw enormous honkers on my character four times and now they look stupid.Yeah.
