from slyths

As promised, I will be showing some of my foul ups and mistakes of my manga drawing training with my manga teacher.

You can laugh all you want, but this is for learning purposes, so I guess it is worth it for readers online.

Anyway, if any reader wants to begin learning how to draw people for manga comics or webcomics, please start with the “Drawing outline of human body” series, because in the series we discuss about the fundamentals of drawing manga males and females, or rather manga girls and guys.

However in this post we will touch on how to make drawings of human body look more life-like, like people.

Learn how to draw people: Mistakes to learn from

*Click on the picture to enlarge.

This is one of the major mistakes I made in drawing outlines of male anatomy. As this was focusing on anatomy, I didn’t spend much time on making the characters look great on their facial features, so pardon the ugly facial features.

So what is the most prominent mistake I made in the above doodle art? It was in both male characters’ poses.

Look at the legs at the above two male manga characters; they are two closed apart! No guy at any street would walk or pose with their legs so close to each other like a female’s.

After I drew the whole character, I was totally disguested with it, especially the right male character. It looked so sissy. However it was a learning point and I decided to still keep this mistake on paper..

Mistake to learn from #1: Never draw male characters with their legs closed together, unless we are trying to draw a sissy.

Tip #1: To avoid the above mistake, my manga teacher advised me to observe how real people walk naturally. By making pointers of how they walk, the mannerisms and the poses, it will help in my drawing skills in drawing people.

If any reader read “Drawing outline of human body part 4: Adding muscles and flesh to stick figures“, you will understand that I did not draw the above male characters at one attempt.

Rather I did it in multiple stages: from drawing stick figures, to adding flesh and muscles to the stick figures, and lastly to add details to the outline of human body.

The above exercise helped to identify where did my mistake occur, which I am going to show it here:

*Click to enlarge

As we can see above, even before I added details to my male characters, the outline of the human body already suggested that my poses are really for females and not for males.

Therefore, it goes to show that my advanced stick figure drawings were not mastered well. If it was done well, the mistake would not be made.

Tip #2: Seek to master advanced stick drawings and their poses well. As I have mentioned before, my friend who graduated with an arts degree, stated that they spent 1 whole year drawing stick figures as foundation.

Therefore stick figure drawings are not just for children to play with; it is used for artists to practise drawing human anatomy.

Other tips and advices

The above tips are not just for walking and standing poses; even for sitting and kneeling poses, generally real guys do not really close up their legs, for natural reasons.

*Click to enlarge

The above pose isn’t really so bad, but my manga teacher commented that generally japanese guys do not kneel that way; rather their legs are still apart while kneeling.

Hence it is vital to notice the mannerisms and poses that real people make, in order to learn how to draw people. Otherwise our artwork will lack realism.

Final words for this post

The mistakes that I made in the above doodle art are not exhaustive; I only picked out the major flaws in these doodles.

If any reader wishes to learn how to draw people well, please go to the “How to draw manga tutorials” page and look out for the series on “Drawing outline of human body”. It will be good to start from there.

Anyway that’s it for this post. Stay tuned for more updates!

If anyone wants to share his experience of drawing manga, or comics, or webcomics, just share it in the comments section(highly recommended for everyone to see) or the “Contact me” form. Any participation is greatly appreciated!

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In this post I am going to share about advanced stick figures drawing, and it is moving closer to our actual drawing to manga comic characters.

Let us assume that many readers have gone through the previous drawing outline of human body sessions. If any reader needs to know what is happening, start from part 1, part 2a and part 2b.

The above picture of the manga Bleach looks cool.

Advanced stick figures drawing example

I will begin by sharing some advanced stick figure drawing, in contrast to our previous manga anatomy exercises.

By comparing with both pictures on the left and on the right, one might guess that I have used the left stickman as a guide to draw my right picture.

This is exactly the kind of exercises my manga teacher asked me to practice on, and though it was tedious, it brought in tremendous results.

I had to trace my stickman into another piece of paper, then draw muscles and flesh into the stickman drawing, trace the stickman with flesh and then finally produce a full profile character as shown on the right.

And we haven’t gone to the details of drawing hands and legs yet. That must be left for another day.

There is actually an intermediate step of drawing muscles and flesh to the stick figure before drawing details such as the image on the right, but I will leave that topic for another day too.

Drawing outline of human body: Advanced stick figures drawing

The spinal cord actually has a shape, as the character has a side profile view. The two triangles at the middle of the stick figure bends forward, giving the stick figure volume.

Most important of all, while drawing our stick figure guidelines we must take note of the balance of the body, and the centre of gravity of the entire character.

I wonder will I ever cover the topics on the balance of the body and the centre of gravity of manga characters, because these two topics are very technical and very difficult to describe in words. Will update if I ever get to the topic.

Anyway, besides observing how the overall stick figure look, notice that the stick figure has a pose. In this exercise, I was required to produce several stick figures with different poses, and then draw them into full profile manga comic characters.

Hence, in this advanced stick figures drawing, paying attention to the pose of the character is very important.

The pose of a character actually can dictate the femininity or the masculinity of a manga character. There were errors that I drew that made the male manga character look very sissy. I will show some errors that I made in future posts.

These are other examples of advanced stick figures and doodling that I had to do for practice, and the above are showing female poses.

How should one practice drawing to improve on manga anatomy?

Simple, just draw the stick figure in various poses that I have posted, according to the proportions that I have suggested in the previous “drawing outline of human body” series.

Notice that certain similar features are still in my stick figure drawings, such as drawing circles to represent joints, and drawing triangles to give a guideline of the shape of the upper body.

All these proportions are exactly what I had advocated and discussed before. Apply them to different poses shown in topic.

And in future poses I will discuss about adding flesh and muscles to stick figures drawing.

Final Words for this post

My friend, who graduated with an arts degree, told me that during art school they practised drawing stick figures for an entire year as foundation!

That is really tedious practices, however it built a strong foundation of the different proportions of human anatomy for the students.

So, if we want to develop well in manga drawing, there is no escape learning how to draw stick figures well.

Stay tuned for further updates! I will be posting more examples of different poses, silly mistakes that I made and how to add flesh & muscles to stick figure drawings in future posts to come.

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from icameinpeace

Drawing outline of human body part 1: how to draw manga easily

Human anatomy is a tough topic to talk about, because there are many things to discuss concerning the human’s anatomy. Yet today I hope to cater even for beginners to have an understanding of basic human anatomy.

Therefore, for simplicity’s sake and for everyone to learn together, I would have to take it slow in talking about human anatomy today.

The above picture is from Slam Dunk, Hanamichi Sakuragin.

Drawing stick figures as beginners’ guidelines

You might be thinking, “hey, I want to draw manga comic characters, not stick figures!”

Never laugh at drawing stick figures, because somehow it forms a basis for us to know human anatomy well.

My manga teacher gave me stick figures to draw for a few lessons. Why?

1. It is for the purpose of recognizing the locations of the joints that can rotate in the human body, and the locations of the parts of the body that can bend and move.
2. It is to know and be familiarized with the size and proportion of the major parts of the body so that we don’t draw an alien instead.
3. It is to train ourselves to be able to draw our characters in different sizes without messing up the proportions of the body.
   

We aren’t going to always draw our characters standing straight, and when we want our characters to take on a certain pose, we certainly must know where are the parts of the body that can move, rotate and/or bend.

General male’s anatomy

Many books will suggest that a manga male character will look the best with 7.5 heads. However, for the purpose of simplicity, 8 heads is still good proportion actually, and because 8 is a multiple of 2, and we can split the body by 2 always.

The above is one of my stickman practices where my manga teacher asked me to do.

There are many things to notice in the manga male’s anatomy. Using the left stickman as the reference, I shall summarize it in the following points:

1. From the top of the head to the hips is exactly 4 heads, and the hips to the legs is also exactly 4 heads tall. Use this as the proportion to draw the character.
2. The shoulder is about 1.5 to 2 times wider than the hips. That’s natural, for males have wider shoulders than females.
3. The two triangles above the hips give a guideline of how to draw the gradient of the body. At the cross section, it is where the waist is, and it is the narrowest part of the torso. (It gives a slight hour-glass figure of a slim male’s body.
4. The circles other than the head are joints that can bend or rotate. (It is not exhaustive, for I have not included 2 major parts yet, and it will be revealed when we come to the female’s anatomy.)
5. The triangle below the hip line is for the male’s private/sensitive part. (Please don’t be shy partitioning space for this, it is needed for effectiveness and realism.)
6. For the rest of the parts of the body, such as the length of the arm, or the length of the thigh, just use the scale given in the picture.

The above guidelines is for a slim looking male character. Plump ones will have to be done through personal experiments.

General female anatomy

It is slightly different from the male’s anatomy.

The circles that represent the joints and the proportion of the female manga’s anatomy are exactly the same interpretation as above, except that we need to know a few different features:

1. The widest part of the hip and the widest part of the shoulder is exactly the same length.
2. The cross-section of the two triangles above the hip is where the thinnest part of the torso should be, to give the ladies a good tight and slim hour glass figure. It is slightly higher than the male’s anatomy.

Also, the red circles at the extreme right stickgirl are areas that can bend, but isn’t exactly joints. Especially the waists, where ladies bend to give lots of different poses. It is the same with the male’s body.

What do we hope to achieve at the end?

After having a stickman, we can add its flesh and muscles to produce a good figure.

I admit that the above picture is at least a few steps beyond drawing the stickman and adding its muscles & flesh, but this is the incentive of going through a few basic drills of familiarizing ourselves with the outline of the human body using stickman.

Final points to note

Guidelines are important to give a skeleton of what to draw next, and it is a technique where every manga artist will use.

However the above guidelines can only suit to teach and train beginners, because it is too tedious and time consuming for professional manga artists to adopt. They have their own different and easier system for guidelines.

Also the guidelines shown in my stickman pictures are too straight; the human body is full of curves, hence it is only good to be familiar with for beginners, but we would have to go beyond that for us to draw more realistic characters.

Therefore just use the stickman pictures as guidelines for proportions, and draw some stickmen yourselves with a scale to effectively train your senses to know manga human anatomy.

Next time we can move from stiff stickmen and draw a different set of stickmen which is more realistic, and then it will lead on to adding flesh and muscles.

More will be revealed soon!

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Pencil sketching examples: how to draw manga easily

The above is my pencil sketching example, based on the manga Hatsukoi Limited by Mizuki Kawashita. I had multiple errors in that doodle, particularly the anatomy, because it’s meant to be upright instead of lying down.

However it didn’t look too bad on paper hence I kept it.

Anyway on this post I am going to show you two other doodles of mine that I made in reference to the tutorials before.

This is one of my pencil sketching examples.

Notice that the eyes are drawn the same way as I taught in the previous post here. It looks decent enough.

There are many ways to draw eyes. However, to master eye drawing, please practise pencil sketching, or in layman terms, doodling.

Doodling is one of the best ways to practise at anytime. My manga teacher kept emphasizing: “Every self-respecting manga artist keeps a whole stack of sketchbooks! One entire sketchbook may only consist of a single character’s design ideas!”

She also said, “Bring your sketchbook everywhere; if you have nothing to do, just doodle and you might find something useful for future.”

And seriously, doodles are not meant to be perfect. They are just sketches, practices and ideas that crash into our heads anytime of the day.

So please suppress your perfectionist side of you while doing your pencil sketching examples. Because I too am quite a perfectionist of a certain degree, and I tend to keep erasing off my pencil sketching examples, leaving me with no doodle at the end of the day.

However we will discuss more about doodling in future; for this post we are going to talk about doodling in respect to the previous “how to draw manga easily” post found here.

Why must we practise making pencil sketching examples, or doodling?

Firstly, one of the primary reasons of making a pencil sketching example is to train our bodies’ senses to adapt our sense of anatomy and overall completeness of a picture.

When we first draw our manga characters, our pictures would probably look like this below.

Bad manga drawings example

If you look at the above, from the left the first picture had eyes that are too closed to each other. In my efforts to balance the overall look of my sketch, I was tempted to shrink the face of the character, resulting in making a very cramped face. Almost looked like a *chibi drawing when I started.

*Chibi drawing is a cute mini-sized drawing which manga artists use to exaggerate facial emotions.

The other picture had eyes that are too far apart each other. In my efforts to balance the overall look, I was tempted to widen the face of the character, resulting in spoiling the facial features of my character as it is disproportionate. Once when I was practising I had one character look very plump accidentally because of the widened face.

It is only with doing our own pencil sketching examples that we familiarise our senses (our muscle memory, eyes, hands and brains) to intuitively accept facial and proportions well. Hence after much doodling we may experience this effect: without much thinking and focusing, one is able to draw a pair of eyes or facial features decently.

This will help tremendously in our pursuit of becoming a manga artist or comic artist. I can’t imagine a manga artist or comic artist that had to take so much brain power to focus on doing a good sketch. However as beginners we tend to take alot of time and concentration to do just one simple sketch don’t we?

This is my other pencil sketching example with a slight experimentation.

Secondly, as seen above, doodling is to experiment with different ways of drawing, and in our pencil sketching example, notice how the eyes looked different when I change the shape of the highlight within the eyes of this manga girl.

With just one simple difference, it could change the whole outlook of the character.

I have been experimenting with different eyes for awhile now, because I want to generate the best look to build my character profile. If everyone had the same pair of eyes, my future manga comic book will look plain.

More on Doodling with Pencil sketching examples in future

Like I said, this blog is about my journey to become a manga artist or comic artist. So not only will I be sharing about manga drawings, but also how I manage with my everyday affairs towards the pursuit of becoming semi-professional at least, and also share about bad drawing examples with hints to avoid it.

So there will be more on doodling, because doodling isn’t just about sketching this or that.

If there is anything you want me to share about concerning drawing and my manga journey, and if it be my means to share, I will post it up on my blog here. Do put your comments for requests, or email me at bright_morn_star@yahoo.com.sg.

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This is my very first doodle art!

This is before my manga comic art lessons started, where my teacher wanted to gauge my level of competency.

She gave me a few rules to follow:

1. I am not to copy from another person’s work. It must be entirely original.
2. Yet every manga comic artist uses references, such as pictures or people or magazines, to aid them in drawing their characters. I am to look for a reference to aid me, but never to copy wholesale.
3. A full profile character is to be drawn, male or female doesn’t matter.

So I did what she said, and produced the above doodle art.

These were her comments after reviewing my doodle art:

1. The body is too long, and the legs are too short.
2. The character is too short as a whole. (There is a sweet spot for good-looking female characters)
3. This girl looks like she is around her teens, maybe 15 years of age. (I actually wanted to draw her to look exactly around 15 years old, but my teacher preferred a more matured character.)
4. Something about the chest area I messed up.  Maybe it’s too flat or droppy. (It became a recurring problem: I cannot draw girls’ chest!)
5. It apparently is more suitable for *bishojo type of comic.

*Bishojo literally means “beautiful young girl”, where shojo comics are generally geared towards the taste of girls.

I wanted to draw a more *shonen type of character like the characters in the manga Bleach or Ichigo 100%.

*Shonen literally means “teenage guys”, and it can also mean a genre specially catered for teenage guys.

All in all, I agreed with what she said, and alot of improvements are needed. I used no guiding lines(its a technical term) to draw, and only with a picture as a reference I drew this character out. I was also afraid to draw hands, as drawing hands is an art by itself, so I hid them behind the character. (LOL!)

However I felt happy for the fact that though I received no formal training before, it didn’t look half bad either. Certainly very far from a sellable comic character though.

So from this lesson, my manga comic teacher began to drill the basics on to me, by training me in human anatomy with the use of guiding lines. Lessons are growing increasingly interesting!

I will reveal more of my training  journey soon. Do comment and let me know about my doodle art if possible. I do not mind constructive criticisms.

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