Doodle art: my first test from my manga comic teacher

September 8, 2009 by r2moo2
Filed under: Doodle Art, News

*Click on the picture to enlarge.

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:

I am not to copy from another person’s work. It must be entirely original.
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.
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:

The body is too long, and the legs are too short.
The character is too short as a whole. (There is a sweet spot for good-looking female characters)
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.)
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!)
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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