Irene Flores - Shojo Fashion Manga Art School, Boys: How to Draw Cool Characters, Action Scenes and Modern Looks

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Every artist has their favorite tools and special techniques theyve picked up over the years. If youve been drawing for a while, you probably have your own favorites already. Here, well cover some basics, in case you find it handy to try them out and add to your bag of tricks. Or, if you are just getting started, this chapter will give you an idea of what you will need to pick up.

The tools covered here arent all absolutely necessary. As long as you have a pencil and paper, you can draw. But these tools will help make the process of drawing manga characters easier and faster.

Mechanical pencils work well for all of the exercises covered in this book, and you dont have to bother sharpening them.

It is a good idea to keep your pencils filled with blue lead. This makes it easier to go over sketches with darker graphite or ink later. Blue lead also tends to disappear when it is scanned, leaving the darker pencil or ink lines without having to erase all of the preliminary sketching.

The image on the left shows the preliminary inks over the blue sketch. On the right, the same image was scanned using the black-and-white setting. The blue lines in the sketch have disappeared.

A brush pen is a good choice for a main pen. It gives varying line weight without having to go over the same spot numerous times.

Use gel pens and felt-tip pens when you have to do straight lines or fill in large spaces. (Suing a brush pen with a ruler can get messy and doesnt always work very well.)

You dont need fancy, expensive paper to draw. Whether its printer paper, thick bristol paper or poster boardif it holds lead and ink, its good. However, some paper will work better with the tools you prefer. Experiment to see what works best for you. I like Deleters Plain B paper because my brush pens dont bleed as much, and ink dries very fast.

Take reference shots with a camera phone or use a tablet to speed up your production time by cleaning up and coloring your art digitally. (I use Adobe Photoshop and a tablet for this.) Its not cheating because it will not make you draw better automatically. Just like, pens, paints and other traditional media, digital tools are just thattools to help you with your art.

The color, intensity and placement of lighting can dramatically change the look and the feeling of your characters and the scene as a whole. Lets examine the same face in several types of lighting to see how changing the lighting changes the way we read someones features.

A few shadows highlight the contours of the face in bright daylight.

The light from the sun isnt very intense at sunset, but it spreads over a wide area. The light source comes from the left and has an orange tone. The shadows on the face are softer and not very deep.

The light source is blue-green and comes from below. It is small but less intense than neon lighting, leaving lots of shadows.

This type of light comes from a smaller, concentrated source that doesnt create much reflective lighting. The shadows are harsher and the planes of the face are highlighted by light and washed out.

The light source comes from the fire directly below.