Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Revisiting Manga


Coming from a fine arts background, I never had much use for the techniques involved in creating Manga illustrations. The "cuteness" of the wide-eyed girls and the stylization never appealed to me. And I can't tell you how many times I've had kids come up to my book signing tables and ask for a Manga drawing. I've just never had any interest it. But this past weekend (on a whim) I bought a book on the fundamentals and history of the style, and now I think I am beginning to appreciate it a bit more. I did the following rendering based on the Manga structure (the figure is broken up into 8 distinguishable sections) and I think it came out pretty good. It's also a great way to stay sharp on your figure drawing skills without drawing directly from the figure, although I can't wait to employ these techniques while looking at a live model. I can see how the techniques would lend themselves to comic book art especially, but it never hurts to strengthen your knowledge of the human body and it's proportions. If you click on the image you can see how I first built the structure on a kind of "wire frame" construction, and then after scanning that into Photoshop did my heavy ink lines on a separate layer. The final step I just colored the skin hair and fabric on yet another top layer.

Enjoy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

great work!