How
to Draw
Manga
Art
Lesson:
Drawing Manga
Manga Basics
This drawing tutorial shows
how to create an original manga character.
Personality for Your Manga
What personality do you want to show? A hero, bad guy, an intelligent person or a fearful person.
The personality of your character is reflected in the way he or she will look. This includes the facial features, body, clothes as well as props like eyeglasses.
Which clothes and props will help reflect the personality? For instance, a bad person could be seen in darker clothes and a hero in light-colored clothes. An intelligent person can wear glasses while a strong person is drawn muscular.
Drawing Manga Faces
Head To draw a manga face, start with a circle using a pencil. Eyes are located slightly lower than the middle of the circle.
At the bottom of the circle, draw lines ending in a point for the chin.
Eyes are the most important facial feature in Manga Art. The eyes are drawn with detail.
There are a few ways you can draw the eyes. Most manga eyes are very large. Young women have larger, rounder and shinier eyes with longer eyelashes than men. Older people can be shown with a simple line for the eyes.
Eyebrows are drawn as a single thin or thick horizontal line.
Mouth and Nose are drawn very simply in Manga art.
The nose can be drawn with a simple line in the shape of a capital L or as a dot. An older person's nose can have more detail.
The mouth is usually a simple horizontal line. But a woman or older person's mouth can be drawn with more realistic detail.
Ears are drawn as simple lines, also.
Drawing a Manga Body
Clothes The clothes and props like glasses, jewelry or a cane should reflect the personality and help the viewer understand more about the character you created.
For instance, a school girl wears a school uniform while a hero wears an armored costume.
And don't forget...
Hairstyles that you
choose are important for showing personality, too. Long hair on a woman
is
considered feminine, spiky hair is wild, and a short cut
is conservative.
Emotions are added to the face. Study the way features move when a person smiles, cries, shouts or is angry by observing yourself in a mirror.
Body poses can also add more depth to emotion and more interest to the drawing. A small wooden mannequin can be found in art stores to help with perspective and to create different poses.
Art Materials There are different art materials you can use.
A #2 or HB pencil for beginning the sketch.
Add tone or color
after you finishing the pencil sketches and inking over the outlines.
Then, erase the pencil lines.
Black and white art can be done on comic paper or Bristol Board using dip pens (Hunt 102; Hunt 100) for outlines, watercolor brushes to fill-in shadows and shading, and India ink. Experiment with different sizes and materials.
Tones consist of cross-hatching, dots, solids and lines.
You can create tones in different ways. You can draw them yourself which is very time consuming, use screentone sheets from an art store or use graphics software like Photoshop.
Color art can be done by using watercolor paint with heavy hot-pressed watercolor paper, color pencils, markers, or graphics software like Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows (& Mac), Paint or GIMP.
Computer Graphics Software Scan at 600 dpi or higher for art with ink outlines.
Hint: If you are planning to print your Manga artwork, draw it 10% larger than the final size. This creates a sharper look to your finished artwork when it's scaled down.
Creative Idea Take a
photo of yourself, family or friends and create manga characters using
the photo as reference.