Learning to Draw Manga

Although, I'm not going to teach you how to draw manga, I'm going to give you some suggestions on books you may want to buy.

Manga, if you don't already know, are simply comic books, but are made in Japan and are read right-to-left instead of left-to-right. There also is it's buddy, the counter-part of our, at least in America, cartoons is anime. They are the same yet different. Why I say different, they are drawn differently and the shows are different in a sense. Anime doesn't have the cartoons like Spongebob or anything like that. They have shows like Dragonball Z and Hetalia, which I love love love.

Besides the point. There are many different ways to draw manga, you just have to figure it out.

There's more than the full adult-y version of characters, the more detailed one, then you got the chibis which are so simplistic, they're cute. You just have to find your style.

Mark Crilley isn't Japanese as you can tell by his name. He lives in America. But his manga skills are just amazing in my opinion. I would recommend you to buy the books below, it's worth it, really.

In his book, Mastering Manga, he teaches you the basics: how to draw the eyes, head, body, poses. He even teaches you how to draw older and younger children. I would know, I bought the book.

He even teaches you scenery and a manga layout towards the end of the book. It's something you must see to believe. In fact, I'll post a youtube video of him up for you!

Just a few of his videos.

What I love about this book is that it's a workbook. You draw as you learn in the book. I have one right now that is almost used up but I don't really use it that much anymore. I never really had the need for it anymore. That's a lie, but whatever.

The workbook is by Christopher Hart and he has a lot of "How-to" books for anime. Your local bookstore, if it has a "how-to" section, should have "How-to draw manga" books and majority of them, or even all of them, are by Christopher Hart.

Since he doesn't have Youtube videos....scratch that, HE DOES! How did I not see that coming. Well, I'll put a few of his videos down and I'll try to find an example page of his manga artist workbook. (Note: He's a cartoonist. He doesn't do strictly anime like Mark Crilley.)