The Rules of Manga Art

I remember doodling about with manga art in my early high school years, but then came to the abrupt conclusion if I kept it up I'd cripple my art development skills ('cos I was very serious and professional about my work at the grand old age of 11).

So after a long art hiatus and regaining a less methodical view on art, I decided I'd like to re-learn the style. Nothing serious, just for making odd bits of fan art. I went online, and I looked at many different tutorials. But they were all rather confusing as the people just didn't explain how to capture the essence of manga. Rather just showing the student how they themselves go abouts doing things.

I don't so much want to learn "how to draw manga" as to understand how the techniques work, what makes an artist's style qualify as manga and how to make a piece not seem formulaic.

So what do you think are the "tropes" of manga style?

edited 27th May '11 5:41:01 PM by wiseoldtabbycat

At the most basic level, there aren't any.

Compare this◊ to this◊.

However, there are s lot of common tropes to "the kind of manga people think of when the word 'manga' is mentioned in most places outside of Japan."

So we'll leave aside the Gag Manga and "ultra-realistic" art styles like Shinchan and Punpun's up there and focus on that.

Anime art is basically stylized life drawing, so go study that. Professional-level manga is much more based in realism than anyone seems to realize:

• Apart from the occasional set of twin bowling balls, anime and manga characters tend to have pretty realistic body proportions... More so the more seriously the show takes itself.
  • However, doing realistic clothing folds takes forever, so most artists just simplify them to the basic lines, maybe with a few patches of shadow.◊
• Professional-level manga backgrounds are usually done as realistically as the schedule will allow. Most background assistants, and a lot of mangaka themselves, take straight-up drafting courses for that.
• Even the shading is just a simplified version of real shading. Screen tone was used in print manga because it was cheap, much faster and neater than paint, and doesn't turn to shit in a Xerox machine like pencil, but these days, we have a lot of options. I actually suggest against using the "free screen tone packs" you download from manga sites because you have to resize them yourself... Which most people get wrong.

Most of the stylization happens in the face.

In fact, faces are the only thing "how to draw manga" tutorials will teach you that most other drawing guides won't.*

• Big eyes are the medium's most famous Signature Trope, but they're not always used. As for the common styles of eye, Google "anime eye tutorial" and see our own pages on Tareme and Tsurime for girls.
• Small mouths, drawn with very simple shapes, are also common. A lot of artists don't even bother drawing tongues and teeth in open mouths - just a white oval. Don't be one of them, though.
• Noses are almost never big, except on gonks. How small they are is up to you, but the "stereotypical style" usually doesn't define them with lines.
  • They'll either use a dot for the tip of the nose, a small vertical line for the bridge, or two small arcs for the nostrils, sometimes with a small patch of shadow showing you where the "dark side of the nose" is.
• Necks are usually half the width of real ones - except for those of muscular characters, who tend to have veiny oak tree stumps. Avoid both extremes.

And finally, Anime Hair.

Despite its wild reputation, most anime hairstyles are based on real ones, except instead of multiple strands, it's treated as one solid clump that breaks off into smaller sections and tapers into points instead of individual strands.◊

However...

The only reason I've studied this so much is because the project I'm working on requires constant Art Shifts between my regular style and the Animesque art used in the Story Within a Story. If you want to be original, don't follow these guidelines strictly.

Expressions n' stuff later.

edited 1st Jun '11 1:46:49 PM by Wheezy

Wow. That was quite impressive 0__0. Any more?

Thanks, but I've been too busy to finish it over the last few days.

I might expand this into an actual guide at some point. Most "how to draw manga guides" I've seen are pretty unhelpful cliche storms.

I have one that is good, and saw another one that helps too.

The thing is, it doesn't matter how clichéd something is, learning even something as simple as this (badly drawn, I know) in a manga book can be EXTREMELY helpful.

The other one was even MORE clichéd (like, it was a bit cringe worthy) but had a very good tutorial on dynamic poses and motion.

edited 1st Jun '11 1:48:38 PM by MrAHR

There are two things that I think manga books are good for, and that's drapery and scenery.

Manga as a whole pays a lot of attention to clothing creases, which are always worth studying because the flow and fold of fabric makes for more dynamic and interesting pictures. (Unless your characters wear nothing but spandex.)

And I think I read somewhere that while American comic books usually do one or two big establishing shots per chapter - establishing shots being those panoramic panels with minimal dialogue and maximum environment detail - the average manga does seven or eight. Obviously it differs from genre to genre (you're going to get more scenery in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou than in Dragonball Z) but most of the manga guides I've read have at least touched on how to draw Scenery Porn. Scenery is often neglected in comics and artists could do with taking a few more tips on how to draw trees and buildings, tbh.

/thoughts on manga guides

edited 1st Jun '11 8:00:29 PM by Yuval

Can anyone tell me anything about the evolution of manga art? How, say, works from the '70's compare and hold up to contemporary works.

I'm still going to write more as soon as I have time. But I don't. This is the first time I've had internet access since Friday, and I only have 10 minutes left.

edited 7th Jun '11 5:41:30 PM by Wheezy

I'll look forward to it.

80s/90s style tends to put black markings on the characters' cheeks, but not like freckles. The width/heaviness kinda ranges from this to this. I don't know what purpose it serves...

edited 11th Jun '11 11:24:40 AM by blamspam

TO LOOK COOL.

Also: to look cute. Which is why I use those lines in my drawings too. Which is why seeing them in Dragon Ball always makes me very amused.

A common habit for many manga stuff, despite the subtle noses proportion wise, they are commonly a tad too long for the face than they should be

edited 16th Jun '11 10:16:41 AM by MrAHR

From what I've seen, faces also tend to be rather roundish with pointed chins, with variations making the face either shorter or longer and the chin angle steeper or shallower.

8 months later, here it is.

The reason no one can capture the essence of manga is because you can’t. Ask someone how to capture “the essence of oil paintings” or “the essence of movies.” Well, what kind of movies are we talking about? Family films? Blaxploitation? Stoner Comedies? The only thing you could do is tell you what comes to mind when you think of movies, which would probably be all the Hollywood clichés like car chases and explosions.

Figuring out exactly what to imitate is the problem most artists who aim for Animesque face, which is why most people who say they want to learn to draw anime and manga-styled art really mean they want to learn to draw moe. I’ve never seen anyone who claims to draw “anime art” come up with anything that looks like, say, Fist Of The North Star.

Just like the guys twenty years ago who wanted to make the next Watchmen, but ended up creating The Dark Age Of Comic Books - they take a few shallow bits and pieces, think they're the end-all and be-all of the genre, and imitate them until they're Dead Horse Tropes.

So study what makes great art in general, then get more specific: pick three to ten artists you admire, really try to figure out what makes them awesome, and observe the hell out of their styles. As you practice and improve, your art will slowly approach what you want it to be.

The story of manga's evolution over the last few decades shows is related. I don't know much about the 70s, in manga, because the only one I recall reading from that time period was Domu, which was very different from anything else being made at the time. However, I have read a lot from the ‘80s, and ‘90s, and I can say this:

Generic Cuteness and Strictly Formula plots seem to be much more common among anime and manga made after 2000 than before. At first, I thought this was my Nostalgia Filter talking, but I’ve noticed that pattern even among series I’ve never heard of until recently.

The older ones tend to have more diversity in both character designs and themes. This is probably due to a combination of Follow the Leader and Sturgeon's Law. Back in the day, most western publishers were distrustful of those newfangled foreign picture books, so only the series that were well-established and popular got imported. However, the manga section at my local bookstore is probably ten times the size it used to be, making a lot more room for new and unproven series.

Unfortunately, the powers that be have the same problem as those animesque artists a few paragraphs back, thinking things like fanservice and kawaiiko are the features that most appeal to audiences. (Your Mileage May Vary on how right they are.) So that’s what gets imported, and that’s what gets imitated by anyone looking for some quick money - doubly so now that making it isn’t as hard: No one has to pay an army of interns to paint cels or cut screentone anymore.

So while, on one hand, some truly great stuff gets made and released due to the barriers being torn down, the market also gets flooded with imitations of imitations of imitations of all the big Trope Codifiers.

Anyway, getting out of rant mode, older manga also tend to show more obvious influences from other genres and mediums, especially films and historical epics, in large part because many Anime Tropes hadn't been established yet.

I promised to write about expressions in the last post, so here it is: The way people emote in Real Life and the way they emote in anime are two very different animals. Many weebs make themselves really annoying by failing to realize that.

This goes for every form of stylization, but it’s even more noticeable in anime and manga, which are famous for their unique expression tropes. There are a lot of them I recommend you don’t use at all, like the Sweat Drop, Face Fault, and Cross-Popping Veins, but those are on their way to being Discredited Tropes, if they aren’t already.

Others are so universal you don't really have to worry about avoiding them, like the closed-eyed smile, but ideally, you'd want to go for an even mixture of Real Life and the "better" anime stock expressions when making your characters emote. Although real life emotions are cartoon ones are distantly related, they're related, so make sure your characters are at least human-like.

And finally, more on stylization: I’ve noticed that most anime appearance tropes only apply to young characters, with older characters becoming either more realistically drawn or more western-cartoony. This can be taken to pretty weird extremes.

And one final note: If you’re planning to make animesque work, “manga-inspired comics,” or whatever Insistent Terminology they’re using now. Write as if your favorite manga-ka was living wherever you are, observing the people around you, and telling the stories they saw. (Or in the place your story is set, if it isn’t where you live.) Don’t try to tell Japan’s stories, or ones based too heavily off of other manga. They have plenty of people already on that.

BTW: I always thought the lines are the pen equivalent of a Blush Sticker, but since they show up in colored work, too, I don’t know what they are. Shading, perhaps?

(I'll edit this later to be more coherent.)

edited 3rd Feb '12 11:11:43 AM by Wheezy

One thing I always appreciated about reading manga and watching anime, was being exposed to a very different country and culture than the one I lived in. Whenever I would see some western fan drawing a comic set in Japan or in a Japanese-esque setting instead of where they themselves live or a setting inspired by where they themselves live, I would feel this disappointment that the artist missed the opportunity to give the reader a glimpse of their own culture. (Like, I once found a webcomic drawn by an Egyptian girl who lives in Alexandria, and her comic had a generically European setting. That's another thing that will stem from cultural imitation: you'll be generic.)

That's why I promised to myself early on to consciously filter all my constructed worlds through my own cultural lens, and have my characters live similarly to how I live and eat what I eat, because even though all that stuff seems obvious and mundane to me, it won't look like that to those who don't live where I live and don't eat what I eat.

edited 1st Feb '12 10:00:27 AM by fanty

I think the closed eye smile thing is sorta inspired by real life. After all, when you smile, your cheeks go up, and your eyes narrow.

It is, but manga exaggerates it.

On tools:

There are no such thing as "manga tools," just tools that are commonly used to draw manga-styled art. But that doesn't mean they're the only acceptable ones.

You don't have to learn to use a fountain pen, and if someone tries to sell you "manga pens," or "manga paper," then they are a charlatan and a scoundrel. You can draw manga-styled art with a sharpie if you have a large enough canvas.

What you draw with should suit what you plan to draw. If you're going for... Say, seinen-inspired art, with lots of detail in characters and settings, use thin pencils (0.5 is the smallest you can find without having to buy all your pencils and leads off the internet) and pens.

If you do decide you want to learn to use dip pens, there are several different types favored by actual manga artists that you can buy pretty cheaply online. But I forget their names, so you'll have to Google them yourself. (I do remember that a popular one is the Zebra G-Pen, though.)

If you're going for pigment liners, Staedtler, Prismacolor, Sakura Micron, and Faber-Castell all work equally well - giving you nice, rich, voluptuous black lines that scanners absolutely love. Just make sure to only buy pens in the line thicknesses you actually want instead of dropping $30 on a huge pack when you'll only end up using two. I usually use 005 - 0.3 markers if I'm drawing on a regular-sized sheet of paper. If you're willing to put the money into A1-3 paper, you'll want thicker markers, but since I don't, I'm not the one to ask about those.

Ballpoint pens - yes, the kind you get at Staples for $2 a pack - are a perfectly good option. But be warned, they're very, very Difficult, but Awesome. On one hand, they're a lot like using pencils that you can't erase: They tend to produce rough, sketchy lines. Some of them also leak, which is an instant drawing-killer if you don't have wite-out or a light table, and even then, it's a horrible pain trying to make the wite-out look smooth or re-inking it from stage one. Not to mention you'll be considered a n00b by artists who think you can't afford real gear.

But on the other hand, they're cheap, scan fairly well, can produce all different types of lines, and you can eventually learn to do work this detailed◊ with them, since they can pull off various shades of gray depending on how hard you press and if you layer them. Make sure to get both thin ones (I use Bic Round Stic Grip, which are the kind shown in the picture above, in fine and medium.)

Finally, there is digital art, which I know jack shit about.*

Try finding out what some of your favorite DeviantArtists use, and if you can't, there are plenty of Western comic artists who have websites where they go into what tools and processes they use. Since superhero comics - being the closest thing our medium has to big-budget action movies - tend to have Awesome Art, what they use will be more than enough to pull off a stylized Deliberately Monochrome comic.

edited 4th Feb '12 4:49:20 PM by Wheezy

- The location issue mostly stem from the fact Japan is a cool place and most people simply do not have the patriotism to showcase their own country.

I thought of it, and if I ever come out with any story, it be a fantasy world to avoid all that.

0.3 leads and pencils aren't that hard to find, in my experience, but they cost a fair bit more.

Re: Digital Art:

What you need is dependent on what you want to do.

At the very least, you need a decent paint program. Photoshop is the classic, and the one I use (it's also very easy to pirate, which is good, because a real copy will set you back hundreds of dollars). If you're willing to pay but not that much, SAI Paint is also good. It's about thirty dollars, depending on the exchange rate with the yen. It doesn't have nearly as many functions as Photoshop, but it does have a very nice blending tool that allows for really rich, painterly colouring. There's a thirty-day trial available online if you want to test it out. The other two I see around are Opencanvas and Corel Paint; I haven't used Opencanvas since the very first versions, and I've never used Corel, so somebody else will have to tell you about that.

I wouldn't recommend Illustrator for comics work (just yet). It's great for really clean vector graphics, but it's very easy to end up with lifeless, sterile pictures. Leave it until you're more experienced with drawing, then consider it if you like the flat, slick Apple look.

You'll need either a tablet or a scanner. A mouse won't do; the only way to make decent pictures with the mouse is to use the pen tool, which often results in the aforementioned sterile look. You can either scan in pencils and digitally ink over the top of them on a different layer using a tablet with pen pressure sensitivity, or you can do your lines with real ink, scan them in, blacken the lines and add the colour digitally on a multiply layer.

Remember that if you haven't got the skills to draw a picture in a traditional medium, using a tablet and Photoshop won't make them magically appear. This is for when you feel your base drawing skills are good enough that you'd like to publish your pictures for everyone to see.

You might not even want to do digital art at all, but I just thought I'd contribute.

^ I disagree about a mouse not being enough. I created this lineart with a mouse, in photoshop, with the pen tool◊, and I wouldn't say it looks that bad. I like the nice clean lines you end up with when inking over a scanned lineart with the pen tool.

Here's the same guy coloured, with a mouse, with the pen tool.◊

edited 5th Feb '12 4:58:18 AM by fanty

It's possible to become proficient with a mouse, but it's not really something all that great. Tablets are where it's at, since you don't have to reteach all your manual training that you learned over the years.

Especially for people like me, who are left handed, but use a right handed mouse.

Although with tablets you do have to get used to looking at the screen and not where your pen is—unless you have lots of unused cash and can buy a Cintiq, in which case it's not a problem. Apparently it's not a big issue for some people, though, so I guess it mainly depends on how good your hand-eye coordination is in the first place.

^ I once tried using a tablet in a store, and it felt horrible. I just can't see myself getting used to it. For me it's either Cintiq or the mouse. I'm really hoping to buy the smallest Cintiq somewhere down the line.

edited 5th Feb '12 10:38:15 AM by fanty