How to Draw Anime & Game Characters, Vol. 4: Mastering Battle and Action Moves [Paperback]

Tadashi Ozawa (Author)

Book Description

Series: How to Draw Manga | Publication Date: August 25, 2003

An enemy is creeping up on the hero, when the hero suddenly does a half-spin and sends him flying with a back roundhouse kick! Then the hero jumps up and on the way down delivers a punch to the enemy. Action scenes are the highpoints of a story. This book selects action and movements often used in popular combat games and explains these motions to allow you to master drawing them quickly starting out by tracing and, later, to draw your own original character performing.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Graphic-Sha (August 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 4766112547
• ISBN-13: 978-4766112542
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful for more than just anime and game creation, November 30, 2003

By 

A. W. Kessinger "keilinger" (Colorado, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Draw Anime & Game Characters, Vol. 4: Mastering Battle and Action Moves (Paperback)

I got books 2 and 3 in this set before I got this one, so I knew that there would be a lot of useful information for me to use. I make computers games and draw manga, and these are my favorite resources I use to figure out just how to draw an anime style character without making things look awkward.
This book isn't my favorite of the three I own in the series. It shows very throughly all kinds of brawling and physical hand to hand techniques, but I found there to be a lack of battle and action moves that involve weapons, which is a must for sci-fi stories and so on. Since 6 of 7 pictures on the front and back had weapons, I expected a little more instruction in that respect.
Another note would be that they show so many different angles of the same move (about 4 pages per pose) that it seems a bit redundant the first time through. However, since I see how knowing these angles is really nessecary for any kind of game with a 3d effect.
Things I liked about this book are the good descriptions of the important points. It's also easy to use the index or simply flip through to find what you are looking for because it's well organized. It's clear and easy to understand as well.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For the Future Animator or Game Artist, November 22, 2004

By 

Rio A. - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Draw Anime & Game Characters, Vol. 4: Mastering Battle and Action Moves (Paperback)

If you've gotten Ozawa's other books, then you already know how detailed his books get! This volume is no different and goes a step further by showing you actions in progress such as showing you each movement of a person walking. Then he shows you how to do the same action but at different angles and foreshortening. There's so much info in here that it'll take you awhile to digest all the information in it. It's stacked full of drawings and side notes!

There are quite a lot of action moves in this book, specifically hand-to-hand combat. No instructions on drawing weapons even though the cover shows them.

Quite unlike Martials Arts & Combat Sports and Illustrating Battles editions, this book prep you to think in 3 dimensions and animation-type movement. If you're set on making animations and video games in the future, this book is the best way to learn spatial relations and seeing your characters more than just one or two-dimensionally.

If you're into making manga, getting this book won't hurt at all but you're probably better off getting the Illustrating Battles or Martials Arts & Combat Sports book initially.

Like his other editions, this book is young-reader friendly and covers nudity well using block, wire, and wooden model figures.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars not as good as id hoped, May 16, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: How to Draw Anime & Game Characters, Vol. 4: Mastering Battle and Action Moves (Paperback)

after getting the first three volumes of this series i admit to being a bit over-expectant of this volume. not to mention i am also guilty of judging it by its cover. as usual it starts off with some useful information about movement or anything it could be covering in this book, which i like very much and has very useful tips. however towards the part of the book where it begins to have illustrations of kicks and punches and stuff, i was utterly disapointed. the cover suggests that the book contains something on sword fighting or knife-fighting, or graceful battles, but was completly off. the battles in this book are like street fights, something i was totally not interested in. All it has is overly-masculine people throwing elbow jabs and drop kicks. there is an even distribution of girls and boys in this book, but none of them seem to be at all related to the kind of battles on the cover or back page. i suggest before buying this book you understand it will NOT give that many battle moves. it never even touches upon knives or swords. and pretty much the only action moves are people going from a walk to a run.