Customer Reviews

How to Draw Anime & Game Characters, Vol. 1: Basics for Beginners and Beyond

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Far and away the best of the English "How to Draw Manga" books. The art style is clean and the layout is well-done, with no issues of whether you should be reading left-to-right or right-to-left (a definite problem in some Japanese conversions).

Best of all, Ozawa starts from the very basics, and urges you to do the exercises from the beginning. Sure, drawing cubes isn't exciting, but even for a non-beginners, it's a useful warm-up that improves technique. With the reassuring statement "if you can hold a pencil and draw straight lines, you can draw, " he skillfully leads the reader to develop or improve drawing skills.

He also includes something I've never seen in a comics manual before: Drawings from different ability levels. He shows stuff by absolute beginers, intermediate, advanced and professional and critiques the problems and positives. Personally, I found this extremely helpful and reassuring. He also marks the time it took to create some of the professional drawings: Again, very reassuring that these things took time and weren't dashed off in minutes.

Finally, Ozawa covers a broad range of character styles, from generally realistic to the SD (simple deformed) type. For each, he includes plenty of detail on what makes such characters work and why.

These books can be hard to find, so if you're interested in this subject, don't wait. Get your copy now.

I... Well actually my dad bought this book for me (I bought volume 3), and trust me this book is worth every single penny! It talks about the basics like the face, body, poses, and more! The main reason I bought this book was to learn how to improve my anime eyes; and let me tell you, being the amateur I am, they've improved ALOT! I would show a scan of one of my practice sheets, but it's not allowed, oh well! XD

I made a drawing of a kitty girl with the instructions the book gives you...*can't imagine all the critiques she would get from the author* But anyway, the book tells you to compare your drawings with other drawings, and it takes you think: "Man, I used to draw like THAT?" At least that's how I did...lol

One of the things I loved about this book was that the author shows us these drawings made from 100% Amateurs, Intermediate *sp* and Advanced artists, plus proffessional versions of the drawings. It tells you WHAT'S wrong with the drawings, the errors etc. And that helps ALOT because these drawings have very common errors.

May I add that the mascots are, hmm how do I put this...KAWAII?! (japanese for cute...heh) The author uses these adorable mascots that briefly explain you things like "We must learn the basics!"; that adds humor to the book, and that alone made me more confident of myself, and killed the thought of "Oh it'll probably be too hard for me". But let me tell you, if you put your heart and time to it, and practice with this book, you'll be a kick-arse anime artist in no time! And remember, if your first straight line comes out horrible, don't worry, by time you'll get it right, because practice makes perfect =3 If you plan on becoming an anime artist or illustrator or whatever, thi book MUST be on your bookshelf, you won't regret it. ^_^

I hesitated to buy this book at first because I was worried that it was one of those cheap, 12 page, how to draw book meant for 2nd graders. This book is not! It is pretty thick for a drawing book. I really liked the exercise suggestions, they helped a lot with my drawing.

One quibble and that is not enough to bring down my rating, some of the translation is obscure (fringe for bangs, etc.) but you can usually figure out what was meant.

This book is well worth it if you enjoy anime.

Yeah, as the title says this is a book with just the basics.

It's not a step by step "how to draw" book as you would first think, it's rather a book on "test and learn", for example it shows a variety of characters and tells things like "separated eyes express lonelines, the small mouth expresses a delicate nature", so this book will only teach you how to design plain characters and it's wonderful for beginners like me; In no way must be considered a complete "How to Draw Anime" lesson, but its perfect for start cooking, even if you don't even know how to hold your pencil (that was my case some months ago when I bought it).

If you're a complete beginner buy this book, I gave it 5 stars because it helped me a lot, but keep this mind: drawing characters is one thing, to give life to them is something else... for that buy the Volume 2, or do some research.

I bought this book from Amazon, without so much as a picture of the cover, because there aren't many "how to draw manga" books out there, and I need as much reference as I can get!

Unfortunately, this still isn't the "Ultimate How to Draw Manga" book, I don't think it exists yet, but this comes very close. I've been drawing for over 20 years now, so I don't need some steps that I think beginners would benefit from, that never seem to make it into these "how to" books.

I felt a twang of discomfort seeing the pictures in this one, going by it's ratings, my style falls somewhere in between "intermediate" and "very close but..." levels and not the "pro" level, but perhaps with some of the lessons in this book, I'll finally cross that threshold!

The art is beautiful, looking like a cross between Disney and manga, it illustrates several different genres, and has pages and pages of examples of each "type" of character. Lots of "how to draw guys" too, which is a subject often ignored in "how to" books and tutorials.

I highly recommend this book, even for the "non-beginner," it has lots to show!

I'd only suggest this book for total beginners -- the first portion of the book is spent on proportions of the face/body, and how to make things look 3D. The rest is spent studying a few generic characters that have been already created; their clothes, what the shape of their eyes mean, so on. So if you need to work on giving your characters proper body sizes, or need to give them dimension, or if you just want some reference material, this book will show you all of this. Otherwise, I'd look elsewhere.

I am what I would call an "absolute beginner". My drawing experience is virtually nil. Other than seeing lots of anime and comics, I have no hands-on experience. I bought this book hoping that it would have a step-by-step process for how to draw anime characters. While it starts off promising, by having you drawing a cube from various perspective, the book's introductory nature almost disappears after that. To draw heads, the book says to draw boxes and then draw head-shaped ovals inside. But I had trouble even drawing the ovals to fit the boxes correctly. It gives one step-by-step process for a head from one perspective, but that's it. It then gives about 10 different head models and says "if you can draw these, then you can do your own work". But HOW to draw those? I was basically on my own to figure it out by guessing, but heck, I could do that just from copying what I see on websites.

The book's methodology seems very confused, as well. At first it tries to say drawing is like connecting dots. But dot-connecting is never mentioned after that. It says to draw heads in boxes, but I was unsure how to even draw the boxes for the various perspectives I was supposed to draw, and the book gave no indication. No rules were give for face proportions (I ended up trying to make my own rules), but later on in the book there were rules for body proportions.

The examples given of "absolute beginner", intermediate and pro were discouraging, in that the book gives very little help even getting to "absolute beginner". The book makes comments like "this gun looks like a toy" but doesn't explain specifically WHAT could be done to improve it other than by carefully examining the "pro" picture. It gives examples of very fancy outfits but it doesn't suggest how to actually draw those outfits.

I think this book could have been improved by just getting rid of the small amount of absolute-beginner stuff and making it a book for intermediate drawers.

Ozawa covers parts of the body he deems important (head, feet, hands, eyes, hair) and the rest of the book focuses examples of 15 character-archetypes on the head and whole character body shown in different views giving a lot of examples of various character types. You get to know different ways of drawing the hair, eyes, nose, and other details while learning various tips. He even has a nice section on character arrangement for a pin-up and a critique section of artists with various skill levels.

The approach of this book to drawing is in a different manner than the typical drawing book. He doesn't go into sections on how to draw specific sections of the body such as the hips, arms, etc. He starts you off drawing the whole body and getting you into the mindset of critiqueing your own drawing and improving it. He also gets you into thinking of your characters in terms of 3D. Some people may be detered by this and others may not.

The highest form of nudity in this book is the wire frame and nothing further. An excellent book for younger artists.

This is overall an excellent book. It shows lots of different styles of characters from many angles, plus lots of information on general anatomy and dynamic poses.

This was the first book that I bought when I became interested in drawing anime characters. Though many people disagree with me on this, I found it very hard to pick up basic skills by reading it. The first section, which illustrates how to draw the basic outline, proportions, etc., of the face, was pretty inaccessible to me as a beginner, and trying to follow the step by step directions, drawing oval after oval trying to get it perfect, was discouraging. Additionally, all the drawings later in the book were so perfect as to be intimidating. In short, this book makes the task of learning to draw anime seem overwhelming to a beginner.

However, now that I have become reasonably proficient in that area, this book has been immeasurably helpful. I use it as basically a source of images that I study when I want to see how to draw a specific thing. This is, I think, its best use; a resource rather than a way to actually learn. Still very good, though!

First of all, I think this book is great, and it will be very helpful to many people. This book gives you many types of anime characters and examples. Very detailed, such as different chars' facial expressions, hairstyle, view from different angles, and body type, custom, etc. It also has many different learners' drawings compared with pro's revised versions, which is very helpful, I think. It gives you pointers about where you should watch out for... However, although this book has some instructions on how to draw face, body and other parts, they are not very detailed, not like step by step as the "How to Draw Manga 1." I would assume that this book is not for absolute beginners. So... Overall, it's a very good book. Recommended: "How to Draw Manga 1"