Customer Reviews

Kodomo Manga: Super Cute!

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Kodomo Manga contains a lot of character vignettes in a cute, for-kids drawing style. You are taken step by step through the process the artist used to make the drawing, with commentary on each step.

Typical steps are:
1. Sketches --a few rough sketches of the subject, and an explanation why they chose to develop the sketch they did.
2. Outlining - Basically a stick figure in the pose, sometimes with surroundings doodled in.
3. Volume - They round out the figure.
4. Anatomy - They add physical details to the more anatomically realistic figures.
5. Details - They add costume and background details. At this stage, the drawing usually looks inked.
6. Inking and lighting - So-called. This step is kind of a cheat, as far as the actual drawing is concerned: it seems to be just a grayscale image of the final product. But the comments on the lighting and inking can be useful or interesting in some cases.
7. Color - This is usually in several steps and covers the digital coloring of the image, in depth. This is by far the most valuable and detailed information, as they talk about a lot of useful ideas using layers, patterns, textures, and special effects.

Kodomo Manga is not a beginners' or all-around manga-drawing book. A beginner could go along with it easily, simply copying the steps and images, for whatever simple imitation is worth. It won't teach you much about composition, proportion, perspective, or any of the other basics.

But it's the intermediate cartoonist who really ought to find a lot of fascinating concepts in the commentaries. Frequently, while reading the description of the steps in the coloring sections, I found ideas and processes I simply would not have thought of trying. The comments on why a particular sketch or pose was chosen are food for thought when preparing to draw your own characters. And the plethora of charming characters---covering a variety of styles from baby-simple to storybook to Anime Kid---should give you a great feel for the rules of drawing similar Kodomo characters.

By the way, this is 384 pages of heavy, smooth, bright, high-quality paper in full color. You're getting a very physically nice book for your money.

If I could suggest a few changes, one would be that the steps along the drawing look too cleaned-up. (I would like to see more of the artist's scribbly bits. Or maybe these pros don't have any scribbles.) I also think it would have been great if a CD-Rom of the images came along with it, or if they were available for download, for practicing digitally inking and coloring the pictures yourself. But you can't have everything, and what you do get is very cool, and well worth the price.

I have this book and it is a very good one! Most of the book has adorable drawings but there is some people in the book that can't draw that well.These people seamed to be just fillers for the book to be bigger. It shows step by step drawing with the computer, I just wish that they put in some copic marker drawings but i love this book anyway!

This is a very good book. I purchased it for my Granddaughter and she just loved it. She has been drawing lots of pictures from this book.

Ahhh, the sweet bliss of obtaining a new, awesome product can be compared to the bliss of finding a good bed-buddy. Yes, I dare say it.

This book has been a blessing to me so far. As soon as I opened it, tips and directions mingled with my eyes and I was awstruck by the clarity and simplicity of its words. No complicated crap, just flat ou instructions; where do you find that nowadays? Uh, nowhere. The book serves its purpose, showing many different styles of Kodomo manga and how you can obtain the same results as the original artists. Clear, perfect color covers every page, and not one bit of information is insignificant. The step by step instructions are great for beginning artists, and even for more advanced artists like myself, and the pictures get your imagination going faster than a man finding out about a free strip-show. The diversity of artists is the best part; the whole book isn't just one artist with the same style, over and over again. There are many different artists with different styles and ideas that will stuff your brain full of color.

I'd recommend this book to anyone, any day.

I have to say that when I received this book, it was better than I expected. The condition is brand new, shipping faster than I thought, and got an affordable price. I would recommend this product to anyone who is interested in drawing manga/anime or just like chibi art because it concluded great pictures and easy to understand, etc.