Customer Reviews

The Manga Artist's Workbook: Easy-to-Follow Lessons for Creating Your Own Characters

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In a different approach to his best selling Art books, Christopher Hart gives us "The Manga Artist's Workbook". The book includes step by step contruction techniques with tissue paper for budding artists to trace as well as grid paper for practise sketching.

Hart discusses (visually)facial expressions, proportions, poses, figure maneuvers, eyes, and hair styles. His art books cover these topics very well, but when you want to grab a pencil and draw, this book rocks.

Tim Lasiuta

This book was awesome. It has really high quality drawings, that are pretty good manga drawings. The book is made with a really high attention to quality. The coverage is only for the basic manga aspects. This book is definitely one of the best how to draw books.

The Manga Artist's Workbook is a mix between a How-to-Draw

book and a Sketch Pad. It goes over head positions, eyes,

eye expressions, hair, body form, hands, clothing, and more.

In the midst of informing you on basics and essentials to

this style of drawing, it has tracing paper and graph paper

to help you learn the lining and spacing. Often times the

book gives you an example drawing and asks you to either

recreate it or recreate an aspect of the drawing on a

partially finished example. It has mini-lessons to complete

to help you to learn this type of drawing that are

comprehensible and fun.

Before I read this book, I didn't

know anything about Manga, and couldn't draw it. Now if I

use a picture of whoever I'm turning into a Manga sketch,

and this book as a reference, I can draw a half-decent

person. As I can't draw people whatsoever, this is as good

as I'm likely to get. I expected to learn how to draw a

happy person looking straight at me, aka. a basic character,

nothing special. But I learned different views, emotions,

and the whole deal! This book exceeded my expectations; it

was the best How-To-Draw book I've read.

Reviewed by a young adult student reviewer

Flamingnet Book Reviews

Teen books reviewed by teen reviewers

I am a pretty advanced "artist" and what I liked about this book is that it has helpful tips that are good enough for the advanced artist but broken down enough that a beginner would be able to understand and follow the steps. It even provides tracing sheets so that you can trace over certain critical steps for practice. Certainly a must have for manga artists who are trying to pick up on new techniques or even polish old ones.

This is a very informative and Exciting book, the product description says it all, its a class and a workbook all in one!

A nice little workbook, especially for people who learn better by doing than by reading. Some lessons have tracing paper over a "template" so you can draw with some guidelines in terms of proportion and distance. Most others just have graphed drawing paper with a light outline of the figure you're trying to draw. There's also some blank graph paper for practice.

The back of the book mentions "From the book Manga for the Beginner by Christopher Hart". It's possible the combination of these two items might be a better learning tool than either one individually.

I have studied drawing for about 5 years, in traditional art and anime/ manga.

I found that this book's cover is a tab desiving, giving the impresion that cover style art is what the lessons would be teaching.

Best parts:

-Emotions Section

The emotions section was very good and has a wider range of styles than the rest of the book. Sadly it was not every well explained of how to get that emotion, it was more or less just a picture with a label of the emotion over it.

-Hands Section

This section had great examples, though I found the instructions to complex and confusing.

-Eyes Section

Had great pictures and explained a tad more, but I still think there should have been some kind instruction.

-Outfits Section

This was probably the best part of this book and the explanation were good.

Worst Parts:

- Proportions

I found this not even some what helpful for learning how to draw in an anime/manga style. The instructions were pretty lacting, like the rest of the book. It would give you an example and then tell you to trace a figure below, though the tracing figure was in a totally different portion.{Their picture 5 heads high : Tracing picture 7 1/2 heads high}

- Explanations

This book lacks full explanations, figuring you can build over a stick figure to a final copy with out instructions.

-Tracing paper

Though this is a great idea, by drawing on the tracing paper it will leave pencil marks all over the example page.

-Not a how to draw feet

A lot of people have trouble drawing feet, so I wish this book went into more detail about drawing them.

Over all I find this book hard to learn from, since it lacks explanations. Though a lot of the example pictures are very well-drawn, it does not really teach you how to draw them. I find this book would be best for people who have aleast 3 years of drawing in anime style. This book is nice though and I have looked through the whole thing. I would say this book is not quite what I was thought it would be and is not worth buying really.