Customer Reviews

The Monster Book of Manga: Draw Like the Experts

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a wonderful book period. But wonderful for whom?
I am not a beginner in manga art but I am far from advanced. I found this book to be helpful AFTER I read other How to Draw Manga Books.
This is not a book for a beginner. The following are some pros and cons I have with this book.

First the Pros

PROS

1. The book is 377 pages long.
2. The artwork is incredible!
3.The Variety of characters examples it contains.The index is as follows, each is met with a brief explanation of what is in each chapter.

Introduction: Just as it says.

Girls: The girls shown are: The Shy School Girl, Sporty, Static Movement,Cat Girl, Fighter,Gothic Lolita(my favorite), Cybergirl, Pinup girl, and friends.

Fantasy: Male Elf, Female Elf, Knight, Explorer, Orc, Dwarf, Amazons, Goblin, Devil

Monsters: Succubus Dragon, Ghost, Worm, Werewolf,Mummmy, Monster from the Deep, and the every popular Vampire

Science Fiction: Demon ,Bionic Girl, Cyberpet, Android, Combat Mecha, Octopus, star pilot, princess nebula, and reflections.

Music: Is my fave section in the book. It covers characters in all the different styles of music from Hip-hop to traditional to children's music.

The samurai section is amazing as well. It has witches, geisha, princesses, ninja, ronin, wanderer, samurai, and Sakura(is a samurai that can fuse their body and spirit with their surroundings.

The final chapter is Drawing Digitally. This covers so much that I really can't type out the chapter titles.

4. For each character there is a page each of the following:
A summary of the character, shape, anatomy, clothes, ink and lighting, and color.



Now for the cons of this book.

CONS:

1. There aren't enough detailed descriptions on how to draw them although there are diagrams that you can look at.

2. No angels, faries or anything like that in the fantasy section or anywhere in the book. That is a downfall to me.

3. There is not a section particularly for boys. Just girls.

4. The digital tutorial is only for adobe photoshop.



All in all I say if you like manga then pick this book up. I think you will enjoy it very much.

I got my One chan,(Japanese for big sister), who is my best friend, to by this book for me for my B-Day. This book is huge!!!Now, I wouldn't really say that it shows you the steps to drawing your manga like the experts, but it does give you the basic steps to drawing the character shown for that example. Which is cool, if you already know how to draw! This book is filled with different characters and it shows you how to draw that specific charcter by using shapes to help you give the charcter correct balance and proportion. Another thing I found interesting to me was that they had a little section towards the back of the book for coloring tutorials. It gives you examples on using photoshop and another type of software that I can't think of right now. (gomen!) Anyway,I gave it 5 stars because I already know how to draw, and I found the tutorial pretty interesting. On the other hand, I would give it 3 stars for those who are beginners. This book wont be very useful to those who are trying to learn how to draw at this level that's in this book. All in all, I do recommend this book for intermediate and beyond artists', but I do not recommend it for beginners. You would be sorely disappointed since the title does say draw like the experts, and it really doesn't teach you how to draw so you can draw like the experts; unlike the 60 how to draw series that I own. So if you are a beginner, don't buy this book! It wouldn't be very instrumental to you at this point. I do recommend these following books:

How to draw manga ultimate techniques Vols 1-6
More how to draw manga vols 1-4
How to draw manga getting started (my very first book that I purchased!)
and how to draw manga vol 3 compiling application and practice.

I'll start by saying that this book is huge. At nearly four hundred pages and more than fifty models, there is quite a bit to digest. To go along with that, there is also a section on digital manga production and all the required tools needed to produce manga on the computer. Another good thing about this book is that the models actually look as if they were taken out of manga and not some Americanized version of manga (I bought three how to dram manga books over the years and everyone disappointed me for this reason). And to add, the book itself is just beautifully made, with glossy pages and colorful artwork.

But it's not exactly a "how to draw" book but more of a "draw this" book. It presents a model, shows the steps in creating that model, and then moves on to the next. It never goes into the detailed anatomy of a manga character, it doesn't give variations on the models, and the steps aren't as detailed as I'd like (six for each model). Though you can learn some from this book, it won't be much since you're very limited to what you can draw. It left me disappointed in the end. I want to learn a craft on my own, yet it seems this isn't the book to start me in that direction.

As for recommendations, this book still isn't bad enough to be ignored. If you just enjoy manga art and want to learn the absolute basics, then this would be a good book for you. It has some interesting, stylized techniques that would be good to learn. If you know the basics, however, then I'd recommend skipping this and moving on to the superior, Japanese produced "How to Draw Manga" line of books.

This book is EXACTLY what I needed...
there are already TONS of books on ananomy and details
available..
What I like a lot about this book is that, while it doesnt
teach you the basics, it gives you hundreds of poses and
characters to practice.
While I dont recommend it as a book for starting off
on your quest to becoming a better manga/anime artist...
I DO highly recommend it for practicing.
If you've gone through and already studied all the basics with all those "How to Draw Manga" books already and just need something to help you practice and get you going on applying those basics then this book is the BEST I've seen and is a MUST for any drawing book collection.

I bought this book for my 11-year-old daughter and was sadly disspointed. I probably should have done more in-depth research. This item is DEFINITELY NOT for younger viewers/drawers. There are MANY inappropriate images in here including everything from blood and gore to sexual parts. Also, my daughter says it does not really teach anything about drawing, it just shows a lot of pictures. I would not reccommend this as an instruction tool for young children.

This will not teach you to draw or create manga. I agree with many other reviewers when they say this book is not for beginners, but I'm experienced and I'll tell you, it's not for illustrators, either. It's just not a good book for the intended purpose. Not only does it lack anything remotely tutorial like, these drawings aren't themselves expert. They are nice comic pin-ups, yes, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're not, but it's important for cartoonists and illustrators to learn how a real person's weight would shift, how they would balance with their hands, and so forth. Many pictures in this book aren't displaying those solid basics. This means that by copying these pictures you might achieve okay pin-up practice, but not learn the movement needed to create great cartoons or sequential art, which is what manga is and what people want to see from experts (the book never goes into sequential art technique, by the way).

Copying other people's drawings is very useful practice, but I'd suggest that, instead of this book, you pick up the work of your favorite mangaka and copy THAT over and over. Study an actual series where you love the illustration. That will serve you much better. Or, if not, just buy an artist's mannequin and pose it. [[EDIT: This is only a suggestion for people too young for a figure drawing class. Anyone old enough to take a class should go there first, then study books with an eye toward understanding the design of sequential work, not to copy the drawing style.]]

In addition to what other reviewers have pointed out about the lack of verbal instruction, while we see various supposed "stages" of a sketch we're not shown any in-betweens. There will be a gestural circle in one phase, then a detailed face the next, but no method as to how or why figural detail was created, which is not only important to the style but the area of most difficulty for many people. Lines will appear in one phase then disappear the next when it would have been more useful to show the lightened work lines underneath each version. We get totally different pictures, too, where in one shot the sketch will be in underwear, then in the next, fully clothed. Why even draw the underwear? No one would actually do that. I can see why the artist might have chosen to do so thinking the unclothed figure inappropriate, but having drawn many figures myself, I know that you don't have to draw nudity in detail to give the body muscular weight, and that is the point behind sketching a body before drawing the final clothed figure.

I have many art technique books and many books on style. I was hoping this might have been a good addition to my "manga style" library. (I realize that, technically, there is no "manga style," but you know what I mean.) All the copies in my local bookstore were shrink-wrapped so I bought this sight unseen. Poor choice. A good style book needs to be a good art technique book first, style expression second.

I think it worth a two-star rating because it is somewhat good at one thing; listing the character types you might need to learn. It is in fact the only explanation given on any drawing -- "These characters have these because in Japan/the Japanese audience yadayadayada."

First of all: this book has great production values. However, it is darn near worthless for teaching ANYONE how to draw like the experts. I'm sorry but you're not going to draw a fully realized character in four skimpy steps. If you want to trace or steal elements from the final rendered version, it might have some value in that but certainly not on how to construct them.

The Photoshop section in the back, however, is very good and very simple allowing even the novice to get a grasp on digital coloring techniques. This section almost makes the book worth its price. So, all in all, I can't recommend this book unless you've got the money to burn and you're a bit more advanced in drawing.

I personally love this book. It taught me many different styles that I can use, and how to draw different personalities and poses. I love drawing from this. Also, the pictures it shows you are great.

The only problem I would say is that you already need to know HOW to draw people or manga before you can use this, because it doesn't really give you the DIRECTIONS on how to draw it as if you don't really know how to, it just shows pictures and gives you a few tips along the way. You need to know the basics before you use this book.

Although this book has 300 pages, it does not go into great detail when it comes to sketching out each character that is depicted. To some, that might throw them off if they're just learning, but for me, the images were good examples to use as references.

Each chapter deals with different genre's, such as Girls, Fantasy, Monsters, etc. Several of the illustrations are good in detail, but they lack any major guidance for beginners. Vague captions are inserted here and there around the images, but that's about it. I suppose the author assumes that you have some knowledge of drawing and digital coloring, which is probably why he doesn't go into great detail.

For me, this book is great to use to form ideas for character concepts. My favorite portion of the book is towards the end, where you're given a better idea on how to digitally color your drawings and how to utilize Adobe Photoshop. It's a shame it's one of the shortest chapters.

Overall, if you have a good grip on drawing and you don't need a great deal of guidance, then this book is for you. Every page shows a step by step progression of a character.
However, if you're just learning how to tackle this style and you're looking for in-depth detail on how to make things look right, then this book may not be for you.

Great illustrations throughout and they're all in color, too.

The majority of this book contains well done artwork both in end sketch and fully finished form. There is little here in the way of instruction so buying this book won't help you "Draw Like the Experts". This book would be great as reference material for ideas to use in your own artwork.

The few pages (less than 4 I believe) near the end of the book about using a computer to color your drawings seem thrown in to keep this from being just a picture book. There are better books with more in depth detail on coloring art with a computer than what you'll find here.