Customer Reviews

Tokyo Urban Hip Hop Culture (Let's Draw Manga)

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

 

 

Wanna draw super-baggy hip-hop clothes? Jewelry with style and characters wearing something other than sailor suits and school uniforms? Look no further. Tokyo Urban-hip Hop Culture is the artistic reference for you. The Authors go into depth describing the various looks popular in Japanese Hip-hop culture today. While this book describes fashions popular in Japan today, these costumes will be easily recognizable as popular in American amongst urban youth.

The best part is you do not need to be a fan of Manga to find this artistic reference book useful. In particular the discussion of clothing, jewelry and the way fabric folds is quite useful to the artist.

An excellent book for comic artists everywhere.

This came within a week and it was in great condition it almost looked brand new. I would definitely purchase from them again.

i felt that this book helped me somewhat with learning how to draw manga. i recommend this book for beginning artists.

I bought this book a while ago because I wanted a quick reference book about drawing modern day characters/scenes. For the most part, Let's Draw Manga: Tokyo Urban-Hip Hop Culture fit that role. However, there this book attempts much more than that with lessons from how to draw characters to making you own manga. Just beware, there is only so much you can fit 138 pages!

This book is organized as follow:

Forward
Chapter 1 How to Draw a Basic Human Body
Chapter 2 Hip Hop Fashion
Chapter 3 A Look at the Streets of Tokyo
Chapter 4 Let's Draw a Hip Hop Manga

This book has good quality black/white illustrations. You start with quick lessons on how to draw the male figure, then the female figure. These include how to draw the body (using the dummy method), head and face including emotions (joy, disgust, surprise, sorrow, anger and fear), hands and feet, and the body in hip hop motion. There is also the process of drawing (from penciling, inking, and adding screen tones), different body types, and drawing styles (geki-ga, realistic, and anime), and a few other tips. These lessons are brief, well to keep in mind as reference.

Chapter 2 and 3 departs from other how to draw book, as these sections focus on the main theme of this book, the hip-hop fashion and the urban life in Tokyo. In chapter 2, you will get essentially a very small encyclopedia of hip hop dressing style, hair styles and accessories. Chapter 3, does something similar for the urban life of Tokyo including students (boys/girls), couples through several scenes in Tokyo (at movies, coffee shop, window shopping, manga cafe, karaoke box, arcade, bar, etc ...). Unfortunately, you only get one half-page illustration of each.

The final section of this book is about how to draw a manga. This is more detailed than I expected, including lessons about designing your main characters including moves, and lifestyle, gathering materials and information about the environment, drawing youths at the park including skateboarding, bicycling, at a bench, depicting couples, and drawing vehicles. Finally, you get an extended lesson on story-boarding which include 31 pages of a story board, with a finished product for the last page.

So there is plenty to get on this book. It may be too ambitious to learn how to make a manga with just one book, but it is a good starting point and reference source about hip-hop culture.

It's kind of limited. But I like it. Used it for my art class to give me a start.