If you love shojo manga and you like to face a blank sheet of paper… You’re in luck! You have in your hands the ideal guide that will teach you how to draw, step by step, the most characteristic characters of this genre: the shojos, those charming girls with spectacular big eyes, and the bishies, those handsome boys that everyone falls for. the teenage girls in the manga stories. In addition, you will find many tips on basic construction techniques, postures, planes, angles, perspectives, staging, onomatopoeia, text bubbles and endless details with which you can create your own novel. graph. So… sharpen your pencils and get ready to design a story full of characters in true shojo style.
MJ’s opinion :
This book is not a novel, it is different, so its review is also different, it adds a difficulty that I don’t know if I will know how to overcome, but at least I will try.
How to draw shôjo manga is a book that teaches us to draw the typical characters of shôjo manga, both girls and boys, that is, girls and the famous bishes. The first characteristic of these illustrations are those hairstyles (especially long) and of different colors (mostly in boys, an example would be the one on the cover), even those large, lively and expressive eyes that are used almost exclusively by women. shojo girls. It could be said that these characteristics are unique to Japanese shôjo drawings.
Thanks to the index we see that the book, although it may seem fine, is very complete. Contains guidelines to learn how to draw an entire scene from any story. Firstly, it focuses on the general (I suppose so that no one gets scared as soon as they pick up the pencil) focusing on the faces and entire bodies of the characters, to later stop at the details of the hairstyles, expressions, eyes, clothing, etc. ; and at the end the litmus test and what we see as impossible, the background, the set, the staging with the characters in motion.
It has information, enough and touches all topics. Perfect. With that you already know how to draw? Obviously not, and since Chris Hart knows it, he tells us step by step how to do it, he gives us different tricks to do it faster and/or better, there are notes on why such a thing is drawn like this and not otherwise, etc.
The exercises are not given as “exercises”, there is no section called that, but in all the sections and subsections there is how to draw what is being taught at that moment (face, whole body, movement…) of a couple of illustrations and then the rest directly drawn with the final result so that everyone can see the process of it, and the different final results they can have.
For example the face and the whole body :
The body in motion and fancy dresses …
I will not put more images because I would not stop. At first the illustrations are simple, but little by little they become more complicated and become precious drawings that if we manage to do them over time, we will surely frame them.
Personally, and for everyone to see if the book is worth it or not, if it really helps learning this, I have taken and drawn (or tried to) draw some illustrations of the book. I give you three examples:
They may like it more or less, but they have not turned out as bad as I expected… Of course, the details continue to touch my nose (face, hands, buttons and others) Drawing people and animals was never my thing, the details of the face and hands seem to me an incredible ordeal, that is why in two of the drawings I do not detail them much. Keep in mind what I’ve been telling you for a few weeks, I’m very busy with my studies and I don’t have much time for other things, so I’ve stayed in general to show you the result of my test…
liked it a lot and I plan to get seriously into the book during the Christmas holidays
Personally I liked it a lot and I plan to get seriously into the book during the Christmas holidays. As a general rule, I do not usually pay attention to these books to learn to draw because they do not help in almost anything, but the great examples that it has, the explanations so direct and concise, and the simplicity of the drawing (it is to learn, not to improve if we already know how to draw), make it really easy to learn, at least, to draw with some ease and knowing what steps to follow to achieve a good result.
Right now, SM would need a book to complement the one I’m commenting on, and it would be learning to paint… That final touch that either disgraces or enhances a drawing. I know that computer programs are used a lot for this now, but just as people continue to draw on paper, it would be nice to learn to paint as they have always painted. Not everyone knows how to do it, the different techniques, the combination of colors, etc.
