Master manga with these top tips and techniques from professional artists! Learn how to create figures, action, portraits, street scenes and more, using digital and traditional tools including Paint Tool SAI and Copic Markers.
Welcome to the marvellous world of manga! Whether you’re a seasoned mangaka or new to the style, the tips, techniques and tutorials from professional artists in these pages will help you to develop your style. Go beyond the comic-book monotones of traditional manga and delve into the wider world of this evocative Japanese-influenced art style. Learn how to draw figures and faces with the unique manga look, then develop them into action poses with anime-style backdrops. Explore how to deploy vibrant colour palettes and line effects to create atmosphere and movement, and how to use specialist tools like Paint Tool SAI, Clip Studio Paint and Manga Studio alongside Photoshop to achieve the effects you want. Let’s go!…
Manga is in rude health, and if you paint it you’re in good company. It’s now possible for manga artists to amass hundreds of thousands of social media followers, get crowdfunded via sites like Patreon, sell their art commercially, and even go and live and work in Japan itself. But how do you go about it? Here, four artists who have found success share their advice on how to follow in their footsteps. The first, and perhaps most obvious, point is that you need to get your art in front of people. “If you create a lot of illustrations but don’t post them anywhere, nothing’s going to happen,” says Ilya Kuvshinov, a Russian artist based in Tokyo with 1.3 million Instagram followers (@kuvshinov_ilya). “It can be scary to expose your…
Heikala wants her art to be a glimpse into the life of a character, a little moment in a larger story. You see it in her illustration of the solitary cloaked figure walking in the snowy wilderness accompanied by a tiger, the girl and her cat staring at a meteor shower at night, the witch who appears to be migrating with a flock of birds. To get to these glimpses, these little moments, the Finnish illustrator often finds herself throwing around some unusual thoughts. “If witches travel abroad, do they use aeroplanes or do they fly across continents on their brooms? Do they need passports? Do witches have to go through customs and declare their potion-making equipment? I like to play around with these things in my head and sometimes…
Artist PROFILE Sai Foo LOCATION: Malaysia Sai has worked in advertising, animation and video game industries. He loves creating dynamic line-art poses, sketching in his free time and trying out various drawing styles and techniques. The artist readily admits that he struggles with some character poses, and says he still has a lot to learn. www.artstation.com/sai “I was inspired by the morning light outside, and decided to stay at my desk and colour it in” “This piece is one of the few that I felt the most relaxed as I’ve sketched. The pose and feeling came naturally” “I’ve been told that I draw women like they’re men, especially their faces…”…
Djamila Knopf’s website has a page of FAQs. One of the questions the German illustrator gets frequently asked is this: can you give me career advice? “If you’re an artist wanting to become a professional,” she writes in response, “I can give you the following three pieces of advice: 1) Work on your craft 2) Don’t try to force yourself into a style that isn’t natural to you and 3) Share your work on social media.” Good advice. It’s solid, precise and applicable to pretty much any line of work – artistic or otherwise. But these three seemingly simple points come from years of trial and error. It’s hard-won advice. Not that long ago, it looked like Djamila was going to quit working on her own craft. Then, when she…
This artwork was commissioned by the ImagineFX team for their cover! I was given a reference for the pose they wanted, based on a sketch I had previously drawn and some ideas for the character. The idea of beauty and strength being non-exclusive is something I like a lot, which is why I often turn to the theme of female knights for my original character designs. In the past, I found armour quite difficult to draw, but I’ve always tried to push myself through challenges instead of avoiding them. Crystal horns from a past artwork of mine caught the team’s eye, so I incorporated them into this design. I added similar embellishments on her sword and armour because I thought the crystal would look a little out of place if…
