How to Draw Manga Animals: A Beginner's Guide to Creating Characters - Softcover

Amberlyn, J.C.

 
9781580935623: How to Draw Manga Animals: A Beginner's Guide to Creating Characters
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1580935621 ISBN 13: 9781580935623
Verlag: Monacelli Studio, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

How to Draw Manga Animals takes readers through step-by-step drawing instructions to successfully create their own super-cute manga animal characters as well as the worlds they live in. This book looks at elements in creating a manga-style animal character with appeal, exploring archetypes and other familiar types of characters.

The popularity of manga among young people who love to draw continues to grow. In her third manga book, J.C. Amberlyn focuses on her favorite subject matter, animals, with a fun and lively how-to-draw book aimed at beginners.

How to Draw Manga Animals takes readers through all the step-by-step drawing instructions they need to learn how to successfully create their own super-cute manga animal characters as well as the worlds they live in.

In How to Draw Manga Animals J.C. Amberlyn takes readers through all the drawing techniques they'll need to create a cast of manga-style animal characters. What makes a good character design? This book looks at elements in creating a manga-style animal character with appeal, exploring archetypes and other familiar types of characters as well as how to add unexpected or unique elements that give characters a memorable twist.

In addition, readers will learn to draw cute chibi critters and dangerous-looking monsters and everything in between for comics, games, or simply their own personal enjoyment. This book includes chapters on some common or notable real and mythological Japanese animals to provide readers a foundation of knowledge to start their own animal character designs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. C. Amberlyn is an artist, book author, photographer, animator, and naturalist. She is the author of Drawing Wildlife, Drawing Manga Animals, Chibis, and Other Adorable Creatures, The Artist's Guide to Drawing Animals: How to Draw Cats, Dogs, and Other Favorite Pets; and How to Draw Manga Characters: A Beginner’s Guide. J. C. loves art, animation, animals, and adventure in the great outdoors. She seeks to create visual and written works of art that strike a chord with her audience, whether they celebrate the life that shares the planet with us or the rich inner workings of the human mind and experience. With her books, she shares techniques for creating epic stories, engaging characters, and appealing art for readers of all skill levels. Her work has received recognition and a number of awards and has been published in various media. She lives in Arizona.

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CHAPTER ONE: STORIES AND CHARACTERS

Concepts for Creating Manga-Style Characters or Creatures

What comes first in character design, the character or the story? This is really a “chicken or the egg” question, without a clear answer, because it can be either. Sometimes inspiration strikes with a character concept and you build your story on that idea, and sometimes it’s the story that comes to you first and you then populate that story with appropriate characters. Let’s take a look at the two ways to begin your creative process.
 
Who’s your character? What’s its story?

Sometimes your initial inspiration to create comes from a character idea. What if there was a character who thinks and acts like this and struggles with that? Whatever “this” and “that” are, the character should spark enough conflict and interest to make you and your potential audience want them to develop further and see how they react and grow. Or perhaps you have a passion for some creature that lives in your imagination and you want to develop them more, see who and what they are, and what challenges they might face. And, sometimes, you just like drawing something! Once you have an idea of who this interesting character is, you can develop a story for them.

This intricate, detailed kirin would be perfect for a sweeping fantasy story filled with more realistic dangers and creatures.
 
This more cartoonish kirin would fit a cheerful, bright video game or comic full of cute critters, and an inviting colorful world.
 
Conversely, sometimes the story comes first. Perhaps you visualize a world that has something different and interesting to you, some challenge or property to it that you’d like to explore further. Maybe there’s a problem you see in real life and you’d like to throw some characters into that mix and see how they might react, or even solve, that problem. Once you create your scenarios, you need to invent characters to live in that world and make it come alive.
 
Puphons are creatures I simply enjoy drawing. I got the idea of taking the traditional gryphon (half eagle and half lion) but replacing the eagle with a puffin, the funny little seabird with the colorful bill! This led to a humorous creature that is a lot of fun to draw. Something like this could lead to ideas for a story: What are these creatures? How are they like traditional gryphons and how are they unlike them? Do they live near the ocean? How do they survive? Do others see them as silly and fun as I do? How do they react to that?
 
Regardless of how the inspiration hits, there’s no wrong way to express it. Creativity and inspiration can come from almost anywhere and simply need someone willing to take those ideas and develop them. That is what this book will aim to help you do. Regardless of whether the character or story comes first in your mind, both are important for developing a concept that brings a new world to life.

Stories affect the characters in them and characters affect the stories they are in. You may have a specific story in mind but as you write it, the characters may take in-character actions that lead the story in different directions than originally planned. It’s exciting when that happens. The story will affect the character, as well, and the tone of the story sets the tone for the characters that populate it. A beautiful world full of cute, cheerful, and friendly beings probably won’t have true horrific undertones. Think of something like Pokémon, which has somewhat dark elements, but nothing excessively horrifying. Likewise, a more horror-genre story probably won’t have lots of cute, fluffy critters in it. The horror videogame Five Nights at Freddy’s has what on surface appear to be cute, friendly animal mascots, but even they hint at something far darker lurking underneath with their unsettling, mask-like faces and frozen, fake, toothy smiles.

Japanese anime, manga, and video games have a rich variety of animal characters that range from the cute monsters of Pokémon to the simple, appealing designs of Hello Kitty to the very stylized, detailed, powerful, and impressive-looking creatures found in the Final Fantasy games by Square Enix. Each inspired creature is expressed in a language of shapes, colors, real-world life, and otherworldly mythology. Many elements of manga-inspired animal character design are universal but some draw on a knowledge of Japanese culture, aesthetic, and native life, which will be looked at in later chapters.
 
How does the character help you tell the story?

Whether the story or character came to you first, to develop any kind of believable world, you must come up with the fundamental, basic concept of what your story is about. Generally, it will be something interesting to you combined with an idea of a challenge or problem one might encounter in pursuit of this basic concept—a challenge or problem that your characters can overcome. And it doesn’t have to be a bad or dangerous thing.

Look at James Gurney’s Dinotopia book series. He simply asked what would happen if people and dinosaurs lived side by side, and made an incredible series of illustrated books answering that fundamental question.

Master animator and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki posed a lot of different questions in his many wonderful movies, such as what would happen if children could meet forest spirits face-to-face, as in My Neighbor Totoro, or whether living people could slip into the spirit world itself, as in Spirited Away.
 
Rusty the Red Fox, was my first (published) story (in a local newspaper), created when I was 10. He was born from my love of wildlife, the woods and hills around my home, and an intense interest in foxes! I tried to see the woodland world through the fox’s and his animal friends’ eyes. I called my comic strip, Rusty the Red Fox and His Friends, The strip explored what happened when these woodland animals encountered a forest fire—how did they react? how did they escape?—questions that helped develop the story. As I documented the animals’ adventures, people told me that my story had opened their eyes. Some had never considered how wildlife dealt with a natural disaster. I was glad to have introduced them to that idea, and, I hoped, help them have more compassion for the struggles of wildlife in the real world. 

Many stories feature a Hero’s Journey (described in more detail in Chapter Two, on page 55). The protagonist must face and conquer some sort of challenge, usually through education and by improving skills, until that problem can be met head on and defeated with the newfound power and knowledge. Think about yourself and your own experiences and what sort of challenges you’ve faced and overcome, or are trying to overcome. How could those experiences be used in a story? It doesn’t have to be a literal interpretation; you can draw from real-life events, experiences, and emotions. The reason “write what you know” is an adage is because it works. When you experience something yourself you can dive deeper into the emotions, difficulties, and triumphs of that journey better than if you haven’t experienced it. Perhaps you’ve dealt with bullies. Your story might take those “monsters” from your life and make them literal monsters in your story—ones your hero can fight and defeat. Have you felt lonely? Perhaps write a story with character who’s all alone in a strange world and see how that character/they overcome...

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Verlag
Monacelli Studio
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1580935621
ISBN 13 
9781580935623
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
160
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@phaidon.com
gpsr@phaidon.com

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