I’ve been drawing like crazy recently and feel I’ve made great progress since I started two weeks ago. I can really see my improvement in the page. I’m trying to get through all my old manga requests. This time it’s Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, which was requested by Zainou when I drew Astro Boy here. Sorry for being 6 years late, I hope it was worth the wait.
Normally I only draw 3 pictures of the manga, but this time I have done 5. The reason for this is I wanted to have a go at drawing manga panels, rather than just individual pictures. I consider this training for a future date where I want to try drawing my own manga, so this kind of thing is very important.
First Encounter
This isn’t a very typical panel, but I think starting small isn’t a bad idea. This captures the characters mutual gaze as the princess rescues Amamiya.
I think this resembles them very closely, I don’t think the princess is as good as Amamiya but neither are too terrible. I will often notice things a while after I’ve finished such as the fact that I didn’t add hair shadow and things like that but ultimately, I’m quite happy with this.
I chose not to shade in their hair as often I find it doesn’t actually make it look better, and it tends to be a large waste of time. In manga this would never be shaded, it would be inked, and digitally I would fill it in with the paint bucket, so it doesn’t seem like a very helpful skill either.
If I smash it with my own hands, it will be mine for eternity
This panel felt really cool to me, even though it’s kind of stupid, and was relatively simplistic in comparison to others I could have chosen. If you’re wondering what ‘it’ refers to, that would be the planet Earth.
It may not be obvious, but for me at least the size of the image doesn’t really affect the amount of time it takes to draw. Especially because all these pictures were more complicated (one fist, one side angle, and one lizard at a difficult angle) they all took a similar amount of time because the struggle is getting the layout and proportion correct, which requires a lot of re-drawing.
I think the images at the bottom do a great job at making the picture above look better. I really struggled with the side angles here as I’m really not used to them, in fact the only side angle drawings I’ve done are shown here in this post!
I spent a really long time trying to redraw the top of his head, but when I had got one I was happy with, I didn’t really notice the problems until I was done.
Noi the lizard is a little different. At this point I’d already spent probably at least 4 hours on drawing, so I was getting a little tired. I did redraw quite a lot, but since this was a lizard positioned at a strange angle, I just found it easier to accept that I wouldn’t be able to draw it correctly, so just gave it my best attempt in a shorter amount of time. With that in mind it probably came out better than it has any right to be, but even so, I wonder if I should have spent even a little bit more time on that slightly odd eye on the right.
The other thing to mention is the layout. I should have drawn the top image bigger as the size it was resulted in an empty space at the bottom. The space to the right of Amamiya is also too big. As you draw, characters can drift around the page slightly as you make different parts bigger and smaller. In this case it actually helped me make it less bad surprisingly, so I’m even worse at layouts than it looks here.
I think when making an actual manga it would have to be digital. I would have to redraw everything here on pencil, but digitally I can just drag and drop things around on separate layers, it seems like such a time saver. While I’m practicing I think pencil will help me improve faster, but I will probably need to make the switch to digital at some point.
If there are any more requests for anime/manga then please let me know! I will try to take less than 6 years to get around to them.
