Manga Eyes Video

Hey guys! I found this video... It's about a year old now, but it's still good. Short and sweet. ;) This is just a really short video of me drawing a very basic type of manga eye, not particularly a guys or girls.

I still don't have a great set up for videos in my studio, but I hope to be able to make more How to draw videos, or at least, videos of me drawing manga for those of you who have five or more minutes to spare, in the future.

New Manga Idea

I was lately inspired by one of my fellow deviant artists work on her manga, and that inspired me to try again, and do a little more than last time. :P So I was fishing my brain for any good ideas, and I think I've found the beginning of one.
This is what I call my 'storming' page, for when I am trying to figure out what I want for the characters and plot of the manga.

Here are my manga's three main (ish) characters:

From left to right they are: Crow (James), Drake (Alexander), and Angel (Claire).
I'm still sketching out the idea of the manga, but I have the characters down mostly and several important plot pieces. I can't wait to share it with you!

Unfinished Panel-less Chibi Comic

For my manga and/or chibi comics I get inspired by all kinds of things: Nature, stories, music; this time, by my Friday dance class. All of my Friday kids are about 8-11 years old. it's almost hysterical, the way they constantly fight over who gets to hold my hand, gets a piggy back or even who gets to be closest to me.
This chibi comic, like pretty much everything else I've posted this week- or this month for that matter, is not finished. It's an outline, showing the line of action, how I want the story to play out.

Everyone likes a good punch line. But why? Like every good punch, it has something behind it. Set up is important, almost, and maybe is, more important than that goody punch line.
This Chibi Comic runs only one page like most of my chibi comics. The shorter a story is the stronger the need to figure out how to get the reader's to 'get it.'






My plan had five drawings, but I was able to take the same concept and turn it into four. The artist of the 'my-four-paneled-life' comics is amazing at this, and she is part of my inspiration to make things clearer and more concise.

Studio Ghibli inspired mushrooms

I was inspired today by some little white mushrooms on the front of the children's magazine 'spider.' Here is what I sketched after looking at the cover of that magazine:

 Just whimsical doodles that don't even resemble manga. I drew botanical things before Manga, and I still have some sort of knack. Then, I was inspired by the Studios Ghibli part of my brain, and sketched out this unfinished-possible-masterpiece:

I don't have a full background planned out yet, but I really like what I did here. It reminds me mostly of My Neighbor Totoro from Ghibli Studios. If you haven't checked out their anime, then now is the time! They have great films, for kids, adults, teens- whatever. I enjoyed them when I was a kid and I still enjoy them.

What I'm working on now

I just wanted to post a few sketches I'm working on since I have nothing finished at the moment, just a bunch of manga/anime projects that I'm working on.

 Here I was inspired by a manga pin on pinterest with a wolf headdress, and though mine didn't turn out too well, my lion one was just fine.

 Here, what I've yet to finish the inking. 'Marriage. Marriage is the reason we are gathered here together, today.' - The princess bride.

 More wounds, blood and stuff. Here one of my character was fatally wounded, the other poisoned. Yep. Sums up what happens in my books. Not finished, I plan to take this one into MangaStudios.

 Another story idea! I like drawing roman toga looking things. I'm also taking this one into Manga studios.

 Mail carrier Manga girl. Not yet sure of the background.

 Manga girl looking back as she ascends the stairs with her date to the ball. Having difficulty with her prom dress.

Manga girl with headphones. Here I need to resize her head. This drawing I drew with a lot of feeling, very proud of it in it's imperfection. Can't wait to fix it up.

And that sums up what I've started working on this week as far as art/manga. I'll show you guys the finished pieces when I'm done!

Manga boy sitting pose

So, I finished one of the manga guys from my previous post ( Sitting poses). And as I stated at least twice in that pose, drawing manga people sitting is hard for me, because it's different. Usually our manga people are just standing around in empty space- at least mine are.
So, here he is sketched out:

Then, I filled it in:

Now I wanted to color him, but I'm still not comfortable all the time with my manga markers or colored pencil, so my best bet is the computer and my mangastudios program.

Ta-da! lol. His name is Akhen-Aten. Short history lesson: Akhen-Aten, previously known as Amenhotep, was a Egyptian pharaoh who abandoned the Egyptian pantheon at the time for his 'god', Aten, who wasn't even a god, but the sun itself. After his reign of 17 years the outraged egyptian people restored the temples and inscriptions of Amen and the other Egyptian gods.
History lesson closed.

Manga Sitting poses

It's easy to draw people all in the same pose, and my go to pose is standing. That is, after all, what we learn to draw first. I've been working on getting my people to sit in various poses and from different angles, and, guess what- it's hard.
Here are two poses I first scribbled out and then reformed into actual people:

These poses are SO much harder than they look, but I liked the challenge the foreshortening provided. They will be developed into actual pictures shortly!

Graphic design

I've started working on a poster for a stop smoking campaign thingy-ma-jig, whatever you call 'ems.
Here's how I started out with my sketch:

 This was not my first try at the design. I'd done several thumbnail sketch and another one up-too size. The focus was that he was leaving. quitting. Done.
Then I scanned it into the computer and did this too it:

I'm only in charge of the image, but I got a funky font and wrote out the title anyway. :P This isn't the final image, but I'm going to keep with this graphic design.

Inking line art

Okay, so here's a piece I did a while back of my character Jezzabel. This is before the line art was inked in. She was colored completely with Tombow manga markers.

I wanted there to be some sort of netting over her shoulder, but I knew the marker would be too thick, and then if I used a pen it would look over done. I used a regular ball point pen and as you can see below, I tapered the line and made them look like they disappeared and came back again.

 At first I made sure to color her skin underneath, otherwise I would make the ink bleed if I put the marker on top of the pen lines. I used a pencil to faintly show what I wanted it to look like.

 Number one: glove. it seemed a little weird with everything the same thickness, so when I made one line thicker on accident, I found that I liked the varying thickness and applied it throughout.

Here it is completely inked. These were all taken with my camera in bad lighting, so if you want a look at the scanned (better) version, you can find it here on my blog post Manga Markers: Tombows.

Prismacolor Marker and Prismacolor colored pencils

I've been trying out a few new things. I've combined my prismacolor pencils with my prismacolor manga markers. At first this wasn't on purpose; my skin colored markers have dried out and the tobow marker's texture just didn't look right for skin.
Here are a few of my first experiments:

 I loved how this one turned out. I used beige for the overall skin tone and then used light carmillon (an orange color) to create shadows and give it a 3D feel.
This next one below I was purely experimenting with colors and what prismacolor pencils (which are very oily and thick in a way) would do on top of the manga markers. It's mostly done with Pencil instead of marker.

It didn't quite turn out how I wanted and I'm going to take the original in Manga Studios and color it digitally.
The addition of the pencils made it easier to combine or make certain colors, but I don't like coloring a picture entirely with pencil because it looks grainy. color SLOWLY, be patient, not me.