Why Guidelines?

My first manga instructor was Mark Crilley. I learned from his youtube lessons before I bought mastering Manga, which is a great book by the way, check it out.

One of the things Mark always stresses is- GUIDELINES. <--- This is the one thing; the ONE thing, out of any drawing concept that I could pick, that I would not, could not do, and because of that, I still have problems. A year and a half from purchasing his book, I have continued to struggle with this. Don't be like me, don't just skip out on guidelines, or at least ground work- Otherwise your manga characters will look funny.

To make it easier, and more fun, I started using a light blue prismacolor pencil to do my guidelines, then filled it out with a pencil and finally traced it with pen onto another paper and added the final touches.

This guy's name is James, known among friends as SEMAJ. Whenever you think life is hard and that you've started out small, don't worry- he started out as a bunch of blue lines. He was also a mistake. A mistake, because I wasn't going to draw James, he hadn't been created yet. When I started, I was going to draw a Sci fi character, but as I went along James popped in instead.

As another example, here's a drawing I'm working on now:

Let me introduce you. On the your left, you have Brandon, and the right, Raider.

Take a closer look at this drawing. The blue I sketched out first, so we can see the shape of both their heads. We can also see that Brandon started out with a sword; one on his back, and then switched to one in his hand. Then, after I did it over with pencil you can see that I gave him a gun like Raiders instead. The ability to go over it again with a different color helped me to separate what would be visible or not, like Raider's ear. It helps me tailor the character's clothes and figure out what the heck I really want in the picture.

So, in closing; GUIDELINES, GUIDELINES, GUIDELINES.