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10 pro tips10 pro tips
Description
You know how to draw, but your manga pages just don't look as professional as you'd want them to be? Fear not!
Let's begin our course on how to draw professional-looking manga with 10 tips that will give that extra polish to your work!
So you want to draw manga like a pro... but don't know how? Then take a seat, because you're about to get schooled B] If you thought that it requires endless amounts of...
Beginners know how to draw squares, circles and rectangles. Pros know how to draw boxes, spheres and cylinders. "Wait, what's the difference?", you ask. Simple: the...
Perspective applies to all objects in the same way, whether they're simple or complex. So mastering perspective for primitives will help you tremendously when drawing more...
Simply drawing a lot of boxes and spheres is great and all, but it's even better to try and understand the principles that rule the world of perspective. One such...
It's very much possible to represent all complex forms through a combination of primitives. In fact, this is also how our brains are able to remember what a particular...
One of the most common beginner mistakes is to restrict your viewing angles to only the front or the profile, which leads to a very "flat" looking drawing style. This is...
So you have an action-packed manga with a lot of stuff going on. That's cool. You can play around with your page layout, sound words and speech bubbles, but here's one thing...
When the reading flow allows for multiple visual paths, it becomes difficult to follow the action. As a result, the reader gets tired and has a tough time immersing themself...
It's common not to draw backgrounds in manga panels and instead use effects to convey a particular emotion or atmosphere. That's perfectly legitimate, in fact it's...
Remind your readers regularly about where your characters are by adding a background to your panels.
The beginner uses the same camera angles over and over again. The pro tames perspective like a wild beast to crush their enemies. Recycling the same viewing angles gets...
Let's take this drawing for example. It's not bad. But the camera focuses on him as a whole. It's looking quite balanced, but also very "normal". Where's the suspense?
Now we're getting somewhere! By using a low perspective with more distortion, we make the character look "larger" and more awesome. Furthermore, the weapon looks as if...
Use interesting angles to show your characters and scenes from their best side. Focus on what you want the reader to notice most.
The beginner will start drawing without first thinking about how big everything should be compared to everything else. As a result, a house or a tree might end up looking...
*A pro doesn't start by drawing the characters head only to find that they won't fit inside the panel, and then change the proportions to "make it fit". No, a pro will...
Every now and then, you will need to draw some (literally) dark scenes. A beginner will be tempted to simply put a dark screen tone over the drawing, but this will make it...
Use rim light to prevent your characters from looking flat and dull in dark environments.
The beginner artist is impatient. They will start drawing a page without fully considering how all elements interact with each other, thus creating a page that looks...
*Always plan your pages from big to small. Don't lose yourself in tiny details before you haven't established the overall layout. Thumb sketches can help to ensure that a page...
The beginner artist assumes they know how to draw everything right. The pro assumes that they don't and checks to make sure. Assumptions are those things that are...
Don't assume you know. Make sure you know.
Quite often, the only thing that seperates an amateur from a pro is the fact that the latter uses references. No one knows how to draw every single thing. *And that's...
Being able and willing to use reference images is a fundamental skill of every manga artist. Acquire it. Just remember: Using references is not the same as copying or...
The beginner keeps re-inventing the wheel with every drawing. The pro takes some extra time to create a refined wheel that doesn't need re-inventing. ...and by "wheel" I...
*Even though it takes extra time and effort: Make sure to create reference sheets for all the important designs of your manga, and keep them close. Consistent drawings is...
Hopefully, these 10 tips have given you some inspiration as to what you should focus on the next time you draw a manga page, in order to make it more professional. *What was...