2003 Manga Studies

Back in 2003 I went through a phase of studying manga art.  I had a friend, Inori, who was helping me learn a few of the various aspects of drawing, inking and finishing a manga.  So, I did a quick two page manga strip and catalogued thed steps I took during the inking process. I am by no means proficient at manga art (or comics in general) but it was a very educational experience for me so I thought I would share it here.The first thing I did was draw out my manga strip idea with pencil.  "penciling" I believe is the technical term. ;-)  (I'm going to show the second page of the strip for the purposes of this article)Next, I started going through with ink, blocking out the panels and caption bubbles:And then I inked further, outlining the characters:Then I went through and inked the background text and various action lines and cross hatching effects:Then it was time to clean things up a bit. I went through and erased all of the pencil lines to make it look a little sharperThen I went in with a thicker marker to create all of the dark areas, like shadows and dark hair, etc.As you can see, there were still some rough areas and the ink doesn't dry completely evenly.  This is when I imported it to Photoshop to improve the contrast and touch up a few of the areas that don't look quite right (such as the smudges on the upper right side of the page where I tested the ink brush).And last but not least I went through in photoshop and did all of the lettering.  I didn't try any coloring this time around but did experiment with it in some other projects.  Needless to say, after doing all of this I had a newfound respect for comic book artists.