The manga

Why bother?

I’m a manga fan and I wanted to make a manga of my own. Bored of making portraits, I found the idea of a comic/manga exciting. It allows me to tell a story and challenges me artistically.

Step 1 : Planning

The project had to be completed in less than half a year, which I estimated was how long my motivation would last. Drawing more than 30 pages is already too much and would be too demanding to complete. Additionally I need time to come up with a plot, make character reference sketches and possibly more time to rework things for a final draft.

I started by filling out an A4 sheet with one scene. This would then be shrunk to make a single panel and each page has 5 or 6 panels. It takes me about 2hrs to make a single panel and I would have to draw every evening for a week to complete just one page. This obviously did not work, it was too slow.

My second problem is drawing portraits from different perspectives. I usually draw a portrait from a reference photo and the mistakes in the likeness don’t matter. People don’t usually notice. The problem with drawing a manga character lies not in quality of the drawing but rather in consistency.

Step 2 : Plot

The story had to be simple. I knew that. The entire story had to fit on a single page, the number of characters had to be minimal and it had to work just as well without dialogue. This was quite hard. My initial attempts made me cringe. I found it much easier to write something completely unrelated to me. However, every idea I could think of did not have sufficient conflict to have an interesting end.

I also felt intimidated about drawing scenes with a lot of action, on account of my poor human figure drawing skills. I finally decided to adopt a story based on the song Someday by Nickelback. I liked the song. Its about a man trying to figure out what happened to him only to realize he is a ghost (it also reminds me a lot of The Sixth Sense). I made a short story involving two sisters where one of them discovers that the other is a ghost. I divided the story into scenes where each page makes a scene. I could also now estimate how much work I had to look forward to.

Step 3 : Drawing

I needed to learn to draw faces using a more fundamental approach. I found this great video by Stan Prokopenko on Youtube on drawing a head from any angle. I made a mini-project of drawing a 100 faces from different perspectives to improve my fundamentals. I had planned a second mini-project on drawing gestures, but I decided against it. Having spent considerable time already, I was eager to make more progress in the manga. However, I did make some reference sketches based on anime characters.

Drawing each panel was out of the question. I set out to directly work on a page and not focus on the details in each panel. The plan was to make sufficient progress in the manga to stay motivated. Finishing the manga takes first priority. I can always return to edit it (I did not.)

Step 4 : Finishing

Even though I could see the road to the finish line, the project was far more challenging than I had anticipated. I could not (despite all the practice) keep a face consistent. Body sketches were a disaster. There was a scene involving a car and now drawing the car from different perspectives was a nightmare. I hadn’t considered lighting at all. I missed simple rules like having characters face each other during a conversation. Redrawing panels was not motivating especially considering that I would have to repeat this process for future pages. I was exhausted from the process. Looking at the work turn out to be less than perfect was hard to swallow.

I reorganized to cope with the challenge. My first priority was to finish the manga. I simplified the drawing for all the frames that were not closeups. Set a time limit for a page and tried to stick to it. I did not get the perfect pages, but it helped me complete the manga. I decided to skip the dialogues entirely and I was too tired to rework the older panels. But I had completed a 20 page manga that told a story (albeit not so clearly). This was satisfactory. I learnt a lot in the process and picked up quite a few tricks for the next time.

Outlook

I don’t feel discouraged at all about attempting this again. I rather look forward to it. There are many things I would do differently. Firstly, I am much better now and I am more confident with drawing human figures. Next, I am getting acquainted with drawing on a tablet digitally. Layering allows me to work on environments and characters independently. This also makes my character sketches reusable. The transform tools allow me to skew, stretch, flip and modify images to correct them. I initially deemed this cheating, but considering the amount of work involved, I will gladly use the tools available to me. Another tool that I aim to use is a 3D modeller/ game engine. It will make my sketches consistent and error free. I am currently working on adapting the story Nightfall by Asimov. I’m still setting up my tools and writing the screenplay. I am not sure when I can find one or two relatively less busy months to dedicate to this. Perhaps later in the year. Stay tuned.