The Master Guide to Drawing Anime: Mostly Adorable

The Master Guide to Drawing Anime is more than just a pretty picture book. It is a good introduction for the beginner artist on how to draw in the manga/anime art style!

I'm always surprised when I read "how to draw" books and find useful tips in them to improve my drawing skills. You may find this silly, but I rarely read these books. I tend to use only half of the reference— the visual half— to add details to my own work. But the written half is incredibly useful as well. It tells you what you might not have picked up from the pictures alone: how and why the image works.

Christopher Hart delivered a good guide. In this book, Hart demonstrates "how to draw original characters from simple templates." The text accompanying the images is concise, but pertinent. He points out how small changes can make a big impact on your image. And all throughout, these changes will have a bearing on the character you create. That was probably my favorite part. Redrawing a character to look the same through a series of poses, actions, and outfits is difficult, so I'll take any help I can get with that. This focus on creating characters and keeping their looks consistent through multiple images makes this guide a wonderful reference for fledgling comic book artists. However, I wouldn't refer to this as a "master" guide. The book is split into six parts: schoolgirls, schoolboys, preteens, charming villains, humor in anime, and fantasy characters. Of these six, the bulk of the content is in drawing schoolgirls.

I guess drawing girls is more fun than drawing boys?
Maybe? I have a lot of fun drawing girls and women in a manga style, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to include boys and men in my drawings. I just found it odd how many more examples were available on how you could radically change a character type/personality (with a quick-change of hair, clothes, or expression) for girls than there were for the boys. And the schoolgirl section was the best illustrated and most informative section of the book also, with the preteens chapter being a close second. Perhaps Christopher Hart just loves drawing schoolgirls and preteens more than anything.

Are you saying—?!
Nothing pervy, you perv! All I'm saying is that those sections of the book received the most amount of love.

When you say love...
I'm saying detailed descriptions, variations, and full-color images for certain chapters and not others. If you do anything creative, there are certain things that you prefer to do over others. Given the attention to detail on these, I would say that "charming villains" are not on Hart's list of favorite things to draw. There were only two types: both male, based on the same body type, and they weren't even done in color. They were boring. The fantasy section of the book was a little longer and contained color images, but little variation. Furthermore, those drawings were all female and they all had essentially the same facial expression.

Overall, I feel as though Hart's enthusiasm and passion extended to only the first half of the book— a little like my enthusiasm for this review. The second half was "serviceable," at best. With the exception of the villains section, I enjoyed the artwork, and the tips on keeping character consistency. Depending on where you're at in your drawing skills, you might find this useful. But it isn't a "master" guide, or anything close to a definitive one.

One last thing to note before I go: After puzzling (loudly and repeatedly to my husband) over why the style of the art varied as much as it did from one section to the next, he pointed something out to me. This was not all drawn by the same artist. There were multiple contributing artists, and I don't think Christopher Hart was even one of them, though he did write the book.
So there you have it! My opinion hasn't changed much, but my jokes make less sense now.

Thanks a lot, Christopher Hart.

Inkheart: A Reminder Not to Judge Books by their Cover

As you may recall from another post, I unintentionally read three different versions of Taken recently. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke was the second one I read, but the first "reverse Taken" that I'd ever encountered.

Oh, so the dad gets kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery in this too? I thought this was a young adult book!
I think this is actually a children's book, and yes the dad gets kidnapped in the beginning. Luckily, neither he or his daughter are sexually molested. The father's kidnapping at the beginning of the book and the daughter's desire to run off and find him are actually the furthest Inkheart makes it into the Taken plotline. In reality, the plot is equal parts "be careful what you wish for," "don't judge a book by its cover," and missed opportunities. I felt the "don't judge a book by its cover" part most keenly since based on the cover and description on the back, I was expecting a more exciting, magical adventure with our little girl protagonist. Based on the description, our 12-year-old heroine— Meggie— is thrust into a book-like adventure where only she "can rewrite the story" and ultimately give it a happy ending. Based on the cover, I expected that adventure to include at least one minotaur, one unicorn, and a troop of flying monkeys. There were no minotaurs, unicorns, or flying monkeys. There was barely even any adventure. Instead, we had a series of kidnappings: first the dad, then the girl, then they escape, then Meggie gets kidnapped again, etc.

That sounds frustrating.
It really was! The sad part is that Cornelia Funke set up some legitimately good hooks at the beginning of the story, which were then resolved in a lackluster sort of way. For the first 300 or so pages, I was convinced that the story would get better! "Wait until I get to the part where they reveal this, and that, and the other thing!"

The way things start out is that 12-year-old bibliophile Meggie wakes up in the middle of the night to see that there is a strange man standing outside of her home. In a fit of panic, she rushes to inform her equally bibliophilic father so that he might send the stranger away. Her father is actually acquainted with the man: Dustfinger the fire-eater, who has searched for them in order to warn them that someone is on their trail. Meggie's father, Mo, possesses a certain book that our story's villain desires, and they must keep it from him at all costs... Thus, our beginning hooks: What could Capricorn, our villain, want from our book-binding papa (Mo)? What's so special about this book he wants? Why is Dustfinger warning them? Is he ally, or foe?

Who the hell names their kid "Capricorn," or "Dustfinger?"
Authors, of course. You see, Dustfinger and Capricorn do not belong in Meggie's world. They are actually characters from a book titled Inkheart, written by some guy in Italy (inside of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart).

It's just a book... No harm ever came from reading a book.

Meggie's father possesses a strange power: whenever he reads a book out loud, something ends up popping out of the book. Sometimes, it may be a bird, or a gold coin. However, for everything that comes out of the book, something else must go into it (presumably to maintain some sort of balance). In the instance of Inkheart, various characters— including Dustfinger, Capricorn, and several of Capricorn's henchmen— make it into Meggie's world, and her mother disappeared into the world of the book. Now, nine years after their appearance in Meggie's world, Capricorn has gathered and destroyed all copies of the story he came from. He needs only the one Mo owns to bring forward more of his evil cronies...

You wrote a book in a book that was better than the book you wrote...

Oooh... Book-ception!
It really did take approximately half of the book to get that all set up, and by then there had already been a kidnapping or two in progress. After that, it all went downhill. Unfortunately, the characters just weren't compelling. For example, as a reader I was told that Dustfinger was really an affable character in his book! However, in the actual book that I was reading, he was pathetic. He was desperately unhappy to be out of his story and wanted nothing more than to return home. Dustfinger gives Mo and Meggie up to Capricorn thinking that somehow— despite all of Mo's previous attempts to read him back— being under Capricorn's scrutiny will force Mo to control his power and send Dustfinger home! Meanwhile, Capricorn was repeatedly described as being a terrifying villain in his own book, with dead eyes devoid of pity. To encounter him in the book I read was to read about a man who wanted gold, and weapons to frighten people with. Color me unimpressed with his goals to be the douchiest douche-nozzle that ever douched. Capricorn is the sort of character one would call the police about, because they can handle him. He didn't have any particularly special powers, so I don't understand why the cops in the book were such pushovers that they didn't just go out and do their jobs.

Their families were being threatened?
Boo-fucking-hoo. You know what would help? Arresting the bad guys! The worst part, though, is that Inkheart spent a lot of time telling me how great Inkheart was. If the story these awful characters came from was so great, how come I'm not reading that instead?! Overall, the writing wasn't bad, though things did get tedious toward the end. I could have done without the repeated kidnappings, for example. Mo and Meggie's curse/ability to read characters out of their stories was an intriguing concept that got me to start the book, but only sheer determination on my part could make me finish it. Funke missed so many opportunities to make this a better story. I think she got lost in the cleverness of having a great book tucked away in a mediocre one.