Techniques for Drawing Female Manga Characters

Rating:
Summary: Great book for drawing anime...however
Review: This book is great as a startup point of drawing the female body and the structures in manga form. The book has good, understandable instructions, and it provides good diagrams of the female body that helps along the way to learn how to draw. However, there is just one aspect of what I think the book is missing. The book doesn't teach you how about screen tone or shading the body enough. It does, though, but not well enough in detail to the whole figure. Mainly, I find this book useful for drawing simple pictures and sketches of manga girls. But despite in all of this (overall), this is an outstanding book that will help the reader who is interested in drawing girls.

Rating:
Summary: good book for people who have experience on drawing manga
Review: this book is great even if it does have nudity but theres a purpose for it so the artist can see how the clothes fit on your female character it shows the different angles of different views you can draw your character there are a good amount of poses. and how to do eyes, legs of different lengths and size, hands, feet and for those who like to draw there characters in water it explains how the water drops flow on the body. So in other words this book is good.it doesn't earn its fifth cause there are some poses half done meaning they don't show the head and face so if you are trying to draw that pose you have to assume how the heads shape is suppose to be buy the book anyways because it has help me a lot so it could do some good for you ^-^

Rating:
Summary: A good reference for intermediate artists
Review: This book is helpful if you want to improve your manga-style female figures, but is not a good place to start to learn basics about drawing or manga-style techniques. As another reviewer suggested, the first book in this series is the best to start with. Also, although this book spends a great deal of time on in-depth coverage of drawing the body, it doesn't cover drawing faces, eyes, and hair nearly enough. Even with this problems, I still recommend this book as a great help to improve and refine manga-style figure proportions.

Rating:
Summary: Great reference material
Review: This book is intended for those who want to refine their manga skills, specially those making a transition from a more realistic anatomy to a cartoony style. Even if it has some little translation problems, it gives very good reference and pointers for depicting a simplified female form in an alluring way, with lots of subtle little tricks to convey character (limb positioning, body types, facial expressions, proportions, etc). As far as the manga style fundamentals, you may want to consider getting "How to Draw Manga", from the same publisher... let's just hope they translate the other books in the series.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible. I use it all the time.
Review: This book is one of the best books I've found for drawing manga; I've always had trouble drawing females characters, despite the many other manga technique books I've read. This one finally helped me learn to draw females much more efficiently, and I've already noticed a great change in my female drawing of now and before. I use this for both drawing pictures and many fighting game sprites/animations.

Rating:
Summary: Very good, though perhaps not the place to start
Review: This book is very well done and is mostly example drawings and diagrams; however, it assumes you already know about rudimentary drawing techniques and things like screen tones. Therefore, the best place to start for manga drawing would be with How To Draw Manga vol. 1 and get this book later on (indeed, if the order of books shown on the sleeve is correct, this book would be vol. 4).

Rating:
Summary: Female Anatomy in Detail
Review: This book is wonderful for learning the anatomical side of females and briefly shows some daily actions. More specifically, it covers typical shapes of breasts, how they move when the body is at rest, laying, standing, or hunched over; the butt, crotch, legs, neck, nails, eyes, mouth, ears, hair, and different body types. Hayashi also has a section of clothing for women covering underwear, bra, regulation swimsuit, gym attire, and the like.

Like any good book in anatomy, there is nudity present in this book. Some may be offended by the areas it covers such as the breast and how they move at different positions or views of the butt and crotch areas but you can't draw a realistic image if you are not made aware of information such as these. Personally, I'd rather look at a line drawing than view the real thing at one of the figure drawing classes with real-live models.

I would recommend you pick this up if you want to know the in's and out's of the female anatomy and once you've mastered it, this book will serve as an excellent reference.