Let's Draw Manga: Bodies and Emotions

Let's Draw Manga Bodies & Emotions is for Fine Art figure artists, as well as for Manga artists. No book covers everything, but this book supplements the other books in your library with some very important, unique material. A key focus of this book is body language -- how to communicate emotion and attitude with posture and gesture. In addition to providing drawing guidance, this material can also trigger ideas for how to pose live models. The author's illustrations, showing ball-jointed croquis and their corresponding completed forms, simplifies and isolates the gestures and postures, and illustrates the relationships between the croquis and the finished forms. Other sections of the book focus on hands (which many artists find quite difficult to draw) and feet, and on the relationship between croquis, muscle, skeleton, and finished form. Cube and cylinder drawing techniques are included. Head and face angles are another important area that the book focuses on. A unique contribution of this book is its discussion of body proportions. Most figure drawing books address the normal human proportions of seven or eight-head high adult figures, and variations for younger figures. This book shows how to deviate from those "normal" proportions in order to obtain alternative graphic drawing styles. The book ends with some material on fashion and on a variety of character types, styles and ages. I would recommend this book for any figure artist's library.

I have several books of how to draw and this one is firmly in the middle of the pack usefullness wise. Some of the shortcuts to figure construction are worthwhile, but like many of this genra of how to books, it spends too little time on storytelling and too much on pin-up drawing. Still, it is better than just about any Christopher Hart book.

This book is pretty good, except it as a huge part on girls but barely anything about boys. Don't get me wrong the girl part shows a lot of different poses and there really good. Its just if your looking only for boys you shouldnt by this book.

I really liked this book a lot, the majority of this book is how to draw TONS of different poses! i didn't even think about drawing some poses that i do in everyday life.And she shows the difference between the anatomy of a human body, and the manga body! which i thought was a total plus! One of the only things i was dissapointed with was the facial expressions, it didn't show how to draw them at all, and thats what i really struggle with! It's a great book for learning all about different poses, anatomy and posture, but not a great book for expressions.