Reddit reviews Manga for the Beginner: Everything you Need to Start Drawing Right Away! (Christopher Hart's Manga for the Beginner)

i'm 16! and i can see why your friends think like that; so did i when i started drawing. and i regret it hugely. i wish i learned the basics from the very beginning. that's why i'm using drawabox now.

i started drawing when i was in 5th grade, so 10-11. i learned from a how to draw manga book (this one) my little sister had borrowed from the library. it has got to be one of the worst ways to start drawing. if i could go back in time i'd go with drawabox or find an art teacher.

as a kid i wasn't aware of flaws in my drawings. like your friends, i just drew what interested me and learned only what i needed to accomplish that. i also avoided anything difficult, so i have pages and pages of headshots, all facing forward or 3/4s view with mild expressions. i was impatient. i started drawing digitally at 11, using deviantart's muro on an ipad with my fingers or on my mom's computer with a mouse. a year or two later, i pirated paint tool sai and bought a drawing tablet. so i was able to move on to digital art without even understanding how to draw traditionally. oh, and i drew entirely from my wrist.

as a result, i can give you half-decent anime style portraits all day. but i'm lost when it comes to anything else. backgrounds, anything below the shoulders, animals, objects, plants, ears, hands, expressions, perspective, poses, characters interacting, different angles, lineart, etc. i have no foundation to stand on.

it's extremely frustrating and limiting.

i know a lot of people are tempted to start drawing stylistically, especially if that's their end goal. i get that. the anime art style just appealed to me, as it does to most little girls. it's still my preferred style, actually. i love how expressive and pretty it can be. but i would much rather have started out drawing from observation then developed a style.

sometimes people my age tell me, "i wish i could draw like you" or "i could never draw like you" and i always tell them about how much time i wasted dicking around and how little i actually know. then i tell them if they avoided my mistakes and applied themselves, they'd be at my level in a year, traditionally at least, no doubt! especially since they're around my age, so they won't struggle with a child's wobbly hand and lack of self-awareness.

Just to add one more thing to this - your favorite anime/comic book/cartoonist/whatever probably didn't learn how to draw anime, they learned how to draw.

What makes something a good picture is like 90% fundamentals and what makes it look like anime is the 10% you add on top of that, which is trivial to learn compared to learning how to actually draw right.

Miyazaki never read one of these.

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