Sangfroid
07-16-2006, 02:03 PM
Put this together to illustrate a point on another forum. Putting it here incase anyone finds it usfull.
look closley at the composition in manga. There are a couple of realy key tricks they use, see if ya can spot them. Remeber it's all about leading the eye where you want it to go.
A couple of other things that help such as thumbnailing out the compositions first (what I did here) Rather than doing a finished drawing strieght away. THis also helps you to see what you're doing as a whole rather than getting bogged down with surface detail. Before you start it's good to decide exactly what you are saying with this page as a whole! (so here I thought there's two guys one has a army of beasts and there getting ready to atack this tough guy) You can also use speach bubbles to draw the eye naturaly to characters. Try to think in terms of rythem and flow (as a whole), Look at the first image,where are you looking? Where does your eye go first? There is actualy an overal line drawn through every page of a manga that has been considered in the composition that leads the eye to areas of attention, here I have drawn this line over my page. you can do this for any manga page and can see very quickly how they use it. Some realy good examples are Akira or Blade of the immortal (but i havn't seen a manga that does not do this to date haha).
edit: somthing i just remembered too, is to think in terms of tention (building and releasing).
http://ja2.nanokostudios.com/files/eye_track1_415.jpg
http://ja2.nanokostudios.com/files/eye_track_631.jpg
look closley at the composition in manga. There are a couple of realy key tricks they use, see if ya can spot them. Remeber it's all about leading the eye where you want it to go.
A couple of other things that help such as thumbnailing out the compositions first (what I did here) Rather than doing a finished drawing strieght away. THis also helps you to see what you're doing as a whole rather than getting bogged down with surface detail. Before you start it's good to decide exactly what you are saying with this page as a whole! (so here I thought there's two guys one has a army of beasts and there getting ready to atack this tough guy) You can also use speach bubbles to draw the eye naturaly to characters. Try to think in terms of rythem and flow (as a whole), Look at the first image,where are you looking? Where does your eye go first? There is actualy an overal line drawn through every page of a manga that has been considered in the composition that leads the eye to areas of attention, here I have drawn this line over my page. you can do this for any manga page and can see very quickly how they use it. Some realy good examples are Akira or Blade of the immortal (but i havn't seen a manga that does not do this to date haha).
edit: somthing i just remembered too, is to think in terms of tention (building and releasing).
http://ja2.nanokostudios.com/files/eye_track1_415.jpg
http://ja2.nanokostudios.com/files/eye_track_631.jpg