This image took about 45 minutes from begining to end. If you keep practising you might be able to draw a non complicated character such as this one in a shorter period of time.  I personally feel that one of the hardest things to do when drawing is coming up with a character pose. I feel I sit down and think about this step for quite some time before me pen even touches the pad.

Hitting that key pose is ideal to being happy with your drawing, It doesn’t matter how long it takes for you to draw, the only thing that matters is that your happy with the final result. Speed will come with practice.

So from here keep drawing and I hope you enjoy this video of me frantically drawing a manga character.

Remember that the view of the world offered by the character/s is not the whole world and we should know that. By this, I mean that if, for example, the character is a fool, remember that world he sees is not foolish. It is no more the way he sees it than the world is exactly as we see it. A foolish character is simply the angle through which that world is seen. If the main character is a bore, the world is not boring, therefore whatever the bore says and sees is offering a flawed but nonetheless interesting view of the world. If the main character is a liar, then their view of the world will be flawed and refracted, but the world itself is not a lie or a deception.

The world you have created whether it mirrors the real world or is an imaginary world is not wholly seen and known by the character.  It is only seen through the looking glass of that character’s mind.

One of the questions I am most asked is which works best- first or third person narrative: Is it better to have a character speaking for themselves or to tell their story through the eyes of a narrator who, even if they only show that one character’s point of view and is partisan to that view, is still seeing it from the outside?

My answer is that neither way of writing a story is necessarily better than the other. The best form is the one that will allow you to tell your story best. It always comes back to that. And of course there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches that need to be considered.

But having said that, I do think writers are instinctively more drawn to one form than the other, and that most stories will simply come to you in one or the other form. You can consider trying it the other way, but I do think that it is important to listen to your instincts- needless to say your instincts will be better honed and more likely right, if you have worked and practiced your craft faithfully and for a long time. After more than thirty books, I trust my instinct a lot, sometimes even to the point of letting a character who has started doing something I did not expect, go on, to see where they will lead me. Very often that character is the voice of my subconscious speaking, telling me to do something with my story that I have not yet figured out consciously.

A lot of writing happens in the subconscious, before it hits the conscious mind, which is why it is important to think a lot about something you mean to write BEFORE setting pen to paper. In fact I think it is vital to put off setting pen to paper for as long as possible, because humans being humans, the minute we write something down, it is set in stone and we don’t want to change it. While it is in our minds, it is fluid and therefore endlessly mutable, endlessly able to grow and develop and change.

Good characters also tend to take on a life of their own, which means they might not be the puppets you carved out with such dedication and love, so they will not always obey the story you are trying to write. I always regard it as a fantastic sign when a character begins to pull at the reins and fight me. It remember feeling shattered and really shocked in Ashling, when the misfits I had expected to win a major confrontation, actually lost. I thought I had failed, then I realized that I had created characters with such a strong pacifist ethic that they simply could not do the things their abilities would have allowed, that would be necessary for them to win. . They could have won, but they chose not to do the things that they would have had to do. For me it was a triumph because the whole series is asking if human beings could ever evolve ethically or morally, and in this moment, I saw that played out without my having set it up.

For me, writing is all about figuring things out, answering questions, understanding things better. For me, writing is a way to think. Maybe the only way…

For me, writing in first person comes very naturally because it allows me to engage deeply and passionately with the character, to become the character, and speak my story through their passions and preoccupations. My first book was Obernewtyn and that is in first person. I tell the story through the eyes of a misfit girl who is friendless, frightened and very strong. Some of her characteristics are mind- when I was fourteen, I was friendless, a misfit and frightened of the world, especially of the inimical authorities which might come to repossess me and my brothers and sisters and take us away from our mother. That was my mother’s fear, which we drank in through our pores as much as our minds. Elspeth’s fear is given life by my fears. But she is not I. She is stronger and more proud, she is less afraid of conflict or of being disliked. She is more likely to live by her ethics. I tend to empathize very strongly with people, to the extent of being unable to judge people because of the fact that I can imagine understand how they came to say or do what they did. When I can’t empathize, I tend to judge very harshly. Elspeth lacks empathy and lived very rationally and ethically. So, using first person, I was able to merge and ‘be’ her. I was able to experience the world I had created- an extrapolation of the ‘real’ world – thought the mind for a character with traits I wish I had, but only after deducting a trait I feel is very important- empathy.

I could have written her story in third person, and indeed it might seem as if that would be the natural approach to a story where I was trying to find out if I could believe that humans, having had the ultimate lesson, would be finally capable of ethical and moral evolution as a species. A passionate question, but perhaps a dry one that would not engage an audience, or me, hence the invention of a young woman character very like me in some ways and very unlike me in others, who would allow me to deeply engage with that imagined world, and which ultimately would bind a reader close.

First person narrative tends to draw a reader in deeply on an emotional level, so that they will tend to see the world and feel about it as the character does. It is a great way to draw the reader in. But, there are disadvantages too: a reader usually only gets to see the world through the mind and eyes from the point of view of one character. That means it is a limited view. This lends itself very well to an unreliable narrator, which will cause the reader to see a slanted and distorted view of the world. It would work very well if you wanted to get inside a racist character. You make them a sympathetic first person narrator with a love of children, strong honor and gentle intelligence, then somewhere in the story you show that all of those lovely traits are switched off when it comes to working with someone of a different race. Having forced a deep engagement between the reader and the character, you can then force the reader to experience the dark side of racism, from the inside. Why? Perhaps to enable us to see how the mind of a racist deviates or distorts in some specific ways, because before change can be effected, we must understand a problem.

The first person approach is limited but vivid. The third person narrative is wider and allows a broader vision, but emotional engagement is lessened.

Of course the limitations of both approaches can be subverted. With Elspeth in the Obernewtyn Chronicles, I wanted a vivid emotional connection with the character, hence the first person approach, but I was not just writing a story about one young women’s gradual change and growth in post apocalyptic world, I was trying to look at the grown of humanity as a whole, and that was a very large story that would have been hard to tell, using the mind and voice of just one character. But if the main character can enter the minds of other characters, I am far less limited than I was. I can have some of the advantages of the third person narrative without losing the specific advantages of the first person approach. And if I also have my character able to dream sometimes of the past or of the future, then I can even subvert the limitations of the lifetime of my main character.

And, if I want to subvert the limitations of third person, I might decide to look only through the eyes of one very sympathetic and/or compelling character, or set up a series of exciting and dramatic events that make the reader align strongly with a specific character.

There are many ways to subvert limitations – which is another way of saying that writers break their own rules all the time.

I am drawn more often to write in first person, however I also sometimes write in third person, and stories come to me in that way. Most often, it is short stories that come to me in third person, perhaps because I need a little distance to keep control of the form and the plot. First person is so close that I tend to play with plotting only after a story is written, when I already have seven thousand and ten pages!

To conclude, story is all about character and character should be dictated by what it is that you want to tell. For me, a book or story requires three elements- the first is an idea of some kind- The Gathering arose from the idea that friendship was like a gang and that it had rules and how great a price one ought to pay for it. Being a friendless teen fed very strongly into this. Greylands rose from the idea that grief turns the world grey, and that it is hard to turn the color back on. The fact that my beloved father and brother had died in car accidents fed into this story idea. So I am usually thinking about an idea for a long time before I write. Then usually some characters evolve- maybe partly I am trying to come up with them, and partly I am looking for a spark. With the short story The Phoenix, it was when I saw two kids – a tall girl and boy with a ripped tee shirt, at the end of a long stony desolate spit of a beach. It was very atmospheric place, and suddenly they were my characters in that place, and the boy was calling the girl Princess.

That is the final ingredient before a story can begin to be written: when one character speaks to another. That is when the story and the world spring to life for me.

Good luck!

So just like the hand we have to think of basic shapes for building the foot. These following shapes are the shapes that I used when breaking down the foot.

Try and draw these shapes from different angles. Remember that these shapes  are your basic building blocks. From here we are going to start adding in some guild lines that will help you to add in details.

When I first start to add details I first turn these basic shapes into a larger mass. Similar to the mitten we used to create the hand.

When drawing the toes in remember that are small gaps between each toe and a slight amount of webbing.

Another important part when creating feet is the ankle, something that is easy to over look is the position and height of the ankle. Keep in mind that the ankle is made up of several bones, the Tibia, Fibula and Talus. The Tibia is the larger bone that is visible on the inside of the ankle which sits a little higher than the Fibula which sits on the outside. This creates the angle of which the ankle is sitting at. Keep this in mind when creating the foot.

It is also a good idea to divide the feet and toe up into two different sections. It makes things slightly easier to pose the foot in earlier stages.

When drawing a character in a standing pose do not start from the feet, it will most probably make the character look unbalanced. Your character should have good balance before drawing in the feet to detail.

The last few entries have covered basic body construction with blocks and exercises that covered how to draw a complete Manga head.

This Entry will be covering hands, which are one of the harder subjects to draw and maybe one of the things that many beginners try to avoid. However hands when drawn well are one of the most rewarding things. When you draw your first hand it may or may not be the best but when you draw a hand that you like don’t stop, keep on drawing them when you’re on a roll.

The following blog will cover the way I draw hands and the tips that I have used to draw them. There are many different ways to approach drawing the hands. Let’s first go over the basics and divisions of the hand.

So we are going to draw up an oval like shape, like so.

From here we are going to rough out the length of the fingers. They are approximately half the size of this shape or the same size as the palm.

Use a curved line to divide the shape in half.
It is better to draw the fingers on a curved line than a flat to avoid making the hand look like a rake.

Divide the bottom in half vertically then draw in a shape that represents the base of the thumb.

From here draw a line from that shape that extends outside the shape in the direction you want your thumb to go.

Then draw in the curve lines that connect to each side of the same shape.

This is the mitten shape that you should try and sketch when drawing the hand.

Variation on the mitten approach but with the pointer finger separated. This is also a very good shape to familiarise yourself with when beginning to draw hands.

When drawing characters you will rarely see hands drawn from this angle, this is used as a basic understanding of hands. You should be applying these rules to hands from different angles. Great thing about it is you have a reference right in front of you

The mitten like shape is used as a base and a rough guide, it is only used here as an estimate of what the hands will look like and where the fingers will go.
Keeping the mitten shape in mind we should move onto the basic shapes that make up the fingers and palm.

The shape that I personally find useful when drawing in the fingers is a solid arc.

Familiarize yourself with this shape by drawing them from different angles. Once you have line them up in threes.

From here we are going to stick them onto a palm. Study your palm shape and you should be able to see a basic shape like so.

From here we should split this shape in half to position the middle finger.

Now we have some fingers in we have to put in a thumb. The joint of the thumb takes about half the palm. Draw a ball where the thumb should be positioned. Then draw in the same shapes we used for the fingers.

Ok now that we have the basic building blocks we are going to add in the details and do some cleaning up.

Make sure when you are drawing the fingers in there is a gap between each, do not draw them as sharp points connecting together, having this gap is essential to creating a more believable hand.

You won’t see a hand like this too often and mostly when used in how to draw hands tutorials, it is laid out this was to explain the foundations and shapes of the hand.

Now try and apply these rules from different angles and use your own hand as a reference.

You can built the most compelling world in your imagination or be brilliant at reproducing the real world in words, but unless you can also build a good character, your world will not come to life. That is because it is only through the eyes of your character/s that the reader will observe your world. How the character sees it will shape the way the reader sees it.

Even if you choose to write in third person, through the eyes of an omniscient narrator, the world will be seen through the eyes of that character. If you think it is ‘only’ you telling the story, think again. You are not nothing. You are not a clear glass. You are a human being with preoccupations and fears and resentments and longings and a life that has shaped you to see and interact with the world in certain ways, so you are going to offer a biased view, no matter how much you wish to be objective. It can only ever be an illusion of objectivity.

Think about telling your best friend about a party you went to. You have an agenda in telling the story to your best friend. You what them to see the events you are describing in a certain way. Maybe you want them to admire, be startled by, be shocked, be amazed, be amused, be a little envious. So you will tell your story to get that result. You will focus on some aspects – a kiss, the fact that someone stole alcohol or drank it, smoked, the fact that there was a gate crasher, the fact that someone slapped someone else, someone cried.  You will drop out other details- the kind of sandwiches the parents supplied, the fact that you were told to behave, the fact that you felt fat in your jeans or dress or were worried about getting food in your braces – you will recreate yourself as a character which you manipulate- give certain words, thoughts, actions, in order to set your audience up to react to the story as you wish. We shape stories in life like this without even thinking about it, to fit our audiences and our desire for them to react in certain ways. If you don’t believe me, try imagining that you are telling the same story to your grandmother- think what might be left out and now included, because you obviously don’t want to frighten or horrify or embarrass your grandmother. Think how you might tell edit that same story when telling it to one of the parents of the kid hosting the party, when they called to find out why their house was trashed. Or to your little brother, or to your mother who is estranged from you. Or how you might write it to a pen friend in another country.

When you tell a story there is always a reason and an agenda, and the character must be shaped to serve that agenda.

Don’t be fooled by the idea that you can step outside of your own humanity and be a truly objective observer. You have a reason for offering your story in a certain way, and you need to figure out what that reason is. Ask yourself what you want to make your reader feel or think or see. What effect do you want to have with your story?  What expression would you want to see on the face of a listener if you were telling this story aloud?

If it is the story of how you fought with your father about going to a party, after he had forbidden it and locked you in your room, how do you want the person you tell to feel about your father?  He may be a real person, but in your story, he is only a character whom you must first bring to life for a reader/listener and then you want your audience to feel something for and about him, and you will reshape him to get that effect. Probably you want your audience to share your sense of anger and injustice, so you will reveal details about him that ensure it. You will ensure that your audience gets your side of things. Or maybe you are telling the story from the point of view of a grown woman sitting at the side of an elderly father’s bed in a hospice where he is dying, and remembering a tempestuous argument you had with him as a teenager, which seemed so very important at the time, and which now feels far away and long ago, and you find you side with the father rather than with your younger self, or at least, understand his point of view now, where you did not then. See how the age and point of view of your character can change the story and its impact?

Try it. Think of a time in life you were really angry with your mother or father, and write the story as vividly as you can, making sure the reader gets your side of things. Remember you cannot tell a reader how to feel about anything in a story. That leaves no room for them to imagine and therefore to connect with your story. You have to give them a reason- details, clues etc, that will make them see a character or situation as you want them to. Then rewrite the story from the point of view of a grown woman in hospital watching that parent lying mortally ill after a heart attack or car accident, having your character remember that same incident.

The amazing, wonderful thing about writing- the BEST thing about writing is that it helps you to think better. You will be amazed how much more you understand about an incident in your own life, if you try this exercise. I call it walking a mile in someone else’s shoes and it lets you see how important character is, how the sort of character you choose as your mouthpiece shapes a story.

If you are writing third person, then you will most likely be following one or a couple of main characters, and they must be well developed too, so that your ‘observer/omniscient author’ character, can make interesting observations about them. But your true protagonist is the person telling the story, no matter how much they try to hide. The important thing, when you are writing third person, is to understand your own motivations very clearly. Why are you writing this story- ask yourself and answer it. Why are you making those things happen? Answer the question. Why are you making your main characters this age or that age? What is your intention – because once you know, you can consciously work to fulfill it.

Writers must be brutally honest with themselves, no matter how they mean to deceive or manipulate their audience. They must understand what they want to do with a story. Only a fool says, but that was how it was. Four people seeing a car accident will see it differently. Only a fool says I am not doing anything with my story but telling it. You MUST have a reason for the telling. You DO have a reason- figure it out.

If you are showing your story from this character’s point of view, or are following a certain character or cast of characters, there is a reason. Know that reason.

Figuring out what you are trying to do is the most important part of brainstorming ad drafting- that is WHY you need to brainstorm and draft – so that you can figure out what it is you are doing WITH THE STORY.

Those of us who write speculative fiction know that better than anyone.

But all writers need to be able to produce the illusion of reality. We can’t assume that our readers are going to accept what we tell them. Indeed if we want them to take in our story, the first step to reaching them is to build a world they can believe. This involves understanding that the world created will be an illusion, not actually a world. Like the street in a movie may not be a true street. It can be a set constructed to look like a street or part of one real street and the end of another in another country. It can be lit to look as if a storm is coming or given sound effects to suggest an army is approaching. It can be set up with props to suggest the distant past or future. In all of these cases, reality is an illusion created by suggestion and a few props. Even if the story happens in a simple ordinary house, your house, say, you must understand that it is still an illusion your story will offer a reader. You will not tell them every detail within the house, or even in a room. If you do try to exactly reproduce your house, I will take a book to tell it faithfully and you will bore your reader to death. They know what a house is. You need only a few things to suggest it, and then a few more things, perhaps only one, to suggest this is a particular house, room, place.

If you are a fantasy or science fiction writer, and wish to set your story in a place that does not exist, and which you have created, it is still an illusion. You cannot wholly recreate the world you have imagined, as some exhausted world builders do, only to discover they have no energy left for writing the story. You cannot be so enamored of your imaginary world that recreating it for an audience becomes more important than the story of their characters. The world is merely the setting for your story, though in some cases, a setting can also be a character. Look at the Australian writer Peter Corris whose detective novels are set in Sydney. In his books, the city is a character. I fell in love with the sentient city of Fork in Billy Thunder and The Nightgate and The Winter Door, and it truly became a character for me. The brilliant British writer, China Mieville makes the city a fabulous, vivid, meaty character in his truly brilliant science fiction fantasy novel Perdido Street Station.  But in all cases, these books do not simply rely on faithfully recreating an imagined world. The writers know they are the background for their stories.

So, how to create an illusionary world that works as a background, whether is a mirroring of the real material world, or the evoking of an entirely imaginary world? The first thing is to know that not everything needs to go in. The wonderful Diana Wynn Jones, who died recently of a long and terrible illness, wrote a marvelous book called The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, in which she mocks the makers of imaginary worlds who force their characters to actually go to and do something in every single place on the imagined map. Since we do not visit every place on the map in the real world, why on earth would be do so in an imaginary world. In reality, we go where our life choices take us, and in an imagined world, we should only see the world through the eyes of the character, which is pursuing the story you have set up for them. The glimpses of world should be vivid and evocative enough that the reader will use each clue or detail to actually recreate your world, whether it be imaginary or based upon material reality, in their own imaginations.

You must always leave room for the reader to imagine.  Let me say that again so you remember it. You must ALWAYS leave ROOM for the reader to imagine. If you tell too much detail, you leave out the gaps that will allow the reader to enter into your story. A few details about a room or a street or whatever our setting is, will work better if the reader is forced to do some of the work for then the setting moves from being your creation to something the reader is invested in. Leaving room means not telling everything. It means choosing what to tell, to evoke the room or space where your story happens. In the first blog in this series, I talked about place, and now I am talking about it again. This is how important it is.

The best way to select the detail that will work on your reader is to be observant and to collect exact detail. By collect, I mean that quite literally. A location scout for a movie will hunt around for the write places to set the story. You can do the same thing with your mental camera. Chances are if you are reading this blog series, you write and that probably means you are a natural observer, even if you write speculative fiction. But even if you are not a natural observer or if you feel you are not very perceptive, you can train yourself to be better.

The best way to train yourself is to practice. The mind is a muscle that can be trained to work better like any muscle in your body. You just need to focus on it and use it.

One great training exercise is what I call Impressionist Writing. This is a very simple and interesting idea which occurred to me after I heard – maybe overheard, now that I think of it- this story about a woman, an artist, who sometimes followed strangers for a little while, observing what they did, and writing it down. Sound a bit too much like a stalker? Well she was certainly an eccentric and of course you don’t have to follow people like an amateur detective to observe them. In fact you would probably get arrested if you tried it. What you can do is to station yourself in a place where a lot of people pass by. Somewhere people might linger for a bit is best – a train station, a bus stop, a café and airport, a school cafeteria, a library, a museum, a zoo, a shopping mall, a movie theatre.  All of those places, incidentally, are places you might go in the course of your own life, and so it would be no big deal to go half an hour earlier to do a little Impressionist writing.

All you need is to sit somewhere alone, with a pen and paper or a little tape recorder or your electronic notepad, and simple observe what is going on around you and write it down. It is not a story but an observation exercise in which you are trying to absorb as much detail of the world as you can, and not it down.  Since you are stationary, people will pass you by, so you will only have a short time to note clothes, mannerisms, snatches of conversation, actions. You will hear drifts of music, a few words; you will read graffiti, book titles, and part of the headline on a newspaper being carried by a man. Do not write in full sentences- this is very important because as soon as you do that, you will not be able to help yourself trying to link things to make a story.

Resist!

Write a list of observations. Be specific. Don’t say a man walks past talking. Tell me what he says. I don’t need all the words or even to understand. A few words will do. The fragmentary nature of the details you note would work brilliantly in a story because they will force a reader to embroider meaning, and once they do that, you have them in your grasp. Write down the things that will be the sort of clues that allow a reader to guess where you are, what time of day it is, what time of week it is. A mall on Christmas Eve will be a totally different place to a mall as seven am on a Sunday. As with the first blog, use your senses and note what they are taking in- the things you smell, see, hear, taste, touch/feel. Take in what will help you to establish place, and what will help you make that place vivid and unexpected in your story. Look for things that seem out of place. And write down the random thoughts you have about people and where you are, write down the snap judgments you make, fairly or unfairly, in the silence of your mind. The guesses and little mental stories you devise without even thinking about it. Do not censor or pretty up your thoughts. Do not make them ideologically sound or clever or deep. Just say it like it is, bluntly- after all you are the only person who is going to read it.

A writer must always be naked and vulnerable in front of himself or herself.

Note down memories that are sparked off by things you see and random thoughts of your real life that intrude- try to write them down exactly as they happen. Resist explaining your thoughts- this is not for a reader, this is an exercise to help you notice what you are noticing and how you are noticing. At the end of the exercise, you will have what will feel like an urban poem- read it out to yourself and relish the detail you have noted down. Relish it, and do it again and again until you do it automatically when you are anywhere alone for more than five minutes. Then do it again.

Despite having written so many books and short stories, I often undertake this exercise myself on a long tram ride. I get on a tram and simply ride it to the end, and then come all the way back.  Sometimes I take it all the way to the other end, and then come back to my original stop.  Occasionally I take my daughter with me- she is thirteen now, but I used to take her when she was eight as well. She would sit a little way from me and make her own observations. I was always enchanted and fascinated by how different her observations were, from three seats ahead on the other side of the tram. And when we observed the same things- and of course we did when something interesting or striking happened, as it invariably did, (the world is full of tiny strange dramas and mysteries- ask Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple) her thoughts and judgments and the memories the event sparks in her are always amazingly different to mine. Maybe you can try it with a friend, so you can compare notes after, but make sure you don’t sit together.

A real writer is a loner- at least when they write.

Isobelle carmody

Think about it.

When you categorizing yourself, what you are actually doing is giving yourself a set of rules that someone has devised for some reason that has nothing to do with the creation of anything. Think about categories – Science Fiction, fantasy, detective thrillers, and horror novels, romance and of course realism. Try writing an outline of each genre for yourself.

You might be thinking about now that realism is not a genre, but that is only because it is dressed up to look like reality. In truth it is no more real than the stuff of a science fiction story- someone made both up. If you invent an old woman at a bus stop who witnesses a car accident, you are still inventing a person who does not exist, giving them thoughts you have come up with, exposing them to an imaginary situation you have devised. Realism is not reality. And even in real life, people see the same things differently, depending on their interest and angle. Your own interests will shape even your interest in an event.

If you are a policeman responsible for unraveling the car accident, you might rather read the report of the car enthusiast and adult who is a keen driver, since he will likely have the best chance of describing physically how the accident happened. If you are the mother of the girl who was hurt, you might be a lot more interested in reading the report of an interview with the inhabitants about what happened prior to the accident. The best report will be the one that serves you. In the same way, readers prefer different approaches to story – different genre- because it suits their interests and preoccupations. I think that is where genre comes in.

Think about each of the genre and try to come up with a list of rules about that genre. Once you have done that, think about how those rules would affect you as a writer. You will swiftly realize that following those rules is like following a recipe or formula, and that is unlikely to lead you anywhere but where the person who invented the formula went. To find an original path as a writer you must avoid formula and recipe.

I read science fiction and fantasy because the best of it looks critically and philosophically at the world I live in and that is what interests me. So it is no surprise that the writing I do often ends up being labeled fantasy. I am fine with that, but I do not impose that category on myself when I am writing. Ever.

Think about the genre you love most and write down why you think you might be attracted to that genre.

I really love good fantasy and I really hate bad fantasy. I really love detective novels and murder mysteries that are clever rather than bloody because I like that feeling of moving towards an inexorable conclusion. I like science fiction if it is about people and not machines, and I never read books about animals because I am too scared something bad will happen to them.

Think about books you like as a reader and why you like them. Please don’t tell me you write but don’t read much, because that is just silly. We learn from other writers- and writers whose work we admire enable us to strive for the best in ourselves. Ursula Le Guin is my shining beacon. I love her stories and I admire the tight clarity of her writing. Reading her makes me write better.

Find a writer that makes you feel like that and always have one of his or her books close by, for solace and inspiration.

As writers, what we want is the point of view and style that allows us best to tell the story we want to tell. For Ursula Le Guin the main character is often a person on another world and sometimes an alien only loosely connected to humanity, because she is all about looking at humanity with a steadfast, critical eye. I want to figure out why people do the things they do- the wondrous, radiant things as well as the terrible atrocities- and I find I can best do that in other or alternative world settings, or by imposing some twist in reality on the characters.

Although I am advising against putting yourself in categories, trying them out can be a great way to find writing tools that work best for you. You might be surprised to find that a story about racism is a lot more powerful because it has a sneaky impact on the audience who don’t realize that is what they reading about because it is happening on another planet.

Read a lot and read a lot of different categories. Don’t judge a book by its category. Judge it by whether it works or not. Do not let yourself be locked in to believing only one sort of writing is legitimate because that will stop you trying something that might allow you to excel. Next time you are stuck, try reading a page of a book you love. Just one page. Then see how it energizes you for your own story.

May the force be with you!

Isobelle Carmody

Ok so we have a Manga head now and we are starting to put everything together, the reason that we are only covering hair at such a late stage in the head is because we need to understand what is under the hair before we draw it on.
I have seen many cases of Manga characters looking odd because there is some misunderstanding of what is under the hair.

This is the kind of thing you see when some basic steps are skipped and the understanding of the head is lost.

This is an exaggerated example but similar things like this happen.
Remember when you are drawing hair you’re not drawing on a flat 2d shape, you are drawing on a 3d shape so you have to think about the surface of the scalp. Think about the way the hair falls onto the head.

Hair should sprout from the surface then drop because of gravity.

Short hair will stick up while long hair will fall.

So with the head you have up we should begin by marking where the crown of the head is. This is the small section on the top of your head that has a circular spiral of hair. We will begin my marking this section in.

So we should be thinking that the hair grows from the surface of the whole head, not just the line that’s used to create the top.

So when we begin to draw the hair make sure that you are drawing above the head line.

If you are having trouble looking up hairstyles a quick Google search should give you a billion results.

When drawing the hair make sure to follow around the scalp.

Draw the hair as large clumps instead of each strand of hair, that doesn’t mean you can’t.

So when you start with the fringe you should draw in the hairline.
Illustrated here

In this particular case the hair sprouts from the hairline, then as it gets heavier starts to fall down the face.

When creating hair try and use tapered lines that are confident in the strokes.

The two major elements that effect hair is Wind and Gravity, it is good to keep these factors in mind when drawing hair. Is it a windy day? Are they in space? Or is it a dry day with no wind?

When attempting to draw hair that is blowing in the wind.

It is nice to add in wind direction lines first. This way you have a clear indication when you start to block in the clumps of hair.

Keep the lines as flowing while remembering that the ends are rooted firmly to the scalp.

And this is an example of gravity. Notice how they flow and drape.

Hair obeys the forces surrounding it especially because hair is light.

A few examples of hair;

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Eyes

Now that you have a rough idea and a bunch of head shapes it is time to start placing the facial features onto the head, we will begin with the eyes.

Study the steps taken to draw this Manga eye.

In the example above the Manga eye is stretched to look more like an oval, it is also possible to achieve a Manga eye from using a circle.

Step 1.

Draw a circle.

Step 2.

You can either draw the iris in early or start drawing in the eyelids.

(When drawing in the eyelids remember to use curved lines. Imagine that the line follows around the eyeball)

Here we have added in a vertical line and a horizontal line to help centre the iris, this comes in handy when we draw from different angles.

Step 3.

Do the same with the bottom eye lid but leave a gap on either side to represent the corners of the eyes.

Step 4.

Now add a smaller line above the top eyelid to represent a fold, this gives the eye greater depth. (fig1)

Notice how there is more lines drawn under the bottom eyelid, by applying these lines the eyes have more character. (fig2)

After you have this shape down you can add in iris, pupil, reflections, lashes and brows. (When drawing lashes try using two lines that connect at one point, do this by flicking your wrist when drawing them in. It will look more natural) (Nicer Lashers Image)

This is just a basic and classical Manga eye, there are plenty of different styles and the same steps can be applied to each. It really comes down to personal taste of which one you like.

Here are a few examples of eyes from different angles but all using the same rules.

Mouth and Nose

[Mouth]

Manga noses and mouths are usually quite simple to draw. The following steps are a quick and fast way to draw both, and they both follow the same basic rule of using a horizontal and vertical line crossing in the centre like so.

To create a mouth draw two points where the corners will be.

Add a small arc in the middle of the vertical line and above the horizontal line, remembering to think about how thick you want your upper lip to be.

Connect the corner of the arc to the corner points and then draw in the bottom of the upper lip.

From here it’s easy to just draw a large curved line to represent the bottom lip. It is a similar shape you would use to draw a bow from a bow and arrow.

You should be able to use this simple rule when drawing lips from multiple angles.
If you are finding it hard to draw it from hard angles you can imagine these lines drawn onto a squashed ball shape like so.

This will help when drawing lips from lower and upper angles.

Once you have finished with this basic lip shape you can draw in some lines that represent the curves of the lip and some highlights like the following.

[Nose]

When beginning the nose it’s very useful to visualise what the basic shape is. So when drawing up a nose you should think of a shape that looks similar to this.

So from a bird’s eye view it should look something like this.

With the understanding of this basic shape you should be able to draw noses from different angles

It’s all just about shifting the peak of the nose when drawing from different angles. Get this basic shape down and you should be able to draw the nose from different angles, it’s just adding the details in after that and you should be done.

When creating the lines for the nose try using curved lines like the following

After you have put these lines in add some shade to the base of the nose

I tend to use a variation when drawing noses and just use the base of the nose.

Or you can just draw in two nostrils and a little arc above them to represent the tip of the nose.

Placement of features on the head.

To position the eyes on a face draw a vertical line through the middle and a horizontal line across the centre of your Manga head that you drew up last week or a new one. Draw a circle in the middle of the lines the size of the eyes you want your character to have, draw a circle on both sides and this should be the starting position of the characters eyes. Divide the bottom half of the head into two and this will establish the nose, and then the bottom section between the nose and chin into two and this will establish the mouth position.

Now apply the eyes, nose and mouth with the rules that you learnt and you should be on your way to having a pretty cool looking Manga face.
While going through these basic steps there were a few minor adjustments that where needed, notice how the eyes have been shifted slightly, this is because the rules learnt are your basic guides and building blocks. You should always be making adjustments till you’re happy with what you have drawn before you get to clean up stage.

This image varies a little from the video because after another close look the eyes looked a little high on the face and the top of the head looked a bit small. So the adjustments made was increase the size of the top of the head and the eyes brought down a little closer to the nose.

That just about covers blog two. Hope to see you in the upcoming week where we will be putting some hair on this baldy.

Now watch the Video

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Part 1 – Place

Most of you will know something about me, even if it is only my name or the name of one of my books, but can I introduce myself more personably with this little short film Penguin made for me.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

As you see from it, I live in a pretty inspiring place in Australia, but in fact that is only half my life.

The other half is in Prague in Eastern Europe. It is this incredible ancient stone city, which sometimes looks like a scene from a traditional fairy story, complete with twisty cobbled streets that looks amazing when snow sifts down over them. There is even a on a hill that shines above the city like a beacon at night and which you reach by traveling along The King’s Road. One of the Kings that inhabited it was, if not mad, then very eccentric. He kept a whole tiny street of houses within the castle grounds which were called the Golden Road, because his pet alchemists lived in the houses there, working away at trying to figure out how to transform lead into gold for him! A black serpentine river flows through the centre of the city and one of the many bridges that crosses it is a fabulous stone bridge with watch towers at either end and great dark looming statues either side that watch you pass.

It is a pretty inspiring place to live, not just because it looks like a fairy tale, but also because it is not a fairy tale city. It is a city where thousands of people live ordinary mundane lives. There are Benetton ads and band posters and bus stop graffiti that sometimes makes the city look like the setting for a punk fairy tale.  I think that is what I love most about it.  That feeling of contrast. Seeing a girl with Goth black fingernails and lips, intent on reading a kindle on the steps of a church that is hundreds and hundreds of years old, unaware that stone gargoyle’s are leering down at her.

I have always been really inspired by contrast- that is to say things that are together which seem not to belong together. The contrast exaggerates the differences between the two things. In Prague it might be the combination of ancient buildings with crumbling stone statues holding up the doorways, daubed with graffiti or Church with a fence where one of the iron spikes has been absorbed by a tree, or it might be that bridge near my home in Apollo bay where if you stand under it and look one way, you see only a sliver of stony grey sand flecked with sea wrack and wild silver sea running away to the horizon but if you look the other way, you see a deep dark, heavily forested fold running away between two steep hills.

The other thing about place is how weather can change it. For instance I often pass through the grounds of Castle Prague at night- you can actually do that here and there is a tram stop on the other side of it that I can reach more quickly walking through the castle grounds than by going around. Sometimes at night in summer when I cut through the grounds, passing the guards in powder blue uniforms at the front gate, whose eyes do no more than flicker to note my passing, I will see a door flung open and get a glimpse of a ball where women in lavish full length gowns dance with men in suits. Another night, I might cut through the cobbled alley alongside the immense and wonderfully gothic St Vitas Cathedral, also within the grounds, and it will be raining hard so I have to duck around narrow torrents of water pouring down from the gaping mouths of the gargoyles (which are actually decorations on the end of the drain pipes). Another night it will be snowing hard and the cobbles are buried under a soft thick pelt of white that swallows all sound while above me the watching gargoyle’s have developed tusks and fangs of ice.

You see how the place is the same and yet simply because the time or the weather change, the mood of the place is very different.

One exercise I love is to write a story about someone doing something, usually thinking about something that just happened or about something he has to do that scares him or makes him angry or happy- in the same place, but at four different times of the year, day of the week, time of day and season.  To be more specific and clear, let’s say you decide your place is going to be the bus stop near your house, and you are going to write about a boy who has had an argument with his mum or dad. All that will happen is that he will sit there thinking about the argument, re running it in his mind, the way you do. First you have it happen on a hot summer Saturday night, then again on a freezing cold winter Sunday morning, another time during a wild spring storm in the middle of the morning and finally at four in the afternoon on a Friday afternoon in Autumn.  You can see that everything the boy would notice around him would be very different and you would have to weave his feelings and thoughts about his surroundings into your story. Try it and see how the different time and season affects the matter in tour story.  Certainly our boy sitting at the bus stop will think different thoughts at midnight. Might he not feel scared or insecure or unhappy to be away from home, or even regret the fight because the lateness and darkness remind him that he is not fully grown? And again, getting wet in a storm, with lightning flashing might make him unhappy about the fight, but he is a lot less likely to feel regret or fear for himself if it is a Saturday morning when he is sitting there, with people all around.

Try it.

Choose a place and a situation where someone is thinking about something they have done or seen, and write four little pieces. There does not have to be a story. Just make it an evocative piece where you try to make the reader feel the place as vividly as you can, and the mood of your character- try making the character a first person narrator. That is, you write from his or her point of view, saying I did this and I did that. This usually makes it a lot easier to get inside your character.

Before you start writing, try imagining how the place might change by thinking about your five senses. What do I see here, what do I smell here, what do I taste etc. Start out by writing a list of those things your senses would take in, to get yourself in the mood. A list is a lot easier than a story. One step is the beginning of a journey, and who knows how far it will take you…