[Takuma Terashima’s Illustration Literacy #4] Assignment from Mangaka Shirow Miwa - Drawing an Original Illustration!

Drawings that are cool. It’s why I emphasize the silhouette whenever I draw a person. No matter what style or genre, I think conveying what you think might be awesome makes for a good drawing. That’s my mindset whenever I draw.

There are a lot of times after seeing a photo or watching a movie when I think, “This is a nice pose.” Especially for movies, I can visualize some good scenes as animations. My advice would be just to see and watch lots of things for inspiration.

- Are there any tricks when you personify?

The key is to draw out the essential elements of the desire theme. Not only capturing the outwardly visible elements of the reference model, but also taking into consideration intangibles like the history, biography and reputation of the person when drawing them. Like if you were anthropomorphizing a machine that was poorly handled, you would give it a slight distrust of people, or something like that.

I would say the things that draw out my own interests.I heard you like active girls. And you emphasized that you like girls who look good in short hair or ponytail with leggings, and their underarm…. (*You can see the detail in KIKI’s video)

Then you want to go from liking those features and raise it to a fetish level. If you have trouble with it, then you can use works of other people as a reference.

You can draw however it fits on the sheet when drawing on paper, but I guess it’s difficult with digital--the image might look or turn out different on a monitor or printed out.

Let’s go with B5 size at 400 dpi for now. It’s tricky to draw small and magnify, but the reverse is much simpler.

For a rough sketch, a broad brush size is easy to work with. The purpose of roughs are to focus and lay down borderlines for the ideal drawing, after all.

I would keep it the same. Again, it’s simpler to work with. It might differ depending on what you’re actually drawing. You would use what you’re used to.

For that, the only thing you can do is draw it out first, step back and see if it’s right, and fix it if it’s not... and repeat. With digital, you can use a resizing tool, so that speeds up the process.

With illustrations, there is always some level of deformation involved, but it is hard to know what to emphasize and what to downplay when you don’t first have a grasp on drawing.

Ideally, you would practice drawing a real life model, but, even without that, you can get better by using photographs as a reference. It’ll give you an idea of how the body is shaped.

Hmm, I would probably say the layout of the muscles. A person’s arm isn’t just muscles attached to bones, but structured by bones wrapped around connections of muscles. Having an understanding of muscular structure will have a very positive effect on your drawings.

Long, smooth strokes with your hand are important. How your arm moves to match your hand, as well as how you grab your pen, are all different from person to person, so you need to find what works for you. 

If you spend some time thinking about your arm and hand joint movements, you might come up with a way to make your pen move more comfortable.

You should try drawing down to the fine details. If it complicates the picture or if some areas look too cramped, just erase as needed. Illustration is about getting a feel for what to emphasize or not.