Techniques for Drawing Female Manga Characters

A volume from Graphic-sha's How to Draw Manga series, this instructional manual by Hikaru Hayashi sets out the conventions for drawing female figures in Japanese comics.

Published in Tokyo in 2000 as volume 20 of the English-language series, the book moves from proportion, posture and facial construction to clothing, hair and expression, each lesson built from clean line drawings intended to be copied and adapted. Hayashi frames manga sketching as a matter of selecting and controlling information: deciding what a figure needs to communicate and how much detail carries it. The examples reproduce the bishōjo idiom of late-1990s commercial manga, with its large eyes, simplified anatomy and exaggerated poses.

The How to Draw Manga series, produced by Graphic-sha with the Society for the Study of Manga Techniques, was the first sustained attempt to export Japanese comics pedagogy to English-speaking readers, and its volumes circulated widely among Western art students and fan artists in the years before manga became a mainstream publishing category. The book is held here as a document of that transmission and of the visual codes it standardised.