A New Type Of Art For Me (Part 2)

A couple of weeks ago, I shared my experience on Twitter learning how to draw manga (which is a Japanese art style) with some wonderful people. Here is a link to it if you want to check it out. Anyways, I already explained that learning manga was part of a project at our school, Genius Hour. In Tech class, we take one period every eight periods and work on whatever we want, and at the end, we have to present it. I chose manga drawing, as you may have figured, and now that we have completed the project, I can explain to you guys what happened before and during the project. Let’s get into it.

Let’s start with the part where I chose manga. As you guys may know, I am a huge fan of most things Japanese, and especially manga and anime. I know I’m a weeb. Anyways, I really love reading this manga called Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic. If you want to check out its wikia page here it is. I really recommend it. Just when I stared getting into Magi, I wanted to draw the characters. I could not do that without knowing the basics of manga, and I had too much work to just st down and research on manga. I decided to make it my Genius Hour project so that I could learn to draw, and work at the same time. That’s how I picked my topic to present on.

Then comes the learning. In class I would do some research on how to draw manga and then draw a little from reference. Then at home, I would start drawing to the point where my hand hurt. Everything I learned came from these two websites: Manga Tutorials and Naschi‘s Learn Manga Tutorials on DeviantArt. I would love just to publicly say thank you to the people that operate those websites. So thank you. Apart from those websites, I also got help on Twitter. I explained more about that in my first blog post on this topic. It is the first link in this post. Anyways, the people who helped me on twitter are @BlckMangaArtist, @Musiriam, @kmccaigue, @Hannarrawr, and @WhytManga. They are incredible people and are all really nice, and you should definitely check them out.

This experience really changed my point of view on most people, especially artists. I though that all artists were just stuck up, bad people that only cared about themselves, but the ones that I’ve met were incredibly nice, and they definitely changed my point of view on artists. I actually really learned a lot about how to draw and about people. I realized that not all skill was given and that you had to work to learn some things in life, because most things that I had tried had been easy for me to do naturally. This was not. I had to try really hard to do this.

In our class, we have to do three of these Genius Hour projects, and the last one that we are about to start must impact the world in some way. I know html and I am learning some css (both coding languages used for websites), so I thought that I could make a website to raise awareness about a problem in the world, and I didn’t have any ideas of what I cold raise awareness for. I wanted to know if any of you guys had any ideas of what problem I could try to make the world more aware of. Anyways that is going to have to do it for this post. I just wanted to say a final thank you to everyone that I mentioned earlier, and bye guys. Wait before I leave, just admire some of Naschi‘s images from DeviantArt. Ok bye for real now.