Hello hello my fellow art nerds and welcome back to another not quite speedpaint.
Today I'll be redrawing a panel from one of my favorite mangas, Fullmetal Alchemist.
Fullmetal Alchemist is probably my all-time favorite manga for its phenomenal story and
lovable three-dimensional characters which are two things that I look for the most when it
comes to any kind of story, but I don't want to keep you here for too long so let's get arting.
To start off, especially when doing a study or a redraw, I kept my canvas completely zoomed out and
sketched in only the largest forms first to really lay down the shapes that I needed. Focusing on
large details first and not worrying about my new details straight from the beginning allows you to
focus on the bigger picture first. Where does this go? Where does that go? How does the composition
look as a whole etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Now this doesn't only go for redraws, this goes for
every art piece. Yes it's good to have detail, but more likely than not, 99% of the people
that look at your work will glance at it briefly and then look at the whole thing. There's a very
small chance that someone will actually stare at it for a good long while and zoom into it.
Focusing more on the big picture is what's truly important because it's what the vast majority of
the audience is looking at anyway. It'll also save you a lot of time and energy and it will quicken
your workflow. The footage that you're looking at right now was actually recorded live from
two of my classes where manga panel redraws were the lesson that I taught. This particular one is
from Cartooning and Anime 2, but I did teach this two other times. It was a two part lessons so I
drew the sketch for one class and lined and shaded the rest for the next class. Each of our classes
are approximately an hour and a half long so in total this whole redraw took me about three hours.
I'd say if you'll believe it, this was the easiest panel I chose to do because I taught this lesson
three times. This was for the easier Cartooning and Anime. So this is Cartooning and Anime 2,
the other two were for Cartooning and Anime 3. The other two times were for older students and
I chose panels from the manga One Punch Man. I wasn't even able to finish those in the three
hours because they were intensely difficult, but like I told my students, they didn't have
to choose anything nearly as tricky as these, I just like to give myself intense challenges.
The students that know me a little bit better, it's like a running joke, it's like if I'm doing
anything that I can teach them with then I'm probably going to choose the hardest option
just because I think it's more fun, but I always tell them you don't have to do this.
It's just me being me. Another thing that I told my students was that what we were doing
in class was something called a study. A lot of professional artists do it either with photos
or other pieces by master artists where they'll essentially copy what they see in order to learn
the difference between copying and doing a study is that studies are purely for learning purposes,
nothing else. When you study a photo, more likely than not you're studying lighting or
materials or proportions or something realism based in nature because photos can't be wrong.
If you're looking at a photo of a teacup say in light, I've seen that studied a couple times then
you're looking at an actual photo of how water behaves or liquid behaves under the light so it
obviously it's going to be 100% accurate. Studying off of that will give you the best results.
When you're studying another artist's work you're most likely studying their techniques or their
compositions. This is where master studies come into play where an artist will copy a work by a
master artist to learn from their techniques. More often than not, these are done with historical
artists but in this case we're taking modern master artists and learning from their techniques
when it comes to lining like a manga artist. More often than not, their lines are quite thin and
clean, and very detailed. So keeping that in mind while I lined, I had my smoothing set super super
high it's called smoothing in photoshop and other programs it's called other things so in MediBang,
I know it's called correction, in Clip Studio Paint, I think it's called stabilization.
All that really does is it lags your brush behind just a little bit so it smooths out
all of your handshake and whatnot. The higher it goes, the higher it smooths out. But it's the
higher it goes, the harder it is also to control so it takes a bit of time to get used to for my
own line work. A lot of the time I like to keep my lines pretty thick but also super clean so the
cleanliness wasn't really an issue on my end. It was mostly the thin nature of the line mark that
threw me for a loop even during the lining phase. I'm still constantly referring back and forth to
the panel reference to make sure that I'm getting positioning as close as I can to the original.
I was doing this whole thing on my own more likely than not I'd be doing every single little piece of
machinery that you could see in there but I did have to keep the sketch in the lines to an hour
and a half each and with this one I was determined to finish it within that amount of time. There
was no way that I was gonna leave all three of the demos for this week unfinished. I had to finish at
least one this. Kind of brings me to my next point that eventually a lot of artists have to learn
good enough is better than perfect good enough is better than perfect and I don't mean that
you should slack off and all of your work is good enough and pass it off that way, no,
I mean that you should work as hard as you can, but don't let it take you over at one point after
you work on something for ages. You gotta say this is the best I can do and if I work on it
any longer I'm just going to be wasting time and I'm going to drive myself insane for no necessary
reason, especially for perfectionists. This is a hard ideal to let go of, but especially if
you're working in a business where speed is super necessary, it's vital that you learn to let it go.
And with that, that's the manga panel redraw complete. This was definitely one of my favorite
lessons to teach solely because I really got to challenge myself when it came to studying these
panels. I don't really do studies in my free time so this is a good learning experience. If
you liked what you saw, make sure to leave a like on this video, comment down below and tell me what
you'd like to see me draw next, and hit subscribe so that you never miss an upload! Join our little
art community with the links down below. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. Buh-bye!