TESTING A BIZARRE KID'S HOW-TO-DRAW BOOK [from 15 years ago]

Hey everybody .

It's love in a town .

Some of you may have noticed that I've been a little mi a lately .

I had to move from here to here and it was really crazy .

But the good news is it allowed me to find this old relic .

This is the book that got me into drawing .

So I thought today it would be fun to try and redraw some of my favorite images from it and some of them are pretty crazy .

This book didn't age particularly well .

I thought as a baseline , it'd be good to start with one of the earliest and simplest of the drawings from the book .

This is just called basic manga Girl .

I basically just wanted to establish what kind of style I was going to do these redraws in and I thought a simple sort of like neck up face shot would be a good way to figure that out .

Um This one is actually one of the least bad uh drawings in the entire book .

It's basically fine .

It kind of looks like a Pokemon anime kind of early style retro stuff .

Um I actually kind of like the fact that her hair is like sticking straight up , it's kind of cute .

Um But I would say that her hairline is a real problem figuring out the negative space around the face and the hairline is something that's really hard for any artist .

And it definitely didn't help that .

The out of draw book I was learning from clearly didn't really know how to deal with that either .

I mean , the eyes are so close to the um the hairline both on the top of the head as well as on the side .

Later in the video , you're going to see the real climax of this problem of understanding the head hair and face and how they are proportionally adjusted to each other .

And it's pretty crazy , but honestly , this one isn't even that bad .

Like when you look at the shape of her overall head , it actually seems fine .

I would say her ear seems a little bit low .

But um other than that , it's totally serviceable retro anime style .

Um I will say too that even when I bought this book , this style was pretty out of date .

Um I think because a lot of Americans were getting older anime , like access to older anime much earlier than they were able to get access to modern anime .

Um It informed a lot of like early anime and manga fans to be sort of like lean towards a much older style anime than was actually like current in Japan .

Um something kind of interesting about the differences between people who draw an anime style um from different eras because obviously now , uh we have all these like simul casts and stuff .

So we're seeing anime at the same time as it's being shown in Japan .

But uh yeah , back in the day , it seems like it was really hard to get access to anything that wasn't pretty old , but I'm getting off topic .

So basically I chose the style because I think this was the style that I was wanting to draw in as a kid .

Um Basically , I wanted to do a sort of more realistic mouth and nose closer to sort of like a Naruto style .

And then I wanted to have big Shojo anime eyes and relatively detailed hair .

Now I'm going to move on to the first like real image that I remember actually trying to copy out of this book .

This is the manga Princess .

The things that stand out about this image to me right off the bat is that she has shoulders like a linebacker and then no hips at all .

And then her head is incredibly huge .

Um Like her , her skull underneath her hair is extremely mysterious to me .

I don't understand why her buns start so far away from where her actual head must be unless that's not hair and it actually is her head .

Um In which case , like dang girl , you got a thick head .

But uh I thought this was the coolest .

I , I just really wanted to be able to draw this and I remember being so frustrated because I felt like I couldn't copy it well enough .

Um So the things that I want to try to do today with it are um I want her hair to look more natural and more like the hair do I think he was going for ?

I think they're supposed to be like braids that are coiled up into buns on the side of the head .

Um I'm going to put them up a little higher , not so like Princess Leia straight out just because I feel like it makes it look a little more realistic .

Usually you have to have the gravity help your hair a little bit and not be right on the sides like that .

It would be better to have it sort of positioned over the top of your head .

So it's not pulling so hard .

Um And generally , I just want her hair and clothes to look softer and more like the texture that they probably should be .

Everything is very blocky and hard looking in this book .

Um And it is something that I really had to unlearn and learn how to draw like fabric that looks fabric .

Um It , it took a lot of time honestly .

Um But I also really wanted to focus on the facial expressions of these characters and giving them character a lot of these manga girls in this book and the guys honestly , um , have faces that are very blink like it's hard to tell , um , sort of who they are or what they're really feeling because they just have all the same sort of like triangle happy smile and almost no change in their eyebrows .

Um , so it's really hard to understand what they might be thinking .

I just really wanted to make them feel like characters who might have their own inner life .

Um , I don't know how successful I was , but I , I did try , um , and I thought that this dress was probably supposed to be sort of like more poofy and , um , classical looking .

Fortunately for me , I just watched a movie that was set in the 17 hundreds in France .

So I just used the dress that they were , um , using in that movie as sort of the of that .

And then I copied the colors in a more desaturated color palette for the dress .

Honestly , I think she turned out really cute and I think that my past self would be super impressed that I'm able to draw this , which is fun to go back and sort of remember how hard things used to be , um , sort of appreciate where you're at now and that kind of thing .

I really , really , really remember clearly how frustrating it was to not be able to draw what you wanted .

Um , and it really makes me happy that I stuck with it and kept going all that mushy stuff aside .

I'm also just glad I was able to give this poor girl some hips because she was severely lacking before .

Um , I don't know where that skirt is going but it's like there's , there's nothing there .

She has no pelvis , there's , there's really no way for her , um , proportions to be balanced like that .

So , um , I also just try to generally do some like , nice shading and sort of sculpt out her face a little bit .

Um There's definitely an attempt there at the original one .

you can see these sort of shade lines on the sides of her face and underneath her eyes .

Um but they're pretty faint and they also don't seem to tell you much about her and she doesn't have any blush , which is really strange for an anime girl .

So I made sure to give her some nice cute blush and just some very soft shading in a few other places .

And now for the illustration that inspired this whole video me familiar face , this girl is um maybe my favorite image in this entire book .

And I think even when I first got this book , I thought to myself , man , her hair looks just a little too big .

Um But now that I'm looking at it now as someone who's been drawing for a lot longer , it is super , super funny to me .

Um the fact that in the how to draw section of this they actually show how far away the end of her pigtail is from her skull .

Um is really funny because it's just like , it doesn't make any sense .

Like there's no way that her hair could be doing this even within the realm of manga , which allows for such things as , you know , yu-gi-oh characters and stuff like that .

It's just , it's even broken past those laws .

So in that way , it's really impressive .

Um This was in the section where he was trying to show like movement and sort of like very dynamic stuff .

Um And I think that other than the fact that she has hot dog legs , um and she's sort of like tilted in the air , I think that this pose is still very , very stiff .

So I really wanted to show some more force and impact um on this character and just try to give her a little bit more of that feeling of like something big happening .

Her outfit here is honestly one of the most boring outfits I've ever seen .

It's so clearly just an outfit of like what would be the easiest thing to draw .

That's why her sweater is super tight at the waist and super baggy at the arms because arms are hard to draw the shape of .

And um her skirt is just , I mean , her clothes look like they're all made out of vinyl or rubber or something the way that they're shaded .

And um the fact that her legs don't have a bottom to them just really leads me to believe that like drawing limbs is , is hard , which I know is true .

Um But it's really important when you're drawing a pose like this , that you don't just like completely lop off parts of the character to make it easier to draw because it just makes it look really weird .

Um But this is definitely something I used to do all the time when I was younger , I would be like frustrated with something I was drawing and I would just not draw it .

Um A lot of the times my characters would have crossed arms and so I'd talk both of their hands like somewhere in their tingle of arms so that I wouldn't have to draw their hand .

Um I honestly think it's something that all artists can kind of identify with at one stage of their careers or experiences .

It's just , it's completely universal .

Um I changed up her outfit completely because , yeah , I just didn't think that it was a crucial part of this illustration and of course , I kept her pig tails because they're very iconic .

But um I scaled them down quite a bit .

I actually love characters where hair is like their sort of thing , their big um signature point of their character design , but I just don't think it's really adding anything .

And I also think it's weird that she has all this hair and none of it is being affected by the way that she's jumping .

Like why would you make the hair so prominent and then not actually have it sort of flow in the um angle of which the movement is happening .

Like we even have speed lines showing that she's jumping backwards and her pig tails are both just completely a Kimbo as if she's standing perfectly still .

And of course , that she's been doused with a bucket of hairspray .

Honestly , as much as I'm being hard on the art in this book , I'm still incredibly nostalgic for it and really grateful to the fact that it even exists because it is the thing that got me into drawing .

I honestly don't know if I would have ever uh discovered my love of drawing if I hadn't randomly picked up this book on a road trip and started doodling and trying to follow the um how to draw instructions .

And while I don't think it's the best book for learning how to draw , I'm still really , really glad it exists .

Um And now it's , you know , providing a lot of entertainment to me just because it's so weird looking in some spots .

But yeah , um if you guys ever want to do this as well , please um like tag me on Instagram or Twitter , like going back through old how to drop books , you used to really try to emulate .

Um I think it's really fun and especially when they're super old like this one .

It can be really funny as well .

Thank you to all of my patrons including bald headed potato fellow story .

Best Bragg Upon Lion Proper .

Construct Joe Doctor Casket , Larry Louie Gray , the animator Griffiths ice cream pal , Yvon Rodriguez J JJ Joseph Co Marina Costa Mic Dach Mr Doctor Pence Nicolette Queen uh nor Corniel Ruin Rain Crow , some mediocre artist , the artsy mousse throat foam X AM and .