Leather-jacket GIRL progresses from rough to color

Here's a scan of a cover illo (circa 2000) intended to show different stages of artwork in progress, from blue-penciled rough to pencils to inks to finished colors (as ably rendered by ).

This cover is from one of the How To Draw Manga books that Antarctic Press released back in the day. For the record, I would never presume to tell anyone how to draw manga per se as, well, I don't technically draw manga as such; all I would say is that my artwork is manga-influenced, and leave it at that. Howeva, "How To Draw Comics With A Manga-Influenced Flava" doesn't make for a very striking title, does it?

Then again, the title could be watered down even further, as I've never really done a serious "How to Draw" feature, nor am I ever likely to.* Alas, "Hey, Here are Some Random Art Techniques That A Primarily Manga-Influenced Artist (That Is, Me) Happens To Use" would be too cumbersome a title to use.

Anyhoo, I'd done a lengthy interview with the great that covered a whole bunch of art-technique issues; excerpts from that piece were patched together with some random artwork of mine, and the results saw print in the How To Draw Manga books.

Side Note: Is there some reason why deviantART doesn't have a subcategory for "covers" under the "comics" heading? (Along with pages, strips, etc.) Given how frequently that comics pros post cover illustrations here, that would be pretty damn handy...

_{*Even the old "Basic Training" piece I did for Wizard magazine [link] was more about analysis and presenting different artists' approaches than a straight-up "How To" dealie.}