Doodletopia: Manga: Draw, Design, and Color Your Own Super-Cute Manga Characters and More (Includes Bonus Manga Crafts and Cut-Outs) by Christopher Hart

An interactive doodle book from the best-selling art instruction author and cartoon master that pairs illustrating insights with drawing, designing, coloring, and crafting activities for aspiring manga artists.

For years, Christopher Hart has given readers the tools and techniques needed to learn how to draw and cartoon. With the Doodletopia series, Hart offers his readers a chance to practice and perfect their artistic skills. Filled with page after page of chibi, kawaii, and shoujo characters, Doodletopia: Manga provides aspiring manga artists with activities to stimulate their creativity. After covering the basics of rendering cute manga characters, Hart sets readers loose to interact with the book's many exercises and challenges, including sections where readers can draw a companion for an already drawn character, create their own emojis, and complete their own scenes. Readers can design manga bookmarks, stationery, and even get started developing their own manga graphic novels. Pairing the informative content for which Hart is beloved with myriad opportunities for creative expression, Doodletopia: Manga offers aspiring artists the next level of interactive art instruction.


About the Author

I started drawing character designs for a small animation studio in San Diego, California, when I was still in High School in Los Angeles. I used to drive 136 miles, each way, on the weekends, when I was 16, just for the opportunity to get paid to draw. Cartooning was a magical experience to me.

I graduated from High School, and attended the character animation program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. At Cal-Arts, we had to do a lot of intense animation, which I found tedious. I was more interested in character design, and story, rather than drawing twelve poses to create one second of movement. It wasn't for me.

So I left and enrolled in, and graduating from, New York University. The social scene at Valencia consisted of a sandwich shop, where you could buy a magazine, if you got there early enough. New York city had slightly more to offer.

After I graduated, I worked as a staff writer on several NBC prime-time, comedy-variety television shows. I also wrote for 20th Century Fox, MGM-Pathe', The Showtime Cable TV Network and Paramount Pictures. But then the Writer's Guild went on strike. Writers in Hollywood weren't allowed to work for TV or the screen. So I went back to my cartooning roots. And I began writing for the Blondie comic strip, and began contributing regularly to Mad Magazine, and did some cartooning for magazines.

My cartoon work got noticed by Watson-Guptill, a premier publisher of art books. They asked me to do a book for them on drawing cartoons. They had never done that before. The result was 'How to Draw Cartoons for Comic Strips,' and it sold briskly. They asked me to do another, and then another. Well, I've sold over 3 million books domestically since then, have 19 translations, and I'm still at it.

My Review

My boys are always talking about and getting me to spring for new manga comic books. When I saw this Doodletopia Manga book I knew this would be right up their alley.
Now I’ve looked at these books that they read from the back to the front, and saw the darling characters, and now they can doodle to their hearts content.
This is a book that won’t leave the pictures half done; from beginning to end help is here.
Contents:
1. Finish the Heads and Faces
2. Make Hilarious Expressions with Silly Selfies
3. Draw Your Own Versions of Manga Characters
4. Dress the Chibis from Around the World
5. Draw the Super-Cute Animals
6. Add a Team Leader
7. Have Fun with Emoticons
8. Stuff the Pages with Doodles
9. Master the Manga Mazes
10. Complete the Scenes
11. Create Manga Crafts

What a fun book to get for yourself, or an excellent gift for that special someone.

I received this book through Blogging For Books, and was not required to give a positive review.