Studing manga in Japan - Manga making process

 (Warning for awful picture quality in this post..)

I've been very busy lately and I still am but I have been drawing for 6 hours today and my hand hurts, I need a break. So I decided to make this post giving an attempt at explaining how a manga is made (atleast this is the process at my school).

When I decided to study manga I didn't even know what I was going to study! I had no idea how a manga was made, so everything was new for me starting the school I am have now been attending for almost a year.

Right now I am drawing my second manga of the year, it is a 28 page story and an adaptation of a manga I draw many years ago! It's actually my third adaption of the same manga, so in another post I just want to show you my improvement by uploading some pages from all 3 different versions, lol!

Anyway, let's get to it.

When you have an idea for what you wanna write/draw you draw a rough draft a "Neemu" that you then show to the teacher. If the teacher says it's ok, you can continue on to drawing the real thing on a big, thick paper called "manga you genkouyoushi" (google translate said genkouyoushi is called manusscript paper in English, but these papers are specially made to be used for comics etc).
Most of the time though, the teacher will give you a lot of pointers and have you change the story a bit before you are allowed to continue.
Some people start with just a written "script" that they show the teacher before they make a neemu.

That way if the teacher doesn't like your story, you don't have to redraw anything you rewrite it a bit and then move on to drawing.


 This was my neemu, last pg                                      This is the same page on the genkou

(Click on the pics to make them bigger)





On the genkouyoushi you draw your final draft in pencil and then show it to the teacher, who will tell you what to correct. After correcting everything you show it to the teacher once more and if they say that it's okey you can continue on to inking and putting on tones.

Page I inked (not done yet tho)

For inking you use dip pens with black ink. There are several different types of pen tips you can use, some of the common ones are: Marupen, G-Pen, Sajipen, Tamapen, etc. They are all good for different things. Marupen, for example, for drawing thin lines, and G-pen for really thick ones.

Big one: Tamapen, Small: Marupen

There are lots of other things that you will need aswell, like white color and brushes to use with it (forgot to include it in picture), white to cover mistakes, a "brush pen" to color big areas black, blue pencil if you dont want to make your genkou dirty, cutter to cut tones, "French curve" ruler, etc.

After you are done inking and making everything you want to be black black, its time to put on tones to get the different types of grey. Tones are pretty expensive, one paper is about 280 yen if it's cheap!
It's this thin seethrough paper(?) that you can cut out and plaster onto your manga pages as you please.

Some of my half-used tones

When you have inked everything and put on all the tones, you again show it to the teacher and if it gets an ok you go copy that manga and on the copies you glue the text on that you wrote on your computer using Adobe Illustator (atleast that's what we did) and printed out, in the speech bubbles, headlines etc. You also have to draw the "tonbo" (register marks??) on each page to the people who print it will know where it should be cut.

A page from my last manga (aka my first real no ever), inked and with tones

Done! Finally! Yes! That took forever (srsly it might seem easy now to draw manga but it takes a long time)!

Give that shit to the teacher and get it published in the school manga! In real life you send it in to a publisher to get it published in a magazine like Shonen Jump, Ribbon or w.e if you are lucky.

That's it! Well, I hope you learned a little bit about manga making from this! (If not.. I need to do something else with my life) Cya!