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!

illuminate me with your illumination!

Crazy gacha in Japan

Gacha! You put in your coins and turn the lever and out comes this little ball which you might have to smash just to get to whatever is inside.
I Saw all these gacha at yodobashi kamera, and there were a lot of weird ones! Took pics of the most interesting ones, and some so uninteresting I wonder how it's even allowed to be sold.

Now this one was interesting simply because it is so uninteresting. It's friggin plastic grass! Who would buy this?!

It says that this is the obachan (aunt, lady) of Osaka. So I guess if you come to Osaka you will see these types of slightly older ladies haha.

These are very popular it seems. I have seen many different versions of this girl crushed(?) under a glass.

And this is... a sausage? I don't even know.

It says that this is: "Cool Dog" but to me it just looks ugly. Also saw a big statue of this "cool dog" in a mall...

Tiny trash can! (Because why not!)

Cats as various things (which seems to be a popular gacha theme)

Girls as sushi!

It says that it's for people who love baseball. A super tiny arena..

I really don't know what this is

At first glance this one might look normal but check the character to the far right X_X
I have seen this before! Where they have all the normal characters but then there is one rly ugly/funny that atleast I don't want that I will of course get if I put in the money!!

Behold all the banana animals that will come! z_z I never thought you could make bananas cute but Japan has proven anything is possible!
This is a grilled banana parrot!

This is a mushroom parrot! x_x

This is a ghost banana

And this was just an ugly banana

This is just a bananapeel yet it's like the cutest thing you have ever seen! WTF

Halloween 2015

I love Halloween in Japan! :) (Photos taken by a friend but I was standing right next to them most of the time so I saw the same things ^^)
I wish we could have walked around on the streets a lot longer, like we did last year, cuz that's where things are going on! So many weird costumes, cars, etc (like flame throwers!). But our group had plans to meet up and go to a bar, and I just followed the flow so this year I didn't see as much as last year.
After the bar we went to karaoke, and stayed til 5 in the morning.

Random person with scary Halloween make and gigant gun

So many bikers in kigurumi

Red limousine o.o

Scary clown and cat woman(?) doing illegal stuff haha

Yes, fire thrower, right in front of us

Small things about Japan I could not forsee

Before coming to Japan I did a lot of research about the country, so as to not have as much of a culture shock experience I guess.
But the things I researched about were big things, like for example, gender equality, school system, work life etc. I didn't even think about doing research about small things that might seem insignificant, but that might still affect you in some way.
Anyway, I made a list of some of the things:

1. The heat! - I knew Japan would be hotter than Sweden but I thought I would be allright. I was wrong! I did not think about the humidity here, which seems to always be very high, and it makes everything feel several times hotter than it is. In the summer you just have to stand outside for about 2 minutes and you will be drenched in sweat (or atleast I am, lol).

2. Cheese - Japan has no real cheese! Atleast you wont find it in any of your common grocery stores. What they have is this pre-sliced very bad excuse for a cheese. It doesn't taste nor smell like cheese. If you melt it in the microwave it will look like melted plastic, which is probably what it is, cuz it aint cheese! I've tried to find cheese online, but so far I've only been able to find Gouda, which is not that great but 1000 times better than the pre-sliced plastic.

3. Bread - (Yea, there will be a lot about food) They don't have "dark" bread in Japan (full grain bread etc). The only bread they have are these white square toasts which suck ass. Don't ever wanna eat toast again thanks to Japan. Sometimes you can find sorta home baked style bread but it's never full grain, the packages are very small (like 3 pieces in one pack), and kinda expensive.
Thanks to this I've been trying to make my own bread, but it hasn't gone that well so far, lol.

4. Fruit is too expensive! - There are not a lot of fruit options here compared to Sweden, and the prices are sky high, so, wtf!

5. Vegetables are flippin small! - The cucumbers in Sweden look like they're on steroids if you compare them to Japanese ones.

6. Gendered toilets - Maybe this is normal in most countries but not in Sweden. So I was very surprised about the fact that the toilets are ALWAYS separated by gender. Meh.

7. Square cars - I thought Japan exported all their cars, but I was dead wrong because I've never seen these square types of cars in any other country. Here you can see them everywhere.
They are small and slim, incase you couldn't see that.





8. Houses have no gardens - sucks.


 
9. Bikes hold 2 kids at a time - and the kids almost never wear helmets.









10. Umbrellas on bikes - They have contraptions on their bikes to hold the umbrella for a rainy day! It's actuallt illegal but no one cares.





11. Umbrellas for the sun - I've talked about this before but people here use umbrellas to cover from the sun. Some people are so paranoid that they use the umbrellas when there is neither sun nor rain.

12. Cakes/coffeebread aren't that good. I basically don't order dessert anymore because I probably wont like it anyway.