A couple weeks back I attended a free workshop at my local library entitled ‘Multicultural Manga Workshop’. What this really means I’ll never know I think, but I’m under the impression that they needed a good excuse to do a comic workshop with the fantastic James Parsons from CrazyComicClub.co.uk. As it was Black History Month James did his best to begin the workshop with a talk about comics that feature black superheroes. After this discussion the verdict we reached is…there aren’t enough. So if you’re a comic creator and you’re thinking of a good idea for a superhero, consider it 
For some reason I didn’t really think that the workshop was going to involve me having to draw anything but I showed up with my pencil anyway and James actually gave each participant a whopping huge A3 page to sketch on! I was petrified! To be honest the biggest page I ever sketch on is A5 in my little sketchbook from WHSmith. Well, here’s the result…
This took about an hour so I didn’t really have time to do the lineart. I went to the highstreet afterward to buy myself a paintbrush though so I may well try doing it later! James had some great advice whilst I was working on this. I’ve definitely improved in my ability to connect the head and neck in the right place, she has a little more strength to her pose which gives it a better sense of weight and gravity and one great tip was to leave her right hand blurry to give the image a sense of movement!
As you can see, I still need to complete the shoes and some guitar details, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to colour this in. Oh and as a side note, that guitar is an Ibanez DTX Destroyer. I have a habit of giving my characters clothes/accessories that I own in real life lol (it’s my favourite guitar and not even the most expensive one…).
Apologies for the scan quality, I actually took a picture of it on my iPhone and the brightness on the camera is awful. I’m sure that after the iPhone software update the camera has got even worse…
All in all a great workshop! Really fantastic that the library did it for free too! It’s a good month for manga in general as the MCM Expo is being held at the Excel centre in London on Oct. 29 – 31st. Saturday and Sunday are the main ‘Comic Village’ days but I’ll be heading down to check out the video games stands and offer my music composition services! Tweet/email/comment me if you’d like to meet up there at the Expo!
- Christopher
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