Alex Heizer

Working on a new page of @CaptiveManga for #mangamonday!

Tip for learning artists #3: when at the store buying drafting tape (see tip #2) invest in an eraser shield.

An eraser shield is a very thin piece of metal about the size of a credit card. It has holes and strips cut out of it which allow you to erase a very small area without affecting everything around it.

Basically, you place the shield onto your paper with the detail you want to erase showing through a hole in the shield and erase right over it. The shield will protect everything not exposed in the hole.

Tip for learning artists #2: When working on a page, cover the areas you aren’t currently working on with paper. This will keep them clean and smudge-free as you move your hand and arm across the page. Cover both finished areas and to-be-drawn areas.

Use any clean paper, including stuff you would otherwise recycle. To be able to reference covered characters, objects or poses, choose tracing paper. For the most economical setup, use copy paper for most of it and be selective with the more expensive tracing paper. And, of course, reuse your paper as much as possible.

For taping the paper down use drafting tape, not masking tape or clear plastic tape. Drafting tape is specifically made to be lower tack than other kinds of tape for temporarily holding down paper while drafting. Masking tape can rip paper while removing it but drafting tape is designed to not rip professional papers like comic/manga boards, marker paper, watercolor paper, etc.

Also, based on comments by Twitter user @Nattosoup, I’d like to point out that this tip works best when you’re done with the composition, layout and rough draft phase. I’m a big believer in working from large to small so you should compose the entire page at once, then lay out the panels and refine the placement of figures and objects across the entire page, then do a rough rendering of all of the figures and objects while being able to view all of them at the same time on the page. Once you have all of the rough drawings, covering what you aren’t immediately working on will allow you to take your time on each individual panel or object. Once you’re done with the final pencils, take off all the coverings and reconsider the page as a whole to make sure it still looks as you first envisioned it!

Tip for learning artists: all figures should begin with a strong gesture drawing, followed by loose roughs. It’s at this stage you can make edits and refine the characters and poses with the least amount of trouble. For example, in this pose I chose to completely reversed the positions of the legs, improving the power of the scene completely.