Blending and Shading to Improve Your Manga Drawings.

By Rick Feathers

I wanted to continue shading with blending of colors. Shading is usually reserved to black and white pencil drawings, while blending involves a spectrum of colors.

Blending techniques will vary with the type of media you use to draw your anime art and manga characters. I will illustrate with 3 kinds of media, colored pencils, colored markers or ink and paint.

Before you apply any blending techniques to your manga drawings, you need to first experiment to make sure you get the desired effect you want. If not you may be disappointed or worst, ruined a great drawing.

Colored pencils is one that is the most forgiving. Like regular pencils you shade, erase and add as you need. The thing to remember with colored pencils is that there is a slight oil or wax residue that comes with the colors. Therefore start lightly and work up to a darker shade and blend as you go along. Using a tissue, kneaded eraser, types of smudging pencil or your finger can add to the blending you desire by rubbing the colors together.

Colored markers or ink are bold colors that make their mark because they are permanent and is not easily acceptable to other colors for blending. I learned this technique from an art teacher of mine. The style is called pointalism. It involves placing different colored points next to each other and the mind interprets it as another color or shade of color.

For example, placing red and blue dots together will show up as purple, blue and yellow will show green and by adding black it will make the shade darker. Try this technique using only the primary colors red, blue and yellow. I think you will be surprised.

Paints blend well and by using a brush you can get some pretty smooth combination and unique effects by combining two colors or more. Oil paints and even air brushing, which I consider one of the best blending tool around leaving a wonderful work of art for skin and facial features.

Paints have a way of surprising you because the colors tend to change into a shade of color you may not like then you add more paint to compensate in which the task becomes more than what you bargained for. So it is best to practice and test two colors on a neutral surface before blending and applying it to your anime work.