Off the Rack: Shoujo Art Studio

Random House, though it’s Watson-Guptill Publications imprint, has published a book detailing how to design and make your own Shoujo comics.

Format: Hardcover, 128 pages
Price: $25.99
ISBN: 978-0-8230-9973-3 (0-8230-9973-3)

About the author:
Yishan Li is a professional manga artist living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has been published in the UK. US, France, and Switzerland. With many published books under her belt, Yishan also draws a monthly strip, The Adventures of CG! for CosmoGirl! Her Beijing-based company, Yishan Studio, is made up of a small group of artists who has published many manga titles in the US.

This book is fairly astounding in how it instructs and what the package includes. It is extremely easy to follow and read. But don’t let that fool you into thinking this is your average how-t0-for-dummies package. This book is designed to look good as well as instruct the casual and fairly knowledgeable user in the art of creating manga comics. Plus the name is a bit misleading. Shoujo manga has a rep for being primarily manga for girls but it is actually a genre for slice-of-life stories like Genshiken.

The book starts off with a brief Adobe Photoshop tutorial that gives you enough a more than working knowledge of the application to navigate through the rest of the book’s traning. It’s not entirely comprehensive and you’re not going to pass a Photoshop certification exam but the book gives you more than enough training to modify, color, and build a fully illustrated manga styled comic from start to finish.

The most beneficial aspect of the book is  its accompanying CD catalog of prepared art in layered Photoshop files. From these files, you can combine diferent aspects build your own characters, and objects (like desks, sport equipment, and pretty much anything else you could think of). It also includes backgrounds, several comic panels, word balloons,  and styling effects to fully render your comic. To round out the book, there is a discussion on comic lettering for both character and story dialogue as well as lettering for sound effects.

An unintended use for this book is character creation for manga and anime styled RPGs. Green Ronin has recently published thier Mech and Manga supplement for their Mutants and Masterminds RPG. Shoujo Art Studio has enough depth to create any number of player characters as well as create settings and NPCs for GMs. Two other RPGs you may want to use the Shoujo Art Studio for would be Bounty Head Bebop from Heroic Journey Publishing as well as Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch from Atarashi Games.

The book dictates that you use Win XP or Mac OS X to use the accompanying CD and Photoshop 7 or later . You could, in principle use an earlier version but some of the menus and options might not look like the ones in the book. Also, as a cost-savings alternative to Photoshop, you could use Adobe Photoshop Elements which is about $99. If you don’t have Photoshop and you’re not a student, you really don’t want to know how much a new version of Photoshop is. Just buy Photoshop Elements and smile a lot.

All that said, if you’re a manga fan and thought of making your own comics, you’ll be more than happy with Shoujo Art Studio.

Thank you to Anna Mintz of The Crown Publishing Group/Random House, Inc. for the opportunity to review this book.