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What do you think of when you hear Manga? I think of fun, comics, and large-eyed, cute characters. The Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga by Christopher Hart has all of that. The book is an instruction book for kids on how to draw Manga, with step-by-step instructions. The book offers a lot of fun, even while teaching–encouraging imagination, creativity, fine motor coordination, and developing self-confidence. I think it will especially appeal to any creative types; to anyone who enjoys cartoons, manga, or drawing; and to parents who want their children to use their minds while having fun, not just placidly sitting in front of a TV or playing video games.

Xtreme Art: Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga

written and illustrated by Christopher Hart
Watson-Guptill/Random House (June 2009), ISBN-13: 978-0823098064
Ages: 9-12 and up

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

For eager dive-in readers, Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga provides almost instant gratification, with each character drawing divided up into 4 step-by-step drawings on the left hand page, and the final drawing on the right hand page. For readers who want to hone their drawing skills and understanding of drawing a magna form, there are detailed written instructions teaching each part of the process–how to draw a face in different directions, how to draw hands, eyes, hair, and more.

The book text is encouraging and easy to follow, reminding readers that they don’t have to get it perfect on the first try, and that they can start out with light lines (including guidelines), and then erase the lines they don’t need at the end, going over others to make them darker. These are important techniques for any budding artist to learn.

The step-by-step drawings make it particularly easy to learn to draw a character–the reader can either trace or draw step one, and each new step is shown in orange lines in the following three steps. The book starts with characters that are easier to draw, and gradually gets a little more complicated.

The book is broken up into three major sections–drawing people commonly found in manga (including those with superpowers); drawing chibi-style characters (short, round, like younger children), and drawing manga monsters. It’s like getting three manga-drawing technique books in one.

The book doesn’t “just” teach a reader how to draw manga; it will also teach a young artist that the placement of eyes, nose, and mouth on a face changes according to how the head is situated (looking up, down, sideways, straight on); some awareness of anatomy; etc. This book should involve a young reader for hours; it looks like a LOT of fun. Recommended!

As part of the run-up to my new book, 'Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle', I thought I'd share this fun little step by step animation.

This image is built from layers in Photoshop. With the magic of digital technology, these layers can be transformed into an animation of sorts.

The original drawing forms the basic structure... while the layers add depth, color, type, background and shadows. It's sort of hypnotic to watch as the layers click together...

Photoshop can be useful in adjusting the elements... without some of the drawbacks of real paints.

The title of my new book is 'Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle'. It's a fantastic true story about a boy named Cromwell Dixon, who was known in the newspapers a century ago as America's 'Boy Aeronaut'.

He had a dream to build his own flying airship in Columbus, Ohio in 1907... and this is a book about how his dream came true.

This is a real boy's book... with imagination, daring, adventure, danger and amazing inventions... all built by a boy in his own backyard.

That was always one of my favorite boyhood things to do... build amazing new contraptions out in the backyard.

I recently had a book turned down at a trade publisher, after serious consideration and a revision. Part of the reasoning was that they found the dummy sketches to be very charming but not so much with my finished art. I'm dabbling with a new illustration and I'm starting to see what they mean. The rough illustration below shows the rough pencil line AND the cleaned up version. I clean up my line work to the point where it is a bit lifeless and has lost a bit of its 'edginess'. Which do you prefer??


I am going to try and trust myself a bit more and not worry so much about making mistakes. Stay tuned for the finished illustration.

-Andy

The official announcement has been made over here, at the Cybils blog. You can find the remaining short lists up today, too, including Nonfiction Picture Books, one of our family's favorite categories.

In alphabetical order:

Marie Curie (volume 4 in the Giants of Science series) by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Boris Kulikov; Krull's Isaac Newton made it to last year's short list
Viking Juvenile

The Periodic Table: Elements With Style! created (and illustrated) by (Simon) Basher, written by Adrian Dingle
Kingfisher

Smart-Opedia: The Amazing Book About Everything, translated by Eve Drobot
Maple Tree Press

Tasting the Sky: a Palestinian Childhood by Ibtisam Barakat
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion (from the Scientists in the Field series) by Loree Griffin Burns
Houghton Mifflin

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sís
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Who Was First?: Discovering the Americas by Russell Freedman (whose Freedom Walkers won this category last year)
Clarion

Getting down to brass tacks now is the Judging Panel, comprised of

Tracy Chrenka at Talking in the Library
Emily Mitchell at Emily Reads
Camille Powell at Book Moot
Alice Herold at Big A little a
Jennie Rothschild at Biblio File

* * *

It was a wild ride. Five panelists, one newborn baby, a couple of holidays over several months, and 45 nominated children's nonfiction books published in 2007 -- on the subjects of history, science, mathematics, reference, biography, memoirs, humor, how to, essays, popular culture, music, and more. Much more.

What an absolute delight to work on the MG/YA nonfiction nominating panel alongside Susan at Chicken Spaghetti, Vivian at HipWriterMama, Mindy at Proper Noun Dot Net, and KT at Worth the Trip, all under the leadership of master wrangler and organizer Jen Robinson. The other panelists made the job of distilling the 45 nominated titles down to seven as easy as possible under the circumstances, and I continue to be amazed at how smoothly our negotiations and jockeyings went. Thank you each, thank you all for several marvelous months.

While we had a fraction of the books some of the other panels had to read (though more than I had to deal with last year on the poetry panel), our hunting and gathering skills were put to work tracking down titles for which review copies weren't furnished. So I'd also like to thank the patient and quick-working libraries in our system that sped books to me, often shortly after processing. And lastly, a big thanks to my kids, who put up with a good deal of questioning, poking, and prodding about what they liked and didn't about the the books they read, with and without me.

And special thanks, again, to Anne Boles Levy and Kelly Herold for coming up with the idea of the Cybils and organizing everything.

One of the reasons I wanted to serve on this particular panel is that for our family, and so many other home school families we know, high quality nonfiction titles are the backbone of our curricula, as well as our some of our children's favorite free-time reading. I wanted, through the Cybils, to be able to publicize some of the best of the bunch, so you and your kids can include these new gems on your "to read" lists.

The other reason is that I realize, sadly, that for many non-home schooling families, nonfiction children's titles are considered the second rate, second tier, B List, utility grade, inferior choice when it comes to children's books, and I wanted to be able to use an opportunity like the Cybils, with such a terrific short list of books of marvelous depth and range, to show that children's nonfiction is not only chock full of superior choices, but every inch the equal of fiction.

I'd like to encourage other readers and fans of children's nonfiction, especially those who are concerned about what children's nonfiction author Marc Aronson calls "nonfiction resistance", to keep up with the subject on Marc's blog, Nonfiction Matters

And one final note -- a raft of terrific children's 2007 nonfiction titles didn't make it to the list of nominees to be considered for the above short list. If your favorite wasn't nominated, it's because you didn't speak up for it. Don't let that happen next year.

I ran out of time yesterday, and wanted to add this list of suggested readings to go with my post yesterday about David McCullough's new 1776: The Illustrated Edition, the illustrated and abridged edition of Mr. McCullough's original 1776. All of the children's books listed below are narrative histories and overviews of the period, rather than books about a particular element of the American

A couple of months ago my father told me about the advance copy he had recently received of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough's new illustrated edition of 1776, which he's saving for us and described as "an enormous book stuffed with removable facsimiles of various documents". So I was interested to read The Wall Street Journal's Author Q&A interview this past weekend with Mr.