Mangaka's Tools

What is drawing manga without the tools?
The following shows a list of items for drawing manga/comic:
(along with some explanation, just in case you didn't even know what a pencil is ^^)

1. Pencil and eraser

This is what you'll use for creating drafts and sketching. Some might argue if using pencil or mechanical pencil is more accurate but the fact is - it doesn't matter, use whatever that suits you best as long as you draw comfortably with it and the sketches are clear enough for inking and easy enough for erasing.
Choosing erasers should be a little more specific, you ought to choose soft erasers that can easily erase your pencil works while keeping the paper clean. You DON'T want something that'll ruin your manga.

Some argues pencil is more appropriate, but mechanical pencil works just fine for me.

2. Rulers and templates

You'll need a long ruler for straight lines drawing and some templates for drawing curves and conversation bubbles in your manga. A bendable ruler can be a useful tool since you can bend it into any shapes that you desire. But keep in mind that bendable rulers are not suitable for drawing small circle lines; you'll still need a template for this job.

rulers

templates

bendable ruler

3. Compass

A compass is a useful tool for drawing full circles in your manga, though it's not used most of the time but you'll find it handy having it around. So just keep one at your side.

4. Light box

A very crucial tool for drawing manga, light box is used for tracing purposes, and there are a lot of time where you can't determine the angle or the amount of content to be placed inside a block or a panel, so a solution is to draw out the entire image without bounding box on another piece of blank paper, then using the light box to adjust the image into preferable angle in your panel, then trace it into your manga sketch.

5. Dip pens and/or fine point pens

This is for inking purposes. The difference is that the dip pen gives you more control over the weight of your strokes, fine point pen however, enable you to draw smooth, fine lines without and difference in the stroke's weight. You can draw lines with different weights with a fine point pen by repeatedly drawing on the area that you wish to put more weight into it, and you'll need to have a set of fine point pens with different point values if you planned to draw your manga/comic solely using fine point pen.

I uses five fine point pens for my manga, a 0.7 size pen for thick lines and borders drawing, a 0.3 pen also for thick lines, a 0.2 pen for medium lines, and two 0.1 pens for fine lines.

6. Ink

You'll find it useful to prepare both black and white ink no matter you're using ink pen or not. It is useful for making special effects such as blood splashing effects, waves and so on. The white ink is also important for correction purposes, to ink out unwanted lines that you find in your manga.

7. Brushes

If you want to use your ink you'll need to have a brush, now make sense?

The brushes are mainly for special effects such as spilling bloods, water flows etc. Now I'm thinking of using it to draw hair for my manga characters.

8. Papers

A4 size paper for normal drawing, but some publisher prefers their mangaka to use B4 size paper, reason is that you can draw more in your manga and you can put in more details as well. But the bad thing is that it is more time consuming, since you're drawing more and on larger scale.
Normally, A4 size will do just fine!

9. Graphic tablet

This is for PC usage, for screentoning and colouring my manga using software tool. The one I'm using is a WACOM tablet, the cheapest one I can find in my area.

Now we're done with the tools, let's take a look at the manga creation process!