How to Draw Japan

About this book

> 100 SUBJECTS. 6 STEPS EACH. 600 STEP-BY-STEP DRAWINGS. EVERY PHENOMENON BUILT THE WAY THE SKY BUILDS IT — BLUEPRINT, MASS, STRUCTURE, NAME, TEXTURE, FINISH. > > A summer cumulus towering over the fields. Lightning measured from cloud base to ground. The calm eye inside the typhoon. One snowflake, magnified until its geometry shows. A wave taken apart — face, lip, tube, spray. A rainbow that stands on two hills because its arc was measured, not guessed. > > Your characters have to stand under SOME sky — and backgrounds live or die by their weather. Every subject in this book is built the same honest way: one fixed blueprint (a centre point, a bounding circle, and one line that never moves — a horizon line, a sea line, a ground line, an ice line, a water line), the phenomenon's mass, its structure, then — and only then — the feature that gives it its name (the anvil, the pouches of mammatus, the forked bolt, the typhoon's eye, the sixfold crystal, the rainbow's arc), its texture, and finish and colour. Nothing moves between steps — the sea line your wave rises from in Step 2 is the exact sea line it breaks on in Step 6. > > Inside: 20 clouds, the architecture of the sky · 20 storms, taken apart piece by piece · 20 cold forms, from one flake to a frozen sea · 20 moving waters, drawn at the moment they move · 20 optical phenomena with honest geometry — rainbows, halos, sundogs, mirages, the green flash. Every subject is named in English, Japanese and romaji — this book is also a walk through the words of the sky: nyūdōgumo, unkai, kasa-gumo, takigumo. > > And after every subject: a practice page. Trace the faint finished drawing, then draw your own version in the empty frame. 100 subjects, 100 practice pages. > > No artwork, character or sky design from any real work is drawn or copied anywhere in this book — every phenomenon is a generalised natural form, so the skies you invent with this system are completely yours. All you need is a pencil and an eraser.