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mayshing — How to draw action fight scene
Published: 2011-02-27 22:50:55 +0000 UTC; Views: 72345; Favourites: 1591; Downloads: 3144
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Description
Here's CD's How to design your own manga/anime fight and action sequence quick tutorial....This fight sequence is used here:
My manga series 2Masters | My facebook | My tumblr
WHAT this tutorial aim for: To bridge the gap between using reference and knowledge to designing fight scenes on page.
WHAT this tutorial does not do: Providing various martial arts references or teach you anatomy, you can get that on youtube or other sites.
Suggested books:
[link]
[link]
Suggested artist:
安藤真裕 - Masahiro Ando [link]
Edit:
Blog post discussion related to this: [link]
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I am doing this note, tutorial for my friends who have fight sequences in their manga but don't know how to do it.
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I only came to realize how little there is out there on this topic on the net, after talking to a friend of mine about her manga she wants to do, but have struggles with action sequence designs.
When i search, i couldn't find good tutorials right away, that's a sign that people don't talk about this. Most of us who got ok at it just purely learned on our own, and usually does not discuss in tutorial form i believe. Those who are good are too busy doing work for others.
So here's some of my free tips for those who wants it.
I can't say i am particularly good at designing action sequences, but at least i don't have major problems...
As long as i am not doing...
Stare...SLASH, enemy falls.... fight ends.
ERRRRRRK... that's the cheapest.... scene... ever.
(Edit: But One Piece used it with Zoro. lol It works somewhat with Samurai fight style, and you don't need a great fight design for a great story, but it requires no skill in designing this kind of fight, I don't recommend using it and I will not use it personally.)
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Comments: 115
Omo, thanks for sharing. I love drawing fighting scene.
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Thanks for this, I haven't been able to find any good tips on action scenes before ^^
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THanks, this REALLY helped me >.< I am FOREVER in your gratitude
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Your awsome...
you should totaly marry me because you made this. >O
XD
I am favoriting this.
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Very useful, I hope I'll be able to use this soon!
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or read Full Metal Alchemist's manga, it has tons of good fighting scenes inside it
btw, nice tutorial ^^
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This will really assist in my work in the long run, so thanks for making this tutorial.
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o.o glad it helps, you do fight scenes all the time.
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Yea, someone else who thinks of watching Jackie Chan movies for action reference!
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I've always been so envious of your action scenes, you seem to be able to draw them with such a natural flow!
Thank you so much for the tips! This is so very extremely helpful since action fight scenes are something I'm struggling with. *runs off to study*
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have fun. 
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Lol, so true! I'm stockpiling lots and lots of Jet Li/Jackie Chan/etc movies and wu-shu stuff for reference. Getting the stances right are what I really need to work on right now.
With your tips in mind, hopefully I won't be dreading doing action scenes as much.
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go you~ <3 I'm sure you will do just fine. ^_^
It does take a bit of time thinking up the moves and how they interchange when you have to depend heavily on references for styles.... you can do it like Avatar the last air bender first (rely on elements to carry the fight, might work for your story, most wu-xia movies are heavy in elements and spins anyways)
Do more fantasy style before moving toward the more physical/realistic ones... those are much harder. ^^b
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I think one of the best manga artists to study on this front is Hiromu Arakawa. The fight scenes in Fullmetal Alchemist, especially in the final arc, are absolutely mindblowing. Not just in the detail, camera angles, choreography, and visceral feeling of force, but also in how they start and end. One of Envy's fights, for instance, is broken down into segments. He's a manipulative coward faced with a dangerous opponent, so he runs, and when he can't escape he abruptly tries to change the entire field to something more his advantage. So instead of one battle equalling one fight, one battle = a fight, a chase, a tense hide-and-seek sequence, a skirmish, another hide-and-seek sequence, another skirmish, an intervention, a defeat, another intervention, and a finale and denouement. And that's not even starting on her use of battle psychology and tactics.
On the animation end, Avatar: the Last Airbender has some great combat scenes. They really put a lot of study of real martial arts into the styles and the sequences, and it shows, even when there isn't any active violence -- the episode where Sokka is learning to use a sword, for example, only has one actual battle, but the entire episode is part of that battle and flows in and out of it very smoothly.
I think too many comic artists, both professional and amateur, tend to either mistake fights and battles for the same thing, or use one when they should use the other. They also tend to be all about the actual blows rather than the zillion other things going on (I've noticed a lot of Western comics in particular guilty of this). It's a bit of a shame, because when done right I think they can evoke more feelings from a reader than nearly any other technique or plot device.
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One more note I think is important: injuries, and how they affect the function of the human body. Your character might be a half demon or made of living titanium, but just saying (or showing) that a strong kick doesn't do anything to them isn't very communicative on its own, I don't think. You need to know how a normal human would respond to that kind of trauma, and use that to tailor your character's response -- and having normal people nearby going through the same thing and responding differently to the same trauma can provide very dramatic context. Best of all, this also works on a character's psychological level as well as physical.
Going back to Arakawa, I think the Armstrong siblings are some of the best examples of this, both physically (Alex) and psychologically (Olivia). Arakawa helps emphasize this by frequently dropping them into troops of regular soldiers to provide 'normal human' context -- and she doesn't make them so inhuman that we can't relate to them. She also has a masterful knowledge of anatomy. When they get really hurt, you know they're really hurt, but she's subtle about it. A good example is this page: [link] (spoilers, unfortunately). It's very slight, but you can see the deformity where Alex's shoulder has been dislocated, and she further highlights it by how he moves in the subsequent panels.
I could go on forever about her examples, but as for general studies I think it's handy to check out first aid and medical sites whenever possible. Search for what happens to a person when they're hit in the gut by a punch, when they jump from a second story window, when they're kicked in the head. Take note of what kind of health these people were in, how much force was involved, what kind of complications occurred, and what the recovery process was if there was one. There's enough material out there to generate hundreds of unique battles just based on injuries alone.
Finally, check out Little Details on LJ: [link] I have gotten so much injury reference from that site you have no idea.
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sounds like you should write a tutorial.
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Well I did ask around but I'm not getting much in the way of responses.
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blog post archieved on this tutorial... :3 thanks for sharing the insights.
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Omg, that's probably a lot of strips to just draw the fighting scene =O
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Very useful. If one can sit in on a class for marshal arts would help as well. If one can learn a little then they can sympathy with the characters a little more, even if it's on a basic level. Learning to draw more complex things from there can come with time. At lest that is how it is with me. I never really realized how far apart their feet really are and how pushed in the feet are. ^.^;; my two cents.
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1000 thanks for posting these tips, not a lot of martial arts in what I'm working with but this'll still help a great deal. The last three lines here kinda feel like a low blow, probably because of how coincidentally specific it sounds to my old, unfinished work... Eh, could be my PTSD kicking in.
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for martial arts stuff just look on youtube or reference books. That's what i would do.
Well, One piece used the stare, slash, fall with Zoro and he's still a cool character, one doesn't need good fight scene to impress others, and plenty of mangakas used the cheap fight scene. BUT to me, that's like... not even a fight design, other martial arts choreographers would say the same.
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Waaaaw thanks ^0^
I always have difficult time drawing the fight scenes T.T
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Reference Books that people might be interested in...
[link]
[link]
They breakdown how to do fight scenes FRAME BY FRAME from 1-on-1 fights... all the way to 3/4-way battles that look very realistic.
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great references, thanks for sharing. :3
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Thanks so much! This helps a lot!
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I love this--it's very helpful! ^^
sometimes I forget how good body reference is...lol XD
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Thanks for taking your time in doing this, Very heplful.
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Yay for tutorials!!
But great tips!! Even though I have not done a lot of comics myself, I cant totally see the problem of not zooming in or out with characters, only instead just rotating the view of them but it's still the same basic view, just different angle.
I am totally absorbed into the thumbnail/story board. I've always love that little fight segment with Randy vs Chris!!
((How ironic I was just looking at that fighting scene yesterday!))
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lol why were u looking at that fight scene? XD its old.
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It popped up in your gallery when I was looking in it, lol. The little previews from the artist's gallary they now show on the sides of a picture show some really old stuff! Even with my own gallary when I look at my more recent stuff, it shows random pictures from my gallary. The fight scene just happened to appear there a few times as I was looking at pictures of Randy and Ko Lei... hehe.
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haha, I'm not THAT stalkerish
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hope u had a good celebrating your bday. :3
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Yes I did!! Thank you! It was really low key but today I had lunch with my sister and my oldest girl cousin and that was fun. Catching up and just talking was great
Now I'm back to studying for school and doing homework, lol.
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