Manga

We are lucky to be working with world renowned artist Sheng Qi on workshops focussing on the topic of identity. Sheng Qi is leading workshops on drawing Manga character swith young people from the Colchester Chinese Cultural Society. In the first session spent some time considering what ‘makes us, us’ and ‘what Essex means to us’ so that we could develop characters with our own identities. It turns out that we feel families, friends and our creativity play a large part in making us, us! Essex means home and happiness to us.

Sheng Qi taught us how to draw Chiba Style characters starting with drawing circles on a page and ending with a complex scene. Sheng Qi told us not to limit ourselves with colours and that the more details and colours the more interesting the scene becomes. It was impressive watching the scene develop as he added each colour and shade. He also stressed that we need to consider the story so we can place elements better. We learned how to use curved lines to create movement and place straight lines where you want to create an impression of stability.

Cydney says; "Today I enjoyed the first Manga Workshop. We explored what Essex meant to us and how we can incorporate these themes into our art. Sheng Qi taught us how to draw basic bodies and use our creativity to design our characters. He explained the process  clearly and simply so it was easy for us to follow him. He also made sure that everyone could follow him and no one was left behind."

Today the Colchester Chinese Cultural Society and I had our second Manga Workshop with Sheng Qi.

We want to ground the characters in Essex so Sheng Qi chose to use First Site as the ‘East meets West’ Cultural backdrop for the Naruto character. We learned about perspective and the use of dots and short lines to help create the perfect drawing. Sheng Qi taught us how to draw hands using angles. Sheng Qi urged us to be creative and put our own personalities into the characters.

Hi this is Cydney again 

The second manga class was also enjoyable because we got to draw more complicated objects such as the FirstSite art gallery in Colchester.We also drew an iconic character from a Japanese manga, Naruto! The hardest part of the lesson was drawing the hands. But fortunately Sheng Qi helped guide us through the process by using points for where the parts of the hand.

Today we worked with Artist Sheng Qi to develop our skills further using pencil, marker pen and water colour. Sheng Qi worked on paper this time so he could show us how to form the character Goku.

Usually Sheng Qi said that it would take 2-3 hours to finish drawing the character but we worked quickly as we only had an hour. We looked to see how we could include Essex in our drawings.

Today was the final Manga drawing workshop with the talented Sheng Qi. By this point the children have built up their skills, and some of the techniques that were brand new to me they had mastered.

In this final session we were working on Sailor Moon, no Manga lesson could be complete without her! This is the image we were working from:

The young people from the Colchester Chinese Cultural Society shared their work with each other. We discussed what they had learnt over the last two weeks. They all agreed hands were hardest.

When thinking about the question ‘has what I feel about Essex changed’ conversation moved to the buildings and architecture, how interesting and different it was, and how contrasting buildings can be seen next door to one another, especially in towns like Colchester. Hopefully these buildings will feature in some of their future storyboards.