Well, I've been searching for a book for a long time that would start out at a basic enough level that I could actually learn to draw. I've finally found one.
Katy Coope writes How to Draw Manga, published by Scholastic. She has many drawings all over the internet, particularly for fan fiction. She has a web site of her own and participates in DeviantArt.
One of the nice things about her book is that she doesn't assume you know everything about drawing. She doesn't assume that you've been drawing still life for the past 4 years in an art college. This is good because I haven't.
Another major bonus for this book is that the formula she provides seems like it can offer enough variety, yet it gives you instantaneous success. Getting a good looking drawing on your first try does wonders for your willingness to keep at it.
Anyway, I've been drawing about one head per day since I started. I'm only drawing heads right now because I want to get good at it before I move on to something else. I would really like to try different hair styles (particularly corn-rows and afros) and some different eye expressions. I need to work on getting my girl/boy head differences more obvious.
Included here is a drawing I did in Macromedia Flash. Most of the stuff I've been doing has been on paper. Flash was useful for getting the lines to curve as I liked them, and coloring the head was pretty easy, too. Actually, it probably wasn't as easy as just using some markers, but it wasn't too bad.
Anyway, you can see that I've made pretty decent progress, since drawing something like this was not possible for me even as recently as last week.
