AKIRA TORIYAMA

For ink, I use Pilot drawing ink or their documentary ink. For pens, a Zebra G-Pen (on the high end, I can draw about 40 pages with one nib), and sometimes Copic pens, Pigma, etc. For rulers, ones like they normally sell at stationery shops, on the wider side, in a few different lengths. For erasers, ones where the shavings clump together. As for coloring my color manuscripts, I used to use color ink from Luma, but now I do it by PC (mostly Adobe Photoshop, sometimes Corel Painter).

It’s not all that different from when I draw in a sketchbook.

Rather than a trick, I’ve recently made the discovery, now that I hardly draw any manga any more, that if you use smooth paper, you can draw smooth lines! I was a bit shocked to find that the paper I’d been using up until now was bad quality.

With manga, in my art style, I don’t do much in the way of techniques to create depth.

But even though I don’t do depth techniques through my art, I am conscious of depth itself.

This isn’t a trick, but all the design illustrations I did way back when may have come in handy. My model-building hobby also trains the eye.

With things like Dragon Ball, in the case of fight scenes, I’d take the panel layout across two pages when the book is opened, and alter it by angling them, and making them bigger or smaller, to give movement to the panels themselves. Also, when they’re moving in continuous sequence, I often use long panels in order to make it easy to understand where they’re moving and how.

It occurs only extremely rarely, but when I’ve drawn something better than I thought I would.

Lumped in as a hobby, I don’t really like drawing pictures all that much, but thinking of it as work, it’s the greatest.

In my case, I use the storyboard as my draft, but it’s not so much that I’m “good at” this part as it is that it’s a bit fun for me. Meetings beforehand, I’m not good with; or rather, I hardly ever have them. I haven’t enjoyed inking since way back.

At any rate, I work hard to have something that’s easy for anyone to understand.

Also, these sort of twisted developments like being light and smooth to read, and not moving [the reader] unnecessarily, I suppose. While making story developments appear to be standard ones, betraying [readers’ expectations] a bit, in a good way.

There are times when I emphasize the distinguishing traits of their appearance, and at times, like with Goku, when I deliberately play them down. That was in order to put emphasis on his personality and movements, though.

I’m afraid that, for some reason, I don’t like my own works very much, and I hardly ever read them; however, if I had to say something, I suppose it would be how they seem easy to read.

It all has to do with thrilling excitement. When I draw, I always recall my mindset when I was a child.

They’re all movies, but Enter the Dragon¹, Drunken Master², Galaxy Quest³, Alien⁴, etc. etc…

In spite of being in this profession, apart from when I was in elementary school, I read almost no comics. It’s not that I hate them; I enjoy them when I read them, but I if I have the time for it, I just end up using it for my hobbies. The truth is, I didn’t like being a cartoonist very much. It wasn’t until relatively recently that I realized it’s a wonderful job. That’s because it’s like making a movie almost entirely by yourself (although having said that, I have no interest in making a real movie).

I just flip through it on occasion, so I’m terribly sorry, but in terms of the contents, it feels like it’s changed quite a bit. But that’s because different times call for different works, so change is a given. It’s always been that way.

I’m constantly saying the same sort of thing in my comments for the Tezuka Award, but find your own form of expression. If there’s no originality anywhere in it, then no matter how skilled you are, it doesn’t mean anything. No matter how silly, nonsensical, or wooden the contents are, the most important thing is individuality. Also, calmly read your own work through the eyes of a third party. Is it caught up in its own importance? Are the contents something only you and your friends would enjoy? And further, please do as best you can to study things like living things and items from nature. The more things you can draw, it’ll noticeably widen the horizons of your work.

Finally — and I apologize for putting this bluntly — the truth is, as long as you know the basics of how to draw, then the most important thing might be to have the guts and the sense to think of this and that in your own way and not concern yourself with the know-how of people like me.