Book Review: Doodletopia Manga by Christopher Hart

It’s vacation time. I hoped Doodletopia Manga would be a fun book to recommend parents pack for the kids when they get bored on a car trip. Unfortunately, it’s sadly lacking and in the most surprising way.

For a book that’s supposed to teach the budding artist how to draw manga, there are precious few instructions and they all are incomplete. A page will have some wire frame sketches and then the finished project from the author. Somewhere between the two an inexperienced artist is supposed to bridge the gap, but that’s not how a book that purports to teach drawing techniques is supposed to work. It needs detailed step-by-step guidelines and there aren’t any. What the reader finds is lots of cute finished manga drawings by the author that I suppose can be used as references. If your kid is only into tracing he or she might get enjoyment out of this book, but you’ll have to shell out for tracing paper.

Doodletopia Manga includes projects such as mazes and bookmarks that could have been fun for kids. Again, with the limited instructions I don’t see a reader producing more than crude artwork, not much better than what they can probably already create. I’m puzzling over the purpose of the book because it appears to be a how-to-draw manual for people who already know how to draw.

In the end, Doodletopia Manga isn’t much better than a coloring book and there are more fun coloring books out there. Buy one of those.

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for a review.