If you're looking for a comprehensive, easy-to-follow guide to drawing anime and manga characters, Draw Like an Artist: 100 Lessons to Create Anime and Manga Characters is a fantastic resource. Alex Brennan-Dent has crafted a step-by-step sourcebook that breaks down the drawing process into clear, manageable stages. Each lesson is approachable and accompanied by QR codes that link to video tutorials for added support—a wonderful touch for visual learners.

As someone who isn’t an avid manga or anime fan, I found myself appreciating the structure and simplicity of the lessons. They’re designed to guide both beginners and more experienced artists, making this a versatile book. The instructions are clear, the progression is logical, and the character designs are diverse, covering a variety of poses, outfits, and facial expressions.

What stood out to me is how user-friendly this book is, especially for someone who might not be deeply immersed in anime or manga culture. While I enjoyed working through the exercises and honing my skills, I couldn’t shake the feeling that fans of the genre would get even more out of it. For manga and anime enthusiasts, this book would likely be a 5-star treasure trove.

Even as someone outside the target audience, I was impressed by the amount of care and detail that went into this guide. It’s a great tool for character designers, aspiring artists, or anyone looking to explore anime-inspired art styles. If you're passionate about anime and manga—or even just curious about the artistic techniques behind them—this book is well worth adding to your collection.

This is a good book if you already draw and want to learn about more postures and character staging.
There were many examples of different characters, body types, face shapes, and dress and accessories.
1 good thing was that it showed the stages of the sketch - so you could see how each layer adds on for the final drawing to take shape.
The book also has QR codes that takes you to video tutorials - so that's an add-on.

This drawing book was super straightforward and easy to dive into. There were so many options on body types, poses and characters. The characters were all consistent and had personality. I also loved all of the facial expression examples.
The best part, however were the included QR codes - which link to video tutorials on specific characters!

A perfect gift for the budding artist. My teen boys appreciated these tips for drawing their favorite characters better.

This book was really interesting at the beginning where it explained some stuff and gave tips, but after the proportions, where it was still quite easy to understand the instructions, the tutorials were not so easy to follow and while the book offers a QR code you can scan for the video tutorials, there is no text to explain anything. If you are at least intermediate and are just looking for some help with poses or more types of characters, this book might help you, but it is 100% not for beginners and I feel like it should be used more as a reference book than as a book that helps you learn how to draw.

I got this book for free via NetGalley for a review.

The basic tutorials at the start of the book for body shapes, body parts, clothing and poses are nicely laid out and really useful.

The book then contains a large selection of characters for you to draw, which are really well designed. However I feel that this section of the book is more geared towards those with some pre-existing drawing experience rather than complete beginners as there are only a couple of instructional steps shown, jumping quite quickly from body structure to line work, which could be complicated for a beginner to follow.

The character designs come with a QR code to videos where you can watch the artist drawing them. While it is nice to see the full process of them being drawn, this does not add any further instructions.

I've already had fun drawing from this book and am sure I will enjoy trying some more of the characters.

This was a little more advanced in figure drawing than I was bargaining for. The book had many wonderful reference drawings for figures in various poses. It’s definitely at an intermediate level though as the basics drawing portion is quite short. So check this one out if you’re looking to advance your figure drawing to the next level once you’re solid on basic figure drawing!
Thank you for the eARC!

I love that this book shows how to draw a variety of body types and face shapes, I can see this being a really useful reference tool! Whilst I do like that it is more visual and less wordy compared to a lot of art books, I would have appreciated just a little bit more writing to explain things, which is why I haven't given it five stars. Other than that, I love it!

Thank you for the review copy!

A very detailed and yet easy to follow guide to line drawing.
This is more suitable for experienced budding artists and for those who have been drawing for some time now. Lots of useful details!
Also, the QR codes are a nice touch and addition!

Es ist ein gutes Buch um zeichnen zu üben. Ich finde es hatte viele tolle tips, aber vorallem viele Zeichnungen die man selber nach zeichnen sollte. Das hatte mir am meisten gefallen, da ich es als eine wertvolle und hilfreiche Übung empfand. Jedoch wäre auch mehr text zwischendurch angebracht, die diesen Prozess erklären oder die einzelnen Zeichnungen in noch mehr Schritte unterteilt. Ich glaube, dieses Buch ist am besten für Leute geeignet die schon ein bisschen Erfahrung mit zeichnen haben und nicht die ganzen Basics lernen müssen.

This book definitely is not for anyone beginning to draw manga characters. There is very little in the way of instruction. I feel that it is geared more towards more advanced artists.
My sons like to draw characters a lot but this was not a lot of help for them. With each figure depiction I feel like detailed instructions could have been given.
Overall really cool body shapes and action poses!

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I mostly really liked this! I was really impressed by the body diversity that was included, so many of the 'anime' focused art books often just include skinny white people. I would have liked to see more tutorial-esk bits like the beginning had, rather than many "sketch-to-final piece" pages. Overall, I really liked the linework and parts that explained why you were drawing something.

Draw Like an Artist: 100 Lessons to Create Anime and Manga Characters is a book that may or may not be good for you depending on what you are looking to get from it. For those who already have some basic drawing technique, it offers an excellent set of references for different poses. For me that was the book's best point, especially if you are already good at character design and shading but struggle with getting poses and body proportions correct. However, if you are looking for a book to teach you to draw manga-style characters from scratch, this is probably not the best option for you. There are really only a few pages at the start that briefly mention some technical points, but then that's it. There are some QR codes jotted throughout that lead to video tutorials, but just a quick search on YouTube would bring up a ton of similar content, so I personally don't consider that a compelling enough reason to fork out for this book if that's all you are after. Based on it being a good reference tool for artists, I am giving it 3.5 stars, but there are other works out there more suited to beginners who need a "how-to" guide to drawing.

Okay, this book is awesome!

It cuts right to the chase, with tutorials on how to draw diverse body types and face shapes (which I found really helpful as I really struggle with realistic proportions and variety), poses, clothes...

Another thing I really liked was the drawing style, which is consistent, detailed and also fun and filled with personality, certainly something I want to channel in my own art

Would definitely get a copy of the book to use as reference, particularly when delving out of my comfort zone with character designs

This digital ARC was obtainable via NetGalley for an honest review!

This was a very good tutorial book even though I was only able to see a portion of it. The art style and drawing examples were helpful!

This was a very cool, but it looks into different ways to draw characters, male and female and hold them having different characteristics and jobs come implement on different clothing. Holly Paula and Friend poses can change the way different things look. I really enjoyed this. I thought it was really good, but I think it is quite basic. I have read quite a few of these so I am a little bit more advanced in drawing than this book in tales as someone who is more on a basic level.

This book has a bunch of lessons on how to draw anime. I love how it's mainly pictures instead of a bunch of words it makes it much easier to follow along. This book will be very helpful for beginners and any other type of artist that will love to learn to draw anime.

Book with great and easy to follow drawing tips. Definitely will be using these and applying them to my artstyle when I draw cartoon/anime-style graphics. Can already see the improvement in my art style!!!