How To Draw Manga: Mech. Drawing
ISBN: 4-7661-1334-9
Publisher: Graphic-Sha
Author: Katsuya Yamakami
Publication Date in English: December 2003
Series: How To Draw Manga
Price: $19.99
Pagecount: 128
Color: No
Breasts: No
Short Impression: This is mostly about surface details, visual design
     considerations and use of perspective.  Covers all sorts of machines,
     but mostly vehicles, power armor and robots.

     Yes, the title is "Mech. Drawing".  The cover has a power armor babe
waggling her shiny metal/flesh butt at the camera, but this is not really a
"how to draw sexy hardsuit gals" book.  In fact, it's an interesting
combination of highly specific and rather broad.  It's a more advanced book
(although it has a few perfunctory very basic pages here and there), and
covers a wide variety of mechanical objects.  Mostly it does vehicles,
powersuits and robots, though, making it useful for Transformers fan artists.
     The first chapter is all about surface textures, claiming all machines
can be surfaced in one of four materials: metal, plastic, ice and rubber.
And while the lessons are for use of screentones (the Graphic-Sha series is
really big on screentones), it's not too hard to generalize to color shading.
     Chapter 2 is the obligatory run through the basics, using solids and
perspective lines to get simple structures together.  The main value of this
chapter is in making sure the reader is familiar with the basic vocabulary
and techniques as Yamakami uses them, so that when they show up later in the
book in more advanced settings, the reader recognizes them.
     The rest of the book mainly assumes that the reader has mastered the
basics and can do a "file photo" pose and design.  There's advice on using
shapes to convey meaning (boxy for safe, rounded for fast, etc), dynamic
posing and perspective, and effective use of surface details.  
     I'm definitely going to try to give this a more thorough reading soon,
as I'm weak on surface detailing and this book is all about that.