My Recommendation: If you have issues with drawing loose shirts, jeans, or under garments, or have trouble drawing them at certain perspectives (and especially for female characters), then "How To Draw Manga, Volume 4: Dressing Your Characters in Casual Wear" is the book for you!
I was ready for this book. Most of the characters I draw wear the same kind of "blah" clothes, but I just kind of fumbled my way through. I really wanted something that I could look at for reference, and boy does this book have it!
I was pleased to find LOTS of reference pictures.
What I'm Happy About: "How to Draw Manga: Dressing Your Characters in Casual Wear" captures what I think is one of the most important aspects of a "how to draw" book and is one of the things that really does help artists trying to improve themselves: reference pics, reference pics, reference pics!!! This really is the selling factor of the book and I cannot stress it enough. Even if you're a pro at drawing "casual wear", the variety of poses and perspectives given are a well of information on their own.
Overall: A lot of attention is given to the wrinkles in clothing, and this is where most of the focus is (the idea being that once you know how the clothes hang and how it reacts to different positions or how it looks in different perspectives, then you can embellish or change them more specifically to how you want). There isn't a lot of delving into style or fashion either, other than a few comments here or there, but remember, these are supposed to be casual and comfortable clothes, nothing fancy.
Content: As in most of the "How to Draw Manga" series, this book is less of a textual guide than it is a reference book, which means it doesn't necessarily have a lot of instructions (though at some parts it does give tips and tidbits of information), but it has lots and lots of pictures!
After a happy welcome, the book opens into a short pre-section before it gets to the chapters; this section is only about three pages long, but gives very useful advice that relates to the following chapters (and is especially helpful to beginners just learning how to portray clothing. There are 5 concepts in the pre-section: (1) Giving Shape to Characters, (2) Visualizing Wrinkles, (3) Creating Basic Three-Dimensionality, (4) Wrinkles Formed from Gravity, and (5) Lines Found in Clothing.
There are only three chapters in this book: (1) Underwear and T-shirts, (2) Tops and Skirts, and (3) Jackets and Jeans. Each section starts off with some text giving you information about the garment it covers while at the same time giving lots of pictures for reference. There are pages and pages simply of reference drawings, sometimes with a single comment here or there. Tons of perspectives are given, as well as many different poses such as sitting, stretching, bending, and even taking off/putting on a shirt!
Possible Downsides: As you can imagine, there isn't a whole lot of variety; you pretty much just stick to undergarments, tucked in T-shirts, jeans, jackets, and one type of long skirt; there isn't a whole lot of design variation. However, on the other hand, the chapters are very thorough, so I forgive it (the tucked in T-shirts still bother me though...seriously, who does that anymore?).
Another thing is that most of the clothing (especially the tops) are rather loose-fitting, but then again, since the title of the book is called "Dressing Your Character in Casual Wear", I can, again, forgive it.
One should also note that there are hardly any reference pictures for male characters. There are a few reference drawings of the masculine nature in the first chapter (the undergarments section), but none for the subsequent chapters.
Lastly, something I noticed was that the reference pictures (especially the ones with the jacket and jeans) show a lot of texturing going on that they don't really show you how to do. In one of the beginning sections there is a little bit of information given regarding how the light source can "accent the three-dimensionality", but that is all.
My Rating (out of 5 stars):
Final Comments
Looking over "How to Draw Manga, Volume 4: Dressing Your Characters in Casual Wear", it doesn't do a whole whoopin' lot, but what it does it does well. I recommend this book to anyone trying to learn how to make clothing look a little more real or who are having trouble drawing people sitting down. This is a great book for beginners and I think that even more experienced artists can gain something from this book.
...PEACE!