Fairy Tail’s Hiro Mashima wanted to make sure his fans learned a useful skill this Oppai Day.
Manga creator Hiro Mashima is a busy man. Sure, his biggest hit to date, Fairy Tail, wrapped up a few years ago, but he still handles the writing and storyboarding for its sequel series, Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest, and that’s in addition to writing and drawing his current weekly manga, Edens Zero.
But Mashima still took the time recently to give aspiring artists a bit of useful drawing advice and celebrate one of Japanese Twitter’s quasi-holidays by sending out a special tweet for Boob Day, which comes on August 1 (since in Japanese 8 can be read as “pa” and 1 as “i,” making the date 8-1 look like pai, an abbreviation of oppai (”boobs”).
Since Mashima was gracious enough to share his wisdom, let’s dive face-first into his explanation. “It seems that today is Oppai Day,” he tweets, “so here’s a tip for beginner-level artists! Depending on the angle the character is standing at, the appearance of her clothing should change.”
Specifically, Mashima is talking about clothing with a wide or plunging neckline, such as bikini tops, cocktail dresses, tank tops, and bras. If the character is being drawn straight-on, each breast can be rendered identically, but if her torso is rotated to one side, the artwork needs to be adjusted. For example, if the character has her left shoulder forward and her right one back, the central area of exposed skin on her right breast should be comparatively wide, with a comparatively thin strip of fabric covering up the outside edge of the chest area. Meanwhile, there should be a narrower section of exposed skin between the center of her chest and the part of her top covering the left breast.
In Mashima’s tweet, the torso illustrations on the left follow this rule, resulting in natural, eye-pleasing aesthetics. On the other hand, in the drawing on the right marked with “NG” (Japanese shorthand for “no good”), Mashima hasn’t widened the area of exposed skin between the center of the character’s chest and the fabric covering the right breast. This awkwardly makes it look like the right cup of the top uses more fabric than the left, and by comparison that the right breast is larger than the left one.
“A lot of people have a tendency to draw like this,” Mashima says of the NG example, “and even I do it by accident sometimes.” Still, it’s a pitfall you’ll need to avoid if you want to draw visually pleasing breasts (definitely an in-demand skill in the anime/manga world), and a number of appreciative commenters showed their gratitude with:
“Ah, so that’s how you do it (takes notes).”
“Definitively the kind of tip a lot of people want, and I’ll be making good use of it. Thank you!”
“Love Mashima-sensei’s art, and I really appreciate this.”
“Very convincing advice.”
There’s one thing we can’t help wondering, though: before sharing this boob-drawing tip with his Twitter followers, did Mashima share it with the president of France?
Source: Twitter/@hiro_mashima via Otakomu
Top image: Pakutaso
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