Excellent Manga Sketching Techniques Vol.1 Pretty Girl Tankobon Softcover – January 1, 2011

This book contains nearly 200 pages of anatomy and posing references for drawing anime women and girls. The text is in English but the credits say it was translated in Japan so some of the text is in what I call in "Engrish" and probably just ran through a computer translator, but it's easy to understand what information the text is trying to convey. Overall the book doesn't contain much that you wouldn't see from other drawing books, but there are two chapters in particular that I found informative. One is a skilled manga artist's step-by-step techniques on how he draws, including what materials and pencil/pens he uses, etc. Another section I found useful shows the realistic motion and limitations of the human body such as how far limbs can extend and bend in a realistic way, and how to avoid unnatural poses if you're going for realism. According to the back dust cover flap there are two other books in the Excellent Manga series which seem hard to find. If you can get this book for your collection, you might want to jump on buying it. The book contains some bare breast nudity so it might not be something you'd want to give to kids.