How to Draw Someone Getting Punched in The Face
AKA: The first of many posts where I don’t just lose my shit over Hajime no Ippo, but I explain to you, in stupid amounts of detail, whhhyyy.
Layout Disclaimer: Any sequential pages will be laid out right to left. That’s how it goes in Japan and it’s important to the motion of the page to keep it the way the artist intended it.
Also, I don’t own any of the following artwork. If you’re a publishing company and want me to take it down, just ask and I will.
Let’s start with the basics. Let’s have one of Japan’s greatest living artists, Inoue Takehiko, rewind like thirty years of his life and show us the early years of Slam Dunk as an example of how most artists show someone getting punched in the face. (Non-sequential excerpts)
So on the right, we have a decent and typical page: we can’t really see the person who’s hitting our protagonist, his eyes are flat for comedic effect, and we’re in the split-second right after the punch. To tell us the strength of the hit, we have strong motion lines, mild distortion of the character’s face, and some ink splatter for blood from a split lip. In the other page, we get even less info, not even seeing their faces. We still get the sense of the strength of the big guy’s hit, both from the motion lines and by how much the guy dominates the panel.
It gets the point across that someone was just punched in the face, and it does it a lot better than most. (Have you ever seen someone get punched in a shoujo manga? It’s pathetic, they really need to pick up their game over there.)
But in order to talk about this, let’s introduce a timing/effectiveness numbering system:
So 0 is the point of impact. 1 is right before it. -1 is right after it. So a 5 might be “Hitter walking up to Hittee” while a -5 might be “Hitter walking away from struck Hittee”. So that’s the timing numbering. And then let’s add a second number in there to account for power. As you can see in 1:2, it’s the moment before impact, but it looks a hell of a lot more effective than 1. and in -1:2, that impact actually looks like it hurt, as opposed to -1.
I’d put the Slam Dunk panels at -1:1. So they’re both right after the moment of impact, and they’re effective punches, but I’m not thinking that someone’s gonna get knocked unconscious.
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