This week’s SMA MASTER CLASS, the future manga stars from SILENT MANGA AUDITION®, member is the duo from Thailand, Suthamon and Preau ☆ They have a knack for creating cinematic action in their manga. They showed us their techniques for creating such pieces. Good Morning Suthamon and Preau!

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INTERVIEW WITH Suthamon and Preau.   “We think working as a duo will give a better story and better illustration.”   1. Tell us a little bit about where you live? Preau: I live in Bangkok, Thailand.  I like to visit many places near by the “Chao Phraya River,” book stores, or art museums. Reading some art books always fires me up and encourages me to go forward. Suthamon: I am from Thailand. Right now I live in Berlin, Germany.  I’m a graphic designer at Aeria Games.       2. How did you first meet? Why did you decide to work as a duo? Preau: We both graduated from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang facility of Architecture.  We were in the same class and worked together many times in the same group.  And also the many University events that made everyone in the faculty become friends easily. We think working as a duo will give a better story and better illustration.       3. How do you keep in contact with each other and how do you divide the manga creation process? Preau: We use Dropbox to share our works. Suthamon mainly takes care of the whole story and I draw all the  illustrations. If we have something to talk about—change the story or some point in the picture—we will contact each other via Facebook and Line.   4. What are the advantages and difficulties of creating manga as a team? Suthamon: Less workload because we help each other in every process. We always polish the story, the way we tell the story, and every single image together in order to make them the best we can. The difficult part would be creating the story and illustration that we both are satisfied with.   5. What’s your work space like? How about the tools you use? Let us see it! Preau: I use paintbrushes, G-pens, Fountain Pens, Color Markers for shading the image. I gathered them little by little from art shops/stationery stores. In additional I have Cintiq (Touch Screen Tablets) for Digital drawing and for finalizing my art work.       6. Who/what influenced you to begin and keep on drawing? “That Manga made me to be a manga lover and encouraged me to start drawing.” Preau: Tetsuo Hara-sensei’s “Fist of the North Star” is a great fun Manga. Kenshiro is not only awesome and tremendous, but also full of morality. I think children growing up in that era wound be that tremendous and full of morality too.  That Manga made me to be a manga lover and encouraged me to start drawing. Then my dad taught me since I was a small kid. I continued practicing by drawing my favorite Manga characters that I watched, such as “Samurai Trooper,” “Saint Seiya,” “Fist of the North Star,” and “Dragonball Z.”  After that, I cannot say I practiced actually.  At that time I drew my favorite manga characters just for fun. I drew them on everything like books, notebooks, or text books. But, when I entered university I had to learn how to draw properly.       7. Tell us how you schedule your creations! How long does it take for each step in the process? Which step is your favorite and least favorite? Suthamon: First the story!! We start to talk about what should be the theme or direction of our story. After agreeing, I need around 2weeks-1month to create the best 3 stories from different ideas. Then we will discuss/change/adapt the best story, which may take a bit more time for me to rework. After we got the final story, Preau needs 2-3 days to create a rough storyboard and then he starts to draw!! I will do the tone and coloring and this drawing process may take around 2-4weeks depending on how busy we are. “We start to talk about what should be the theme or direction of our story.”       8. Tell us about your preferences when drawing manga? What kind of advice do you have for creating characters? Preau: I love drawing an action style because of the many mangas that I have read when I was young. But, I still think that I need to improve a lot in how to design a character design to be more unique, deep/dimension, and background/story behind. I think I am not good enough to give an advice yet.       9. Tell us about you preference for manga storytelling! What kind of advice do you have for creating a story? “I start the story in the dark and slowly turn it from dark story to bright story…” Suthamon: I love a bit dark and unexpected story ending.  In “Turning-Point” (SMA4) I tried to make this story more exciting and more complicated than before. I start the story in the dark and slowly turn it from dark story to bright story and put something a bit surprising in the end to make it not too simple. It should not be to difficult to understand. My advice is just read a lot and travel a lot. That will give you many ideas and inspiration.       10. Where do you get your ideas from? Preau: Mostly from movies, music, and traveling experiences. Movie gives me ideas about the concept of plot, scene, and how to tell the story in many directions. Music inspires me from their lyrics to an idea to draw, but mostly time-killing during drawing. Traveling affects me more directly, but can be used in compositional manga frames or background drawing. I’ve had opportunities to visit a couple of countries. Each of them are different and have their own sceneries.  But, the country that impressed me the most is Japan because of its inner beauty, the varieties, and the unique culture. This is rarely found in other country. Suthamon: Mostly music, especially the music that I cannot understand clearly (Instrument, foreigner songs, or unknown music). That kind of music can drive me to the unexpected imagination though their beat and feelings. Sometime I read and translate the lyrics and found that the song that inspired me to compose a story is the opposite.   11. Which manga or manga creator influenced your creative style? What impressed you about those works? Preau: From many artists. Eiichiro Oda: His ideas and presentation are incredible. Inoue Takehiro: His brush strokes and his drawing style are charming and outstanding. And many more. They effected me in different ways, such as concept, perspective, background and how to communicate to readers. Suthamon: Haruki Murakami is the one of my favorite writers. His rhythm and atmosphere is really something. Naoki Urasawa is my favorite Manga and Story artist. His stories make me explode and he has composed in many story styles and all of them are amazing.   12. What other skills or experiences help you create manga? Preau: Watching movies helps a lot. It’s a different way to tell the story, composition, and scenes order.   13. What kind of advice have you received from the SMAC! editorial team? Preau: How to tell the story like Manga, how to make the story more fun and exciting, how to create a better character, and how to choose the angle/point of view/composition in order to make it easier to understand and more fun. And when I was in Japan there was a workshop with Tsukasa Hojo-sensei. He brought a Manga and explained how to use the direction of the character to guide the reader to the next frame/page smoothly. That workshop improved my Storyboard skills. “Tsukasa Hojo-sensei explained how to use the direction of the character to guide the reader to the next frame/page smoothly.”       14. What are the specifics areas you focus on when creating comics for SMA? Suthamon: Sometime we created a bit complicated story, so we needed to think more about how to present the story in many possible ways. For example, in “Home” (SMA3) that was my first time in composing a silent manga, so I tried to make it a very simple story, nothing complicated, try to make it as easy as possible to understand. “I tried to make it a very simple story, nothing complicated”       15. Where there any moments you felt, “I’m glad to have entered this contest!”? Preau: Many many times.  This Contest gave me opportunities to publish my works, have great experiences in Japan, educating me how to draw and make a better story, and much more.  I really feel thankful to this Contest for making us better Manga creators than we were before. Seeing Tetsuo Hara-sensei, my favorite manga artist, in Japan was one of my biggest honors. Moreover, he taught me about how to design a character and how to make it more deep/dimensional and more unique.       16. Are you planning any future projects? What genre would you like to attempt in the future? Suthamon: Yes, Since Preau wants to draw something action and I want to create a little bit of dark story.  So we are thinking about it.

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Thank you for your time Suthamon and Preau senpai’s! We can’t wait to read your next action manga with a bit of a dark story! Thailand is bursting at the seams with creative manga talent!  We want to see who will take that talent to the SMA Master Class. Please show your worth by joining SILENT MANGA AUDITION® and start creating today!  And don’t forget to comment and share!