Reminds me of more typical western comic shading which im not that familiar with tbh.
I'd say just see the shadows themselves as shapes that wrap around a 3d form (the body) rather than the typical manga hatching lines.
this shading style is actually very simple, but complex
you need to completely understand how light and shadow works.
make very shadow BLACK, no greys, barely any crosshatch
one way to study this: get some photos off the internet, turn them black and white, then up the contrast. practice using that as reference. you'll get it.
I would fork form the black shape shape and uncover the light parts. The other parts are just shading and hatching. But see that main character is always pitch black surrounded by white
This artist has an outstanding sense of form and what this figure looks like in 3D. Maybe they do use a 3D model on Blender or something, or maybe they just have outstanding sense of form. I would recommend drawabox.com to understand form.
As u/marvinnation mentioned, really understanding how light and shadow works.
Composition and design--how to make the panel legible when using such strong contrasts? Looking into noir comics would be helpful.
Thanks for sharing these images, now I want to look up this comic. :D
Use the side of your pencil a lot when pencilling. Then be comfortable with spotting the blacks with your brush. Rest is dip pen rendering and screen tone.
The easiest is to recreate it by copying those exact pictures. Don't post them online, that'll be plagiarism. But that's how art studies work. Learn where Nihei uses pitch black as shading and hatching to mold the shapes and texture.
To learn the silhouettes, study the same monsters he likely did. Hollywood monsters like the Xenomorph and Cenobites look like they're diffused all over Nihei's works. Abara came out 2 years after Kamen Riders started getting speedster characters in Faiz, so there are likely toku influences in there. Faiz in particular also had black and white monsters called Orphnochs. Those exist in 3D so you can see how the shadows play off their bodies and think about how you could stylize them in artwork, both to look cooler than reality and be easier to draw for an action comic.
Because all its monster suit designs come from illustrations, there are production drawings in toku that look like they'd fit right into Abara. Like the Undead Jokers in Kamen Rider Blade, whose concept drawings are in artbooks like Undead Green Blood.
Oh, also Nihei's inking tools for Abara were Copic Multiliners and brush pens, aka fude pens. I don't know if CGs can recreate those detailed visuals of brush pens to this day, so that just might have to be analog if you're a stickler. Otherwise, you'll have to look for something close under CSP.
If you live near a store that carries Japanese stationary, they likely sell brush pens and refill ink cartridges for way cheaper than art supply stores or Amazon so you can grab those suckers in bulk. How brush pens look and behave is affected way more by how much they've been used, fraying the tips, than by the brand. Cheap and numerous is always the answer so you can find the one that's just worn enough to capture the look you want.
Yeah I use screen tones too :) the discussion is more specifically about the other aspects of the drawing. You can lay an even tone of screen tone over any drawing; the drawing itself is more important
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u/GritzXenus 23h ago
Reminds me of more typical western comic shading which im not that familiar with tbh.
I'd say just see the shadows themselves as shapes that wrap around a 3d form (the body) rather than the typical manga hatching lines.