What is penciling?

Penciling is one of the manga creation stages in which you draw a pencil sketch referring to a manga script before the inking stage. In the manga process, there’s often a first-draft pencil sketch and a second-draft pencil sketch. The first one is called Ne-mu, pronounced like “Name,” which is a very rough pencil drawing, with panels and speech bubbles to create an overall page draft.

We do this to get a good visual plan of the page, and it’s important to show it to an editor, a designer, and/or a scriptwriter if you’re working with a publisher. After getting approval, we move on to a second pencil sketch, which is more detailed and easier to work on with inking pens. In the image on the right, we can see the whole process of the manga page creation, including the Ne-mu on the very left top and the second penciling sketch next to it:

Figure 3.1: A sample image of a manga page creation process

When we draw Ne-mu...