Helpful tools for new and experienced artists.

biffsmackwell

Hey gang! Since the beginning of this year, I've been picking up lots of very useful (and a couple not-so-useful) materials in preparation for putting together a comic book. Recently, there has been a lot of artists, experienced and new, posting their artwork, and it's been really fun to look at. In addition I know a few people who have been interested in what I've been doing and how I go about doing it, as well as others that I know that just want to learn to start drawing. So here I'll be posting a few things that I've found useful and such for my endeavors. Hope you guys find some use in this junk!

First off, I want to start off with some of the most basic stuff. Anatomy. This is something you'll want to know if you plan on drawing people, whether they're in tights (LIKE THEY SHOULD BE!) or clothes, or armor, or robots, or whatever. Knowing anatomy is important for an artist.

When developing your drawing style, anatomy doesn't have to be exact. It's not a science, it's artistic expression, right? Sure. But you want to know the fundamentals before you go breaking the laws of the human body.

One of the most important things you want to learn about anatomy, that I always tell people, is how muscles connect to each other and react to movement. Many new artists don't take these things into consideration, and muscles often look out of place.

I recently picked up Figure Drawing: Design and Invention, a really nice book on anatomy that covers quite a bit, from the basic building blocks of the body all the way to tension points of clothing. If you're just getting started drawing, or want to brush up on your proportions and general anatomy, this book can prove very useful.


Of course, you can't start drawing without a few good tools. Well, they don't even have to be good. Break into your local elementary school and you can find yourself with a lifetime supply of #2 pencils. For a while I went through a phase where I just used these kinds of pencils to draw with. As long as you have a sharpener on hand, they're really not bad. Lots of people these days swear by mechanical pencils, and that's cool too. Always a sharp enough point, but not great for covering in large areas.

Recently I bought a couple of lead holders. This is kind of the expensive route to take. This one is only 8 bucks, but the lead itself can be pretty pricey. A pack of 12 leads will run you 9 bucks on Amazon. I personally haven't used these particular ones. I currently have a couple packs of Prismacolor leads I got from **** Blick. You'll also need a lead pointer (well, you don't really need one; the cap of the lead holders serves as a sharpener as well). These things will sharpen your lead to two different points, which is pretty useful.

Intermission! I personally try to buy everything I can from Amazon since I'm a Prime member and I'm impatient and want everything in one or two days. However, Amazon doesn't have everything I need when it comes to art supplies, and that's when I go to **** Blick. They've got great prices on stuff, but you know, shipping and all that.

I'd also bought some blue lead for my pencil holders, but while they worked fine, I found something out. Blue lead is made from some waxy stuff, like crayons, and so they're pretty impossible to erase. Hey, sometimes you (okay, I) make mistakes even at the blue pencil phase. So after some poking about I found these blue lead pencils, which are erasable. These work just great, they're pretty cheap for a pack of 12 (about the same, maybe less, than you'd pay for a pack of 12 blue leads for a lead holder).

For those of you unfamiliar with blue lead pencils, they were used because back in the day, photo copiers wouldn't pick up anything drawn in the blue pencil; they would only pick up black areas made in ink. Though modern technology can now actually pick up blue pencil in scans and such, they're still useful for scanning inked comic book art, since you usually want to scan (or run a threshold adjustment post-scan) inks instead of pencils.

Anyway, if you're going to get these blue pencils, you are now left with the dilemma of having to buy a different kind of pencil sharpener. You could buy yourself like a dozen of those little tiny plastic ones that ruined all your pencils in elementary school for like eight cents, or you can do what a proper artist would do, and buy some three dollar sharpeners so you can turn your nose up at those undeserving of such high-class implements of art.

And finally, to hide all the blunders you've made in your masterpieces, you'll want some erasers. First up, some of them click erasers that are pretty easy on paper Fourteen buck for a pack of 12, that ain't not bad. I got some of these, they're kinda neat. For erasing small details. You can also get yourself one of these little gizmos. They're great for blocking out areas you don't want to erase. Good stuff. There's also these art gum erasers, which I still don't know how I feel about em. I know that one time I erased with one of these guys, because I had a large area to erase, and it picked up a lot of ink, and it made me angry. But I'm lazy so I didn't re-ink, and just fixed it up in Photoshop. I'm a cheater. These guys will crumble like a mofo, which leads me to introduce to you the eraser brush. I haven't actually tried one yet, but I just bought it, so whatever. Apparently it's much better than blowing all your eraser shreds away.

And finally, let's talk rulers and templates. My favorite kind are the C Thru rulers. They're marked all over the place to make parallel lines easy, stuff like that. They also have a raised edge, so you won't smear ink all over your drawing. Doing that causes anger. So use a raised edge. Also, these metal ones are often used for inking, and have a higher raised edge than the plastic C Thru ones.

Next up, French curves. These things are freaking infuriating. Good luck finding the one you used when you penciled your drawing during your inking steps. Unless you wanna put sticky notes all over your French curves, they will make you angry. I picked up one of these guys recently, and have not used it yet, but I bet it won't make me angry like the French curve.

Here's some templates that are useful. No one can draw perfect circles, and if you can, then you're no one. So get some templates. I picked up this one and this one. They are invaluable. Last and certainly least, there's this little guy. If you plan on lettering comic books by hand, you deserve a medal. My penmanship is straight crap, so I'm going the digital route.

biffsmackwell

Oh come on, forums. Nickname-for-Richard Blick. :rolleyes:

Anyhow, here's a quick run-down of the inky stuff I've gotten.

For fine lines, I use the ol' Microns. I think this is the smallest they make them.

I also picked up this set of pens, half of which are like the Microns, except they're of larger varying sizes, and the other half which are soft-tipped, which are good for making lines of varying weight. They're pretty good, but they tend to lay down a real thick line.

This guy, however, is my current favorite for inking. The tip is soft, like an actual brush, and it puts down beautiful lines of varying weight, and is pretty easy to get used to. When you poke the ink cartridge in, you'll have to shake it up a bit and then let it sit for a while (my first one took a day before it put down a good amount of ink). But these are a blast to use, and have found no alternative to them.

You will mess up when you ink. Don't worry about it. At first I didn't have a steady stroke while inking because I was worried I was going to screw things up. I inevitably did, and still do. But once I let go of worrying about it, I was able to make larger, looser strokes that look pretty good.

But, if you want to correct your mistakes, I hear that plain-ol White-Out works. Personal experience, it's not great. At least, not if you want to keep inking right away. In one piece I was working on, I used the White-Out, and ink took to the White-Out, but it smudged soon after. Needless to say it made a mess of the picture, so now I usually just try to fix inking foibles in Photoshop.

biffsmackwell

Now I'm going to link a few books that have been pretty instrumental in my learning of the world of comic books.

One of the complaints that I see on these books is usually along the lines of "This book on how to pencil for comic books doesn't teach you how to draw!" or "This book on how to ink doesn't teach you how to ink!" The part that these people don't really pick up on is that these are books that teach a person who is already an artist, how to do these things specifically for comic books.

So anyway, let's get started. I've always been a fan of Marvel comics, and a big fan of Smilin' Stan Lee, so the first two books I picked up were How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics.

I loved reading The Marvel Way. It was written like a thousand years ago, but it was mainly written by John Buscema, an amazing artist from the yesteryear or whatever. They cover a lot of ground in this, but like I said, it's basics. But, basics that will stick with you, which you'll use for a long time to come. Don't expect ground-breaking stuff with this book, though. It's pretty old stuff. But still valuable.

The second, I honestly thought I would like a lot more than I did. It's got a lot of modern-age stuff, like how to incorporate computer use into your comic-making career. However, I found a lot of it to be very disjointed information. It seems Stan has gathered information from several artists from, which all give their tips and tricks here and there, but it's not cohesive. My first red flag with this book was when I saw that one of the first examples of drawings came from a cartoonist. Obviously not someone who would be doing much in Marvel comics. Second was when I got to the Perspective section, which talked a lot more about the relation of body parts to each other (like one person's knees to another person's knees) and how they relate to the horizon line. Not a whole lot about actually teaching perspective. And then the description of how and why to use foreshortening. They say use it for dramatic effect. They don't say that foreshortening only works in close-ups, and it'll look completely weird from a wide angle.

I said before that these books touch on specifics, and don't actually tell you how to draw and all that, but the chapters on perspective and foreshortening are nothing that an accomplished or amateur artist doesn't already know. Lots of disjointed info there. I won't completely write the book off though. It does have some good info.

So, after reading those books, I started looking to DC to teach me more about comic-making. I don't know why, but I had the hunch that DC would stick to the more traditional methods of doing things (based completely on nothing but guessing), and I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of their methods.

Intermission! I recently got into the older style comic books, and found that I really loved the entire process of how comics were made then, and the style of their artwork, especially in comparison to the content-light comic books I've read that are published today. So in writing my own comic, I've been trying to stick to more traditional methods, which is why I'm inking with real ink, instead of in Photoshop, and things like that. I know my limits though, and that's why I won't be lettering by hand!

So here are some books I picked up from DC, all of which I've been very pleased with.

At first I started with Inking, because it's the area I'm least familiar with. I've never really tried inking before, so I needed the help. However, I really wish that this book had taught me methods of actually putting ink to paper. But no dice! The book does teach you a lot on what kind of lines to put where, what your job as an inker is, bringing a composition to life by putting ink in the right places, etc. It's very valuable, but I think at some points it was a bit redundant.

Next up there's the Writing book. I loved this one. It teaches a lot of the basic building blocks of writing a story, how to develop characters, pacing, etc. Nothing bad to say about this one. I was pleasantly surprised though, at how much I'd picked up from reading old Spider-Man comics, that I had already applied to my story before reading this book. It showed me that I was on the right track, and and that they were using methods that they used back in the days for writing, which pleased me quite a bit.

A couple of other books I've picked up but not finished reading through, are Pencilling and Coloring & Lettering. I'll talk about these more as I read them, but so far the Pencilling one is good. Has some nice, solid info. Coloring and Lettering, my brother already read that one, and he said there was some really fantastic info there. They talk about different types of coloring, effective ways to use (and not use) fonts and letters and such. Flipping through it it looked pretty good.

Finally, the thing that got me inspired to finally start a comic book (it's something I've been wanting to do since I was around 10 years old), this little handy guide. I'd picked it up when our own BobFromAccounting pointed me toward the Kickstarter. Once it arrived, I was really intrigued by the tools that the pros use, and ended up picking up a lot of them to try out. This book/sketchbook is a pretty quick read, and has lots of practice pages. one part I found really useful was their head templates that you can just draw over. Good for practicing awkward angles. Some good info in here, but the instructional parts are very bare-bones.

Anyhow, that's all I got for now! Hope some of this stuff comes in handy for you guys. I'm happy to answer any questions you all may have, but I'm not like no pro or anything.

Anyway, have fun, hope you enjoyed!