Drawing tips?

peekachoo

Hey guys.
Doing my LC at the moment. Art paper has an James Bond extract depicting a man shooting another guy driving a car and I wanted to make a comic book style page as my exam piece.
I'm a big fan of Gabriel Bá and others and although I'm a fan I have not much of a clue how to go about drawing them.
I'm fairly handy at drawing but can anyone link me towards tips on drawing this kind of style or tutorials etc?
Thanks in advance!

Ring4Fea

1 take a dump on your wacom and set fire to it. Real comics are almost always done by hand.

Get some very soft non-hardening clay and spend 3 afternoons sculpting faces and torsos for nothing but your own satisfaction. It invigorates the portions of your neurology which can improve your drawing and painting skills.


Get print outs of any bullsh1t masquerading as art by Caicedo of Frisky Dingo infamy, pi$$ on it then light it on fire with tiny doggy doo doos. Which have more artistic merit than any digi-barf "created" by Caicedo.

Fysh

I find it hard to take someone seriously as an artist when they're that dismissive about drawing with tablets. "Real" comics are anything with words and pictures used to tell a story - how they're made or displayed is irrelevant. IMO

Ring4Fea

I completely concede that 2/3ds of my post above was outrageously bitchy.

I also add that only the middle was ever to be taken seriously and is still helpful. But Caicedo is still a hack.

Ring4Fea

Fysh is correct in the spirit of the law RE what Fysh said about tablets, but not the letter of it or the way in which such a sentiment is abused by the lazy and hack-minded. More on that below. But first, in the spirit of what Fysh said, one of the best panels I ever did was on the plastic packaging of a dvd inked with a dvd/cd marker over pencils scrawled with a 10 cent pencil on the back of crumpled Christmas wrapping. Basically a tad of talent plus bloody minded work ethic plus a Boxing Day headache. Everyone who sees the panel on the smartphone or webpage thinks it's traditional tools on traditional bristol board. It worked because of dedication to the hard stuff and never being one of the million thimbleweenies looking for a shortcut. Which sadly is the reason why too many people turn to tablets when making comics. Or things they refer to as comics. Again see below.

A non traditional technique which works wonders is to draw the panels individually, PHYSICALLY and resize them as needed digitally and have them as separate items to arrange as you see fit on the page. Allowing you to alter page layout at any time and/or reuse panels or sections of panels THAT ARE PROPERLY DRAWN. As per Fysh's post, these drawings can be kn anything. Example: the penciling can be done on a brown paper bag or aught else. Then flattened out on a hard surface, at which point you place sheet of frosted architectural film over it and affix that securely. You go over the drawing lightly but firmly with a 2h pencil and refine all elements and solidify the tenebrous areas, making sure not to smudge the surface, then you take a 2b or b or hb pencil and "carve out" the final lines you want as your desired final image.

Scan it and work the exposure/contrast. Works a treat. IF YOU PUT IN AT LEAST 2% OF THE TIME YOU SPEND ON VIDEOGAMES INTO PHYSICAL DRAWING PRACTICE BEFOREHAND.

When people learn to draw or paint by hand before the tablet, like Bolland, they make tablet magic.

When they are too lazy to do anything "hard" and go directly to the tablet because it is the path of least resistance, in comics, they make wacom-wankage. Nothing else. Ever. Fysh's reply carries water if the person with the tablet has the same work ethic as Fitzpatrick or Steranko or Nicole Scott.

If they want to do something that takes less than 1.5 hrs to complete and call it a "page", then they don't have that work ethic and it's not comic art - it's a cartoon. Or graffiti created digitally. Never the same. Equal but different.

Operetta is not hip hop. Crumping is not modern jazz. Cartooning is not comics. All equal, NOT the same.

Admittedly, RE vector based art designed and animated for festivals and concerts, the above statement does not apply, but we are looking at comics in this thread.

Fysh

Being awkward more for the sake of trying to keep what is (to me at least) an interesting conversation going, I do think that working with physical media has no more guarantee of leading to good (or great) artwork than working with digital media - there are plenty of bad, bad Direct Market comics that could be used as examples here.

I think one of the issues that arises with digital media is the way that it makes it even easier to trace from any given source without having a real understanding for either character design or composition, leading to Greg Land Syndrome. And if there's anything we should have less of, it's that. I do wish that more people in comics would focus more on learning the fundamentals properly - superhero comics in particular have a dreadful tendency to excuse some absolutely godawful anatomy or basic perspective errors because "they look kewl" or "they have real energy" or any other way of phrasing the same excuse for godawful craft.

Although I will quibble a bit with one point in your post above - drawing individual panels physically and scanning them can work very well, so long as you don't need to change any individual panel's size by more than about 20% either way - otherwise you get that problem with panels that have impossibly fine (or coarse) linework compared to the rest of the page. Which, for certain styles, can actually work well - but for others it really doesn't. (For example I remember a few times in 100 Bullets you could see that Eduardo Risso had almost certainly re-used the same artwork for a panel that was used in increasingly large size on the same page; the composition was invariably very nice but the difference in line size was generally quite apparent and worked against the page overall...)

Ring4Fea

Too true. and talk about awkward: I added the separate panels bit to support alternative-2-traditional stuff and play devil's advocate. But I brace for pitchforks and torches as I agree with you in my own way thusly:

You are 100% in what you said about direct market made by hand comics sucking as bad or sometimes worse, as evidenced by the defecation on paper afflicted upon the world entitled "Johnny the Homicidal Maniac".

Which people love for the same reason they love craptacular cooking shows, Japanese 'humiliate the contestant' gameshows and DIY fixer-upper shows ~ they look at that stuff and the narcissistic ganglion in their brain sparks off because they say to themselves "I can do THAT". And they are right. Anybody can do the garbage Jhonen made into a pseudo comic. Which he himself said pretty much at an expo in the San Fran Bay Area. While being honest and stating the comic was merely a leg up to get his animation deal going (which to his credit, he did)

But to return to a completely non-sarcastic tone and realm... our student above asked about Ba. I respect Ba's success but as you might imagine I am no fan. Then again I can't stomach The Sovereign Seven or the art of Whilce Portacio (great man, though, most gracious and kind and polite) or [not using the name] the graffiti based guy doing stuff using Nova Corps. material. Distortion of the human figure (or a Sidhe figure or Fir Bolg figure, for that matter) should be by choice, not default.

Fysh

I have a soft spot for JTHM but I'd never deny that the art has various "issues", some of which are disguised a bit by Vasquez's style.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had elsewhere about the relative merits of Kirby and Moebius, and I took the line that while Kirby had made some significant contributions to the US comics scene I don't think he can hold a candle to Moebius (in fact thinking about it I don't think Kirby compares well to Eisner, for that matter). Yes, his artwork is full of energy/kinetic/whatever and he was a substantial contributor to the idea of moving US comics towards having more of the story told in a visual fashion, but that doesn't stop it being kind of ugly to me. Kirby clearly understands anatomy much better than, say, Rob Liefeld, but nonetheless a lot of his distorted anatomy stuff still just looks wrong to me. Whereas Moebious' artwork, on the other hand, has always looked great regardless of which style he's adopted...

Ring4Fea

Very good points. The thing about Kirby is that his contribution is more/truly about design. His tricep and lats and quad structures were always hard for most people and even as a kid who loved Kirby, by the early 70s Captain America it was hard to take. But the designs and the IMAGINATION he brought to bear on the look of every costume and robot and alien was incomparable. Gene Colan's suave noir Gil Kane's anatomical genius couldn't be argued but their costumes and tableaus, and those of almost every DC artist until the 80s save for Grell and Cockrum, were like plain mashed potatoes without even a pinch of salt, much less butter.

oddly enough there's a Gene Colan page on ebay that gets advertised on the Ba page on a fan art collection site. And it looks A LOT like a Ba page and Ba had cited Colan as an inspiration once. Only better of course - Ba is overly smitten with Tim Sale.

Ring4Fea

70s Grell and Cockrum. Sorry, tiny touchpad keys lead to errors.