How To Draw Comic Books

Since I was quite young, comic books have been an influencing part in my life, from the early eighties onwards, they have under gone an evolutionary change, with the quality of production values and a massive array of stylized artists achieving critical acclaim worldwide.

The top comics of these early days were marvel, dc and image came along in the early 90's with such iconic and powerful storytelling and art, that they made me want to start to write and draw my own comics or graphic novels, whilst I obviously consider myself as a novice in the sense of not having anything published yet(although I have had a few comic strips printed in a few rare fanzines that have a low print run)

But now with the event of having the equipment and the luxury of a computer of my own, it is now I am preparing an onslaught of massive proportions, a mammoth 8 - 10 graphic novels all originally written and drawn by me, featuring stories that I have been thinking about since what seems like forever.

When it comes to think up your comic book, the page layout makes or breaks your ideal comic book creation.

The pages have to be laid out and pre defined beforehand, so that you have a clear idea of what goes where and the progression of the story can be told.

A simple story breakdown or a synopsis will help you outline the story, one side of A4 will do, pin it up near your computer where you will be able to review it if anything needs to change, also I find that if you take the story break down and re read it a few times, you may get ideas for actual story elements to be laid out in little sketch thumbnails, thumbnails will help you to get the best possible layouts designed without wasting clean sheets of paper or illustration board.

However, before any breakdowns occur you will have to already have character sketches and profiles already thought out, so that you are able to continue with the evolution of the story process.

Always remember that each page doesn't always have to be the same, there are splash pages, split panel pages, double spread layouts and well the choice is up to you, you are the artist, just make sure that your page layout is easy to follow, with action happening from left to right in sequential order.

Other notes to consider:

Size formats - Some sizes of comic books are sized and proportioned in different ways, and you will need to take this into account.

Allow room for dialogue - Drawing comic books are great, but to go with the art there obviously has to be writing and words to advance the story and character development, so make sure you consciously leave space for fonts and words to be added later.

When the important part of the layout process is finished, then the next step is to draw and develop the drawings so that they are clearer, and what you intended, this is the best step for changing anything you don't like.

This step will also introduce the light and dark elements that need to be present in any drawing that you create and the natural process of adding form and structure to your characters and other designs.

Inking your pages follow straight on from the pencils stage and adds definition to your art as well it clears up some issues with clarity.

The clean professional image of your art shines after this process, also if there are any errors or line breaks, these can all be removed at this stage, smudge, marks of any kind can be Whited out with a solution called process white, this is a specialist pain that when you paint it onto a surface that is later to be printed, nothing will show up after printing, so this is very useful stuff, especially if you are prone to a shaky hand when inking often.

A lot of shading methods are achieved at this stage too and many effects and techniques can be employed to convey shade with line hatching, stippling, scuffing and other ways.

A good balance of black and white areas within your art should define your characters and the action or the story that unfolds.

Colouring is often dealt with by colour separators now, but with the notion of having your own computer and a decent Photoshop type program, professional colouring is possible in the comfort of your own home, just remember to have lots of disk space or lots of external memory that you can upload everything on to disks, this also compacts all of your image data, for later use.

Pencil crayons, felt tips, whatever you use, just remember to make it as clean looking as possible so that you won't have that much work to do later, cleaning marks and smudges, always consider what filters and layers you need for each page and keep a note on them, sometimes you can apply to many layers and filters and then before you know it you've gone too far with them.

Lately, I have been experimenting with just adding watercolour washes of mid tone greys to shade artwork on one of my horror stories, and it's turning out awe-inspiring results.

There are still some artists out there that prefer the retro look of just black and white artwork with no colour at all, while this is good to see the untouched artwork and drawings, but consider adding or even experimenting with paints to create atmosphere within your art.