Comic Book Drawing: How To Draw Venom

 Venom is one of my favourite villains to draw, because I'm a fan of the comics and also because he is quite easy to draw too, the very nature of venom is to mimic the classic look of spidermans black costume, since his first appearances when he was drawn by Todd Mcfarlane back in amazing spiderman he has undergone many changes in design, particularly on his face, he starte out looking more like a human figure in costume, but as the hatred for spiderman took over, the alien symbiote costume changed the features to look more evil as he is known now with his pointy teeth and long alien tongue.

Here we will learn how to draw venom, but explore some possibilities of layout and character design too.

 When starting off drawing venom, we do small sketches and other stuff to determine a layout that we might like, nearly all comic book characters demand to strike a pose and venom is no different, to start off Eddie Brock (venom) is alot larger than Peter Parker(Spiderman)and so we have to deal with that fact, Venoms muscle mass is larger and so we have to get that into proportion on the page and construct the lines before we even attempt the final details like the white spider design on Venoms chest.

First sketches are vital to get the right balance betwen proportions and anatomy, so that later on down the road we can just add all the relevant details for the Venom character.

See the above small sketches on possible poses and layouts for venom and then see to the right which one I decided on, sometimes it's a usual process of draft drawing until you find the one that you like and want to draw as a finished piece.

 Once the key areas of the structure and the pose has been roughly finalized in the draft drawing we can start to have some fun in determining the characters pose further and how it will look once you start to sketch everything in, like with darker pencil lines that will bring it all together and clarify the muscles and the form as a whole.

You can see to the right that I have drawn in a few details but left some of them out, this is so I can add them right at the end, because some aspects of the drawing could change if I pencil them things in now, right now you need to consider all of the underlying basic structures so that the final details can be added with confidence.

 Venoms costume is black in the comics and the lighter parts are blue, this helps to contrast against spidermans costume and so in shading the dark parts of Venoms costume we can therefore verify the characters form through separating the dark areas and the light parts.

This stage really makes the venom character stand out when you add the shading, just remember to try and build up the form and improve upon it through the balance of the light and dark areas.

I use a 2b pencil to add the darkened costume parts as it produces a darker edge than a typical hb pencil, so doing this stage now, helps you later on for the inking stage of your drawing is all you have to do is follow the lines and black areas to fill in.

 The inking stage is something that I really enjoy doing and on our Venom drawing we can improve some of the pencil lines and bits of the drawing that either fell flat due to some simple mistakes or just by adding simple inking techniques applied to your drawing can improve the drawing as a whole.

I use for inking a fine roller ball gel pen for the thin lines and a permanent medium tip Sharpie to fill in the large areas of black needed for the costume, only ever rarely have I used a paintbrush, but when I do, I use indian black ink as that is the standard comic book inking medium of choice, or if you find a paintbrush to difficult you can use a dip pen, which I am beginning to like more and more these days.

When you have inked your Venom drawing, you'll see that the contrast of the black drawn areas to the papers white surface, just makes your drawings really stand out.

Now go draw venom, because soon I will be drawing Venoms offspring - Carnage!