How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way introduces some of the ideas and concepts involved in drawing and more specifically in creating comic books. The type of topics covered include:
- Tools of the trade
- Drawing basics
- Drawing the human figure and more importantly, the super hero!
- Drawing the human face – male and female
- Drawing a sense of action and movement
- The effects of perspective
- Composition, i.e. a complete panel with shading, people and action
- Creating your first comic book
- Drawing the comics cover
As you can probably tell from the list above the book is fairly comprehensive and gives you a good grounding in comic book art. But also much more than that. This book is a good course for anyone who is interested in drawing period. The technique of building up a skeleton of a figure and then fleshing it out is simply an excellent way of drawing people, and one that most (if not all) fantasy artists etc. also use. This cross over can also be seen in the section on seeing the underlying shape behind an object. For example, a gun is made up of a rectangular box for the handle, and then various cylinders for the barrel etc.
I have read other books on drawing and they all say these same points. However, the way that it is explained in How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way really hit home, for me at least. This is probably due to 2 factors, firstly the writing style is very chatty, friendly and encouraging. The second factor is the quantity of illustration work you, the reader, do and that represented in the book. What do I mean? Throughout Stan Lee and John Buscema ask you to draw, and this is something that you don’t often see in many of these books (yet it is so obvious). They will give you a completed image and you will have to go through the steps they’ve taught you to try and re-create it. And the first few times they go through and show you each step as well, really helping to engage and help you learn.
This process is even used when you draw your first comic book page. Essentially they give you a script and you have to compose a page that is representative. After you have given it a go they then show you what the actual page looked like and how they built it up. This is good because it allows you to exercise your creative freedom but you still get to see what the professionals did!
All in all this book should be useful to anyone who is interested in creating comic books and other composition/line based drawings such as fantasy art. I have been using it for many years and still find it is a great reference guide even now.
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