Tag: comics

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My Recommended Art Books

Often I’m asked what books people can look at to learn more about art and honing their skills. I decided to put together a list of books that have been helpful to me in the past and/or I currently own and refer to often. This is my own personal list of what books I find helpful. These titles may or may not help you in your art journey as well, as all artists are different and learn in different ways. So here are the books that I’ve found helpful in the past!

This list contains Amazon affiliate links. Purchasing items through links in this article gives me a small commission on Amazon (which I will then use to purchase more art books and supplies…)

Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain

This is THE book that I recommend to anyone who says to me “I want to learn how to draw but I have no idea how to get started! I can’t even draw a stick figure!”. I used this book a looooong time ago (like… 1998-long-time-ago) but I can’t imagine that it has changed that much over the years. Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain teaches you how to switch to “Right-Brain Mode” and see the world as an artist. With lots of easy to complete lessons that won’t take complicated or hard to obtain supplies, this book is accessible and a great start for training your brain how to discern basic shapes and start drawing what you actually see. Note that this is not a comic or cartooning drawing book, but a book on drawing from observation, which is absolutely essential no matter what sort of art you want to do!

I used this book back in high school, as I said. At the time I was a decent (for my age) artist with both drawing from life and cartooning. My skills after doing only half of this book saw a drastic improvement, which is why I absolutely recommend this book to anyone who wants to get start with art.

Vanishing Point: Perspective for Comics

Learning perspective is essential for anyone wanting to draw, whether that be drawing comics and cartoons or otherwise. Even drawing the human figure at any angle other than straight-on requires some knowledge of perspective! I got this book for Christmas one year not long ago because I wanted to brush up on my perspective skills for my comic panel backgrounds. Not to sound dramatic, but this perspective book pretty much changed my life. The material is presented in a way that’s easy to understand even for perspective beginners. But there are also tips on advanced perspective drawing that will benefit those who have been drawing in perspective for a long time. I asked for this as a refresher course and got so much more than that, as it taught me tricks for how to make drawing in perspective easier that I had never seen before. The exercises in this book are easy to follow no matter what your level of skill is with perspective.

Figure Drawing For All Its Worth

If you want to learn about human anatomy, Andrew Loomis is where it’s at. Not only does this book go over ideal proportions, muscle groups, and features, but it also talks about foreshortening, proportions in perspective, and how to draw the figure in different centers of balance and motion. Not only is Andrew Loomis’ work fantastic to look at, but reading the text is helpful as well since it’s full of tips and tricks.

Dynamic Figure Drawing 

Burne Hogarth was one of the first anatomy books I had when I decided I wanted to be an artist back in my high school days. I can remember going to the bookstore and looking at Dynamic Figure Drawing over and over again, coveting it for the longest time before I had the money to buy it. Sadly I either lost or had to sell my copy around the time I was in college or so. But I never forgot looking at the cool dynamic figures with several sets of arms, legs, or heads drawn on a single pose to show the versatility of the pose and to show the human body in motion. This is not just a book of anatomy drawings, but a guide to how to draw the human figure in motion and with foreshortening.

How To Draw Manga: Illustrating Battles

Okay, okay, look, I know that a lot of the How To Draw Manga series is generally regarded as being “garbage”. The thing is though that many of them DO make good reference books. And the other thing is that this book is one of the few out there that actually goes into the theory of drawing all those cool, dynamic fight scenes that we all love in comics and manga. This is another book that I bought back in high school and lost when I was in college. (Maybe I had a book thief sneaking into my dorm at night or something? Or maybe I just loaned my beloved reference books out to the wrong people, who knows.) This book always stuck with me though in my mind because it doesn’t just have nice pictures in it to reference from. The text also describes the theory of why to draw the figures the way they show to illustrate motion. This book covers many topics of drawing battles, from different kinds of unarmed strikes and throws to fighting with weapons and also drawing battle damage on characters. (Doing research for this blog post, I found this book used on Amazon for less than $2 and I confess that I love it so much I bought it immediately to replace my long, long lost copy. I can’t wait for it to get here!)

Understanding Comics and Making Comics 

The above header should read “anything by Scott McCloud” but I wanted to give links to actual books. If you’ve ever wanted to understand how and why comics work or don’t work, and the tactics of visual storytelling, Scott McCloud is the guy to read. Plus his books are presented as comics, so they’re easy to read and there’s lots of pictures. It’s a win-win!

Color Theory: An Essential Guide

This is a short book that is a great introduction to color theory. It introduces the concepts and theories without getting too bogged down in things and making color theory even more confusing than it can be. I still struggle with color theory because it’s such a vast topic with so many variables. But this book is a fantastic primer on the concepts for the beginning artist and I highly recommend it.

How To Make Webcomics

Okay, so How To Make Webcomics is a little outdated now as far as some of the topics go. There have been so many changes to technology and the convention scene since it came out that the age of this book really shows in spots. That being said, it’s also still a good reference on getting started in the practice and business of making webcomics. You just have to remember to take the advice in it with a grain of salt, because so much of the comics landscape has changed a lot since this book came out. It’s also geared more toward “gag-a-day” strips and so, as the creator of a long-form story comic I found a lot of the marketing type advice didn’t apply to me. It does have sections on writing, creating characters, prepping your comic images for posting, web-site design, site hosting, and interacting with your audience though, and those sorts of topics can be applicable to almost all comic creators no matter what your you’re creating your comics in.

So those are my personal recommendations for books for beginning artists. Have you read any of these books? Which books have you found helpful on your own art journey?

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My Mission and Philosophy

Writing a blog about my artistic mission and philosophy feels a lot like a college art assignment, but I’ll do my best. It feels a bit like writing an artist’s statement, actually!

So what can I say about my mission and philosophy of creating art? I feel like I am, at my deepest heart of hearts, a storyteller. Whether I’m writing a novel, or a blog, or a comic, I like to tell a story. And when I’m drawing, whether it’s sketching or illustrating or doing sequential art, I still like to tell a story. Even a drawing of one character can tell a story. I keep this in mind most of the time when I’m drawing something. Some of my art (especially warm-up sketches) are just character studies. But they can be so much more. I love when I can create an illustration or a sketch that tells a story about the character or the creature on the page.

My Horses of the World series of drawings started off with this idea in mind. The vintage map pages that I use to draw on are beautiful, and nearly anything drawn on them would look wonderful. But the reason I choose the pages I do, and the reason I draw horses on them is first to tell a story. Each breed is drawn on the map page of the country where the breed originates from. An Arabian on Saudi Arabia, a Fjord horse on Norway, a Heihe on China. It can be easy here in the United States to see this different breeds and forget where they come from, both in the U.S. and in the world. We can see a Percheron or a Paso Fino and not really think about where that breed has come from, and what it means for a horse to be of that breed. So I hope these images make people think about the horses they love and the journeys they’ve made to come into our lives.

But even something like a quick character illustration or character design can tell a deeper story. For instance, one of my warmup sketches in early 2018, tells a story despite being fairly simple. The character in this sketch is from a novel series that I’ve been working on for a long time. I published the first back in 2009 and am currently working on the second book. The second book takes place two years after the first, so this character has aged a little bit but is still fairly young. In this sketch she is running late, as is obvious from her pose of running and her looking at her wrist to see the time on her watch.

But what else does the illustration tell us? I specifically put her in a school uniform so there is an idea of her age and that she attends a private high school. If I’d dressed her in her casual clothing it could have been more difficult to get a sense of her age, other than she’s obviously on the younger side. In different clothes and without the bow in her ponytail, she could be a young professional woman on her way to a meeting who’s just realized she’s about to miss her train. I gave her a messenger bag, but the bag is decorated with cute keychains and pins, another hint to her young age and to her cheerful personality.

These are the kinds of details that I think about when I try to tell a story with an illustration. Drawing images like this, that have a meaning and aren’t just a character standing around doing nothing, are my favorite types of images to draw!

One of the reasons I wanted to become an artist and writer and to tell stories in the first place is because of the stories I grew up with when I was a child. My parents read to us a lot when we were young. My brother and I were reading books at high reading levels from a young age. I’m the youngest of four children, and all three of my siblings are boys. I grew up as a bit of a tomboy (naturally, with three brothers!) in the 1980’s. My closest brother had bad asthma when we were young, and since he was my best friend we were inside much of the time. We played with toys, of course, but we also watched Saturday Morning Cartoons and such, especially after we got cable when I was a little bit older.

I remember watching shows like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and GI Joe and Transformers and thinking “Where are the girls?!” Sure, April O’Neil was capable and competent in TMNT, but let’s face it, she was pretty much a damsel in distress most of the time. I never saw myself, a girl who was strong and capable, in any of the stories I watched as a child. I remember seeing Beauty and the Beast when it came out and nearly crying, because not only was there finally a Disney Princess who looked like me (brown hair, brown eyes), but who also was smart and strong. I didn’t want to play as a damsel in distress when my brothers and I played. I wanted to save the world just the same as the boys did! So when I began to write stories, I tried to include women and girls who saved the world and were just as capable as their male counterparts at being completely badass and heroic.

These two things, telling stories and inspiring young women to be strong, are the two things that are the most important to me in my art.

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Coloring in Manga Studio 5

httpv://youtu.be/aCYgO446aHQ

This week I was asked to make a video about coloring in Manga Studio 5. This is just my method, and of course there’s a million ways to go about coloring. Hopefully some of the methods I use in this video will help you!

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Using Materials for Repetitive Tasks

httpv://youtu.be/JtIfV07BHZo

In this video I take a cracked pattern for a video screen and then show you how to save it as a material and use it over again on multiple panels across many pages. Using materials for tasks such as this helps with consistency in your story and saves you time!

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Making Custom Page Templates

httpv://youtu.be/2w_L8q5cf4w

Posted on April 14, 2014, this tutorial video will show you how to make a custom page template in Manga Studio 5. I used the Kablam page template here, but you could use it for any paper or strip size! I go over Finish size, Default border, Canvas size, and how to set a material to the page template. Then learn how to give it a name and save it for use later on!