One of the things I’d most love to do is learn how to draw, especially comic-book style.
Learning this skill/talent would make me very happy.
So which dopers can do this, and what do they recommend I do to help me along the way?
I was born with the talent to draw well, or so it seemed. I got better at drawing “comic book style” by tracing hundreds of comic book panels that I liked. In the industry it’s called “swiping”. Some famous artists throughout comic book history cut their teeth by swiping earlier famous comic artists. Some were even paid to do it as assistants. One example that comes to mind is Frank Frazetta, who was for years the actual main artist for Al Capp’s Lil’ Abner..
Some are more infamous, Berkley Breathed swiped shamelessly from Gary Trudeau.
I eventually sort of developed my own style but I admit it’s derivative.
Take some life drawing classes and learn to draw the human figure quickly in all sorts of positions. Eventually muscle memory will help you, if you have any drawing skill at all then all you need is training and repetition.
I agree with this 100%. When I’m actually in a drawing class, I draw better and with more confidence than when I’ve been out of practice for awhile.
I’m not that great, but my skill level increases dramatically when I practice.
Remember: everything you draw at first will look like crap, but the more crap you draw, the nicer crap it will become. 
A good way to get the drawing talent jump-started is the book *Drawing on the * Right Side of the Brain. Link. Working through this book and its exercises brought my drawing ability up very quickly from cartoonish sketches to life-like art.
The staple guide for art students has been (at least throughout the time I was in classes) Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
As others have said, even for comic-book style or cartoon-style drawing, a good basis in drawing realistically is a great asset.
The book is geared specifically towards teaching one how to draw. It’s not all about inherent talent. Drawing is as much ‘learning how to see’ as it is learning how to draw. Even though I’d been drawing all my life and was considered talented by many of my teachers, this book helped me in so many ways. It filled in a lot of the gaps and helped me realize just how I managed to do what I did, and how to do things I didn’t know intuitively how to do.
The author has a website with a gallery of before and after pics, from students who had never drawn before.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, eh? I’ll have to check that out.
I draw… okay, I suppose. Occasionally I’ll draw a hand or something almost perfectly and be delighted, but I can’t do it consistently.
Simulpost!
Okay, CandidGamera, you now have two strong recommendations for this book. Check it out from a library to give it a test spin, or go ahead and buy it. It really is worth the money!
One of the exercises listed in the book, and something we had to do in all my early-level art classes was drawing upside down, that is, taking an image, turning it upside down and then drawing it.
Exercises like that teach you to look at the lines of the object rather than what the object represents as a whole. Much of the time our brain can sabotage our efforts by inferring what it thinks something should look like, and those signals interfere with our seeing what the object actually looks like. By turning the picture upside down your brain’s natural tendency to take the picture as a whole is distorted; rather than seeing a picture of a lady, you see a picture of a bunch of lines. It’s a lot easier to accurately reproduce a bunch of lines than it is a lady.
I’ve been drawing (with the hopes of comic book style) ever since I was a kid. The biggest thing is practice, practice, practice. If you take time off from drawing, you will degrade. And it will take some time to get back to where you were. So the biggest thing is to try to draw really regularly. (It can be really depressing to sit down after a while, and realize you’ve “forgotten” or “regressed”).
I would also recommend figure drawing classes (yes, there should be nude bodies, but you’ll be amazed at how quickly you are desensitized to them - and they merely become “objects”. Really interesting phenomenon).
But what is interesting is that both instructors of figure drawing and portraiture that I’ve had, have been kind of down on the “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” book/approach. Perhaps it’s just an old school vs. new school mentality, but both have made good points for their justification. My take is that if you’ve NEVER (at least since grade school projects) drawn, the DRSB approach is a good way to kick start things. However, if you have (as I have) at least dabbled with drawing ever since grade school, you may not get as much benefit. You’ll have to see what works for you. But a class is definitely the way to go - nothing like drawing live models (it seems like it isn’t that big a difference from drawing from photographs, but it is).
If you’re going to really pursue “comic book” style drawing (like superheros and stuff), you’ll also want to get some anatomy books to start learning about muscles. There are lots out there (and many in the bargain sections of bookstores), but what I found most useful was the “Anatomy Coloring Book”. There’s something about coloring that helps (whatever section of the brain) remember the shapes of various muscles. There also other illustrations (which you also color) which explain how the muscles interact with the bones - which muscles do what.
That should get you started.
When I was a kid, I got the book, How to Draw the Marvel Comics Way, or something like that.
I don’t know how serious artists would feel about that book, but it helped teach me some quick & dirty techniques to make what I was drawing at least start to look vaguely as good as the real comic art. That encouraged me to do more of the practice, practice, practice thing.
It’s only swiping if it gets printed. If not, it’s just training.
The tracing is a good idea. Once you get good with that, start redrawing the panels from memory. Dave Sim said, “it takes 2000 pages until you know what you’re doing, so get those out of the way as fast as you can.” Of course, the standard is a page a day, so you’re talking almost six years.
There are thousands of how-to comics books out there, the most infamous being “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.” It’s a nice book, but pretty limited. When I was trying to learn to draw, the lifedrawing class was recommended to me as well.
I agree, I was trying to be brief. Thanks for expanding on that point.
I’ve done some drawing which was related to my D&D games. I have to chime in with the Drawing on the Right Side crew- my fraternity brother lent me the book; he read it for a class at college.
One of the exercises is to take something you want to draw, and turn it upside down. Your mind loses pre-conceived notions of what things should look like and allows you to draw things as they are. I still have the Stravinsky portrait I drew using this method- not a perfect copy, but my own interpertation of the original drawing.
May I be the first to say: Whooshity whoosh, whoosh!
I believe you may, but why?
Two things come to mind:
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reach out to the Doper Xander - can’t remember his user name, but it should be some variation on this. Why? He’s comic book artist and has worked on some great titles, with Alan Moore.
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Get Dynamic Figure Drawing by Burne Hogarth. He was pretty much The Man in the 40’s and 50’s in NYC for that type of drawing and everybody took art class from him. His basic approach outlined in this book is to break any figure you are trying to draw into its component geometric shapes - so to draw a figure in motion, sketch those “guide shapes” out in perspective and then translate that into a human figure. Really simples things up and looks great. It is pretty much the bible, AFAIK. I can’t speak to “Drawing on the Right Side…” to my knowledge, it is more about “freeing your mind” - getting you to look past your analytical expectations for what a drawing should look like and instead really allowing your eyes a clearer channel through your brain to your drawing hand. Obviously a great thing to have, but not a valuable as knowing how to quickly break down the subject you’re drawing, sketch it out and fill it in…IMHO.
Hope this helps.
I have a Dynamic Figure Drawing book - it may be that one.
We have a real comic book artist?
check out this thread - I got his username wrong - it’s Zander…
Check out that Hogarth book - it is very good specifically for comic-style drawing…
It seems Zander hasn’t posted in 8 months, or signed up for the pay-for Membership.
There’s a whole series of Hogarth books. Hogarth was the standard reference at Sheridan College when I was in their animation course. It was also the standard art book at the Silver Snail in Toronto when that store was still into comics and drawing rather than gaming. (I have since learned that real comics people in Toronto go to The Beguiling for input…)
This is SO true. I am currently trying to get ‘unregressed’. I may see whether I can take some life-drawing classes after work to get loosened up again… I used to fill three sketchbooks a year but I haven’t done that in ages.
Very true. The explanation I saw was that after a while we almost see and remember familiar objects in ‘conventional symbols’ rather than seeing what’s really there. When you really look at things, you realise how different they are from your usual way of thinking about them.
I think this is part of the same ‘discarding pre-made perceptions’ thing, but what also happens if you’re really intent in the drawing is that your mind with all its external thoughts and distractions kind of vanishes and you merge with the drawing task. The drawing sort of flows through you. I call this ‘the art state of mind’, but it is by no means confined to drawing; precisely the same thing can happen when you are progrmming. It is a treasured state of mind: hard to get into and easily broken. No wonder I tend to snap at people who interrupt me drawing…