Way back in time (2010?), Gordon Rennie and I kicked around the idea of a book called “Monsterology” (which needed renamed cus it turned out there was already a book called Monsterology). And we ended up finding a publisher in Renegade Arts. And it was a fun book and I’d’ve loved to have done more, but the audience wasn’t there, and while it’s nice to draw a book for money it’s no fun if there’s no readers.
Anyway, I stumbled across these in my photo library and thought you might like it.
You can find the book digitally on comixology, there were two books in the series and they’re both great fun.
I have an immense and somewhat impressive library of “How to Draw Books” which, I’ll be honest, I’ve barely read. So I should make the effort, right?
And I am. Starting with the grandaddy of them all – How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema – this edition is Titan, 1986 – so I’ve carried it with me a long time. It’s a slightly odd book, compared with a lot of other how to draw books. Probably down to Stan’s bombastic stylings where you might want some more thoughtful words from John Romita. And it feels dated, Marvel comics certainly don’t look like this any more (for shame!)
Anyway – heading in to the first section one and – I suspect because I’m older, and I’ve read a bunch of how to draw things, I’m seeing things in the art that aren’t at all explained by Stan but are pretty fundamental concepts. Take the first real how-to-section where Stan is talking about building objects and making them solid from simple geometric shapes.
Here’s John has drawn an ellipse at the end of the gun barrel, importantly he’s drawn a centre line on the ellipse that correctly matches the orientation of the ellipse – rather, as I’ve done for decades from force of habit a centre line based on a box shape. The weird thing is having a centre line that follows the ellipse you want to draw makes it much easier to free hand that ellipse. So I’ve annotated my own version of the book with those notes. It’s now a living document!
What John Romita is doing largely mirrors some solid advice I saw from Sean Gordon Murphy on drawing tyres (or really any cylindrical object)
Here’s the Sean Gordon Murphy advice (which was a nightmare to trackdown, stumbled across this on pinterest so apologies for the rubbish resolution) (If you can find the original of this advice, I’d appreciate it – I’ve never seen anything like it in any book)
Here’s how I fit comics on to A3/A4 paper – A3 paper width is 297mm. 2000AD Page Size safe width is 264mm – subtract one from the other = 33mm, divide by 2 = 16.5 and I just measure in from the edge of A3 paper by 16.5 (and then do the same for the heigh of the page)
2000AD full bleed is just a little wider than A3 paper, so I just draw to the edge of the paper, scan it in to a document I’ve set up that’s the exact size for 2000AD and then fill in the extra digitally (it’s usually pretty easy)
And because I’m lazy, now I just mark the 16.5 mm in from the edge of the paper, and using the side of the paper block as a guide I just drag my pencil down along from that side (it’s not perfect, but that’s ok) and that’s good enough to get going on pencilling.
Once I scan the pencils in I can then straighten lines up, add digital panel borders and enlarge any pencils I need. Then -if I’m inking traditionally -I’ll convert the pencils to a light cyan colour, leave the panel borders black and then print that whole page out on the reverse side of the pencilled page, so I never rub any pencils out and every page of inked art is on the back of the pencilled art.
And here’s 2000AD’s full page sizes for art Page Size: 30.2cm x 39.43cm Panel Size (or the Safe Area, in other words – that area of the page that lettering will go into) 26.44cm x 35.79 cm If you want full bleed DRAW TO THE PAGE SIZE.
(there’s a trim size too, but you don’t need to know that, either draw to the page size for art to bleed off the page or draw to the panel size to ensure it all fits on the page, that’s it…)
I know I’ll illicit very few sympathies for this, but it can be tough planning out when you’ll finish a book when you can find yourself hitting spurts of speed and equally, suddenly losing a day for family reasons can knock you off course pretty violently. It’s the driving equivalent of doing 90 in a 30 zone.
My plan is to roughly mark out days in chunks of four pages of pencils/two pages of inks. Last month the best I did was six pages of inks and seven pages of pencils in any single day, but you’d be mad to base your working life on that.
So four pencils, two inks. Two inks is a pretty average for many artists, speed wise, but I’m secretly hoping for the most part I can hit three/four pages of inks, and get to the same 40 or so pages this month as I did last month.
So, that said, my plan this weekend and week ahead is:
Saturday: 2 pages of pencils (weekends I tend to hope for any work rather than expect any – that said I’ve done one page already. so actually I might get four done) Sunday: 2 pages pencils Monday: 4 pages of pencils Tuesday: 2 pages of pencils
And that will finish the pencils for this chapter of Bad Magic – then I start in to the inks, given 2 pages of inks per day, I reckon I’ll hit 21 pages on or around the 18th/19th. Then more pencils for the final chapter (again 21 pages) about a week to do those which means, even with a following wind I’ll probably only start inking on the 28th/1st so nope, not a mission of getting 40 unless 2 pages of inks per day is pessimistic!
Acer Asus 4k 27″ Monitor (which I can show 3 roughly print sized pages on across ways) cost: £179 (I think I picked this up as a bargain, it was the last of two of these in curry’s and they were discontinued, the newer one I think was about £230 or something)
Huion 16″ I picked that up for around £300 (Actually it might’ve been £269?) absoloute bargain at either price. I’d buy another of these in a heartbeat.
Even when I had the massive 27″ Cintiq, I’d usually split the screen in two, in the left I’d show the full sized page and on the right I’d show a zoomed in area I was working on. The Huion is capable of the same but there’s not enough real estate there realistically, so instead this double screen set up is perfect.
Both powered by a Mac M1 Mini, the new M2 Mac Mini starts around £649 (8Gb RAm, 256Gb HD) – I’d probably go to the £1049 model (16Gb Ram, 512Gb HD) the mac isn’t upgradeable, and while my current setup is 8Gb/512Gb I do slightly regret not getting more ram (not that it’s ever hampered me, mind you, it runs fast enough for everything I do)
Updated to add: I forgot, the mac doesn’t come with keyboard or mouse, so I’ve a logitech wireless mouse (about £20?) and a really lovely, took-me-ages-to-finally-pull-the-trigger keychron keyboard, that was about £69(!) yes, I know. But it’s super small footprint, the keys are bright white (though it has an irratatingly large selection of how the keyboard lights work – I mean keyboard lights that dance around while you’re using it, I just want them on or off!) and they have a chunky nice feel when you use them. Plus it’s wired OR wireless, I use it wired just to keep the lights on all the time. (And you have three bluetooth connections you can choose from if you like).
Connected to all of that is a Brother DCP6690CW – which I think I bought 10-15 years ago? An A3 scanner/inkjet printer. Anwyay, it was around £260 and I use whatever rubbish ink cartridges I can find cheap and it works great for everything I do – scanning lineart, and printing blueline for inking. (though a more modern one would work a bit nicer on the network and I could print/scan to an iphone) That said I don’t actually ink this way anymore, so I’ve got it on hand JUST IN CASE.
Second printer is a Brother HL2350DCP laser printer, I use this for printing scripts and the odd comic, it’s A4 and can print double sided so good for silly fun projects.
Software wise: Clip Studio Pro Ex ver 1.13 (Latest version 1). There’s a version 2 coming soon, I’m not sure it has any features I want/need, but my old computer head will kick in and I’ll probably upgrade.
For scripts/editing, I’ll usually turn to Pages – which is Apple’s word processor and free with the mac. Word compatible so good enough for most things. Though I am tempted to get Scrivener for comic scripting, which is about £50.
I’m scheduling the pencils I’ve got to do this week for four page a day. Absolutely bonkers, but very doable. I mean, for a start my pencils are super rough (a guide for my later inking). Hoping I can get 21 pages completed, then start inking next week. One annoying thing about that schedule is when you have a hard crash in the middle of it (for whatever reason) suddenly, you’ve missed two days and you’re eight pages behind. Horrible.
Some people have imagination to burn, NOT ME! so, when required to draw a crowd, I’ll stick something on tv and liberally steal from every extra that walks past. Right now I’m catching up on Servant which means M Night Shymalan makes an appearance (well, not really, I’m not going for likenesses just INPUT for my imagination engines to latch on to.)
A Twitter snippet, that might go away – who knows with twitter at the moment!An image of the above tweet exchange with a link to the original (just in case!)
Jim Stafford (website here: https://www.jimstafford.co.uk ) said “I’d love any tips you could give me to pimp up page 2 (the yelling heads). Other pages for context.”
Firstly, let me say this is good stuff, man, what can I tell you – drawing transformers is insanely hard. Adding character to boxy shaped vehicular robots? DIFFICULT.
And I suspect I can’t tell you much, but I can say what I’d do.
Page 2
So here’s what I’d do.
There’s a couple of philosophical points I wanna get out of the way first, and these are no criticisms of you (or anyone else) but purely what I would and wouldn’t do.
I approach all my art work with rhythm in mind, and how quickly people get bored. People get bored looking at incredible art if it’s page after page after page after page. We’re so hard coded to boredom, I once saw a tv show where a sea cucumber was set up beside a machine that poked it at exact regular intervals, the first couple of times the sea cucumber visibly flinched, the fourth/fifth time it reacted less and by the seventh or eight time it did nothing. Why? It was BORED. SEA CUCUMBERS get bored. We get bored as a mechanism to conserve energy and we do it at a fundamental deep low level.
(This is why reading a 22 page comic is easy and looking at the art of one is actually hard – also why if you’re going to convention with artwork to show an editor, six pages is enough, they’ll be bored around seven no matter how amazing it is)
Anyway I say all this because I think the rhythm on this page is pretty simple -Every face is a shout. Every face is a close up (and often repeated faces). By varying the head angle we can do two things, one we break up the monotony a bit (same character but a different angle maybe?) but we can also very subtly cue the reader about the relative positions of each character. The page before clearly shows where they all are in relation to each other, and so, for example, Rotorstorm (in panel 4) is to the LEFT of the captain of the ship, so we have him look to his left on panel 3.
The robot dude (I’m sorry I don’t know all of their names!) on panel 5 & 7 is situated above the captain so if our camera can get a perfect shot of the captain’s head it would be looking up at that robodude. And any opportunity for a dramatic up shot is to be welcomed.
I think colour has something to say in this page too. As things get more intense that colour could be changing over the page. pushing to red or orange or similair?
Plus you can pull dramatic lighting even when you dont have the lights to do it, dramatic uplighting on panel 8 helps sell the idea that robotransformerbot is looking at a very important screen.
Panels 5 & 7 I’ve also varied the emotional response on this cylctronicmegarobotcardude – panel 5 seemed funnier if it was delivered dry – like raised eyebrow, then panel 7 a more dramatic shout. Just giving each face a slightly different emotional reaction will help a lot.
Panel 9 I’d push that shout even bigger. BIG pull in to a big reaction. Helping the reader on an emotional rollercoaster on the page rather than a kind of straight line emotional train.
And that’s it. I’ll end with mu usual caveat, this is what I’d do at this moment in time, it’s not right (or even wrong) it’s just my opinion, and I hope it has some value (even if that value is in ignoring it and saying – no – I’m sticking to my convictions!)
If you’d like to be featured here you can hit me up in email via pjholden gmail.com – stick an @ between pjholden and gmail.com and you’re golden!
Oh no! Chimpsky, locked in his own tower block surrounded by brain controlled cits that are all friends and all, now, absolutely set on killing our ape chum!
Here’s the first few pages in black and white from this week’s 2000AD!
And since I’ve been pretty lax in posting Chimpsky stuff over the past several weeks it’s been running, here’s some fun background extra inf… for the most part Ken just described these scenes of Chimspky in the different areas of his Megablock as outside or inside, so that gave me some free reign to just start designing areas of a block we’ve never really seen, so food areas, an alien garden, shopping precincts, all that stuff. It also allowed me to do a fun little King Kong moment…
You’ll notice on this preview, that I somehow forgot to draw legs for some of the characters in the top right, this was fixed before print, but oops!
Also, Makrill! The Ocean Sent “It Stinks” absoloutly inspired by my eldest who must’ve been 11 or so when he was told about scented candles and he asked if there was one that smelled like Mackrell – which he loved – no, son. No. (He’s now 18 and insists it would’ve been a good idea…)
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