Offer some Comic advice

[Rkolter]

Reasoned Cognition isn't teaching me much more about art. It did teach me a bunch of stuff - I knew nothing before, but I need to draw a comic to learn anything new, and that's one of the reasons that I started doing an online comic in the first place.

I'm still running Reasoned Cognition... but, I'm going to start one that I draw. Probably one large update, once a week.

Three ideas have really been turning around in my mind for the last month or so... any ideas or thoughts?

1) Draw my Q-CPU's Story comic as it's own weekly comic instead of just once every couple months. Currently it's done in paint shop, same as Reasoned Cognition. I'd go back and draw the previous strips, and then add to it regularly.

Pros: I have at least two readers who actually lobby me for Q-CPU's story. I also have really mulled over where this story is going for several years, enough so I could probably write it as a book.

Cons: Where it's going to go involves drawing people... a lot of people... and I can't draw people to save my life. No, really. If you put a gun to my head, you'd have to kill me, because I can't draw the sembalance of a face. I think I may be slightly face-blind.

2) I have a bunch of fun stories of practical jokes gone well and gone awry, and I could draw those.

Pros: I could probably draw them and it would still be a challenge. They'd be pretty fun to draw, and I know exactly how each story started and ended.

Cons: I don't know that I really want prospective employees years from now finding my name attached to images of me pulling pranks on people, even if they wholeheartedly deserved it (and they all did).

3) In a wholly different vein, I used to come up with whimsical fairy tales involving a bamboo carved cat Beth and I have, named "Tiki".

Pros: I know the stories, they're G rated, and they'd be kind of fun to do.

Cons: I have no idea, none at all, how to draw these in a style I'd be satisfied with.

[RemusShepherd]

I don't have much advice for you, paisano, except that if you don't love it, you won't carry through on doing it. Artistic skill, technical expertise, appreciation of anatomy...these can all be learned. But you can't learn to love a story, it either happens or it doesn't. And if the story is going to be one you love, you'll probably already be loving it well before you start to create it. Stories are total whores that way.

[Dr Legostar]

i too have thought about drawing my own comic in addition to what I have now, to get practice, but I just haven't the time or energy to put into it, so nothing gets done. I'd have to agree with remus though, do what you love or you're wasting your time.

[Yeahduff]

Like you said, you have to draw to learn how to draw. If you need specific tips on how to draw people, several of us can help you out, I'm sure. But in the end, you just gotta practice.

As for pissing off potential employers, you can use a pseudonym. I go as B Duffy because there's already a cartoonist named Brian Duffy, but it's also nice that no one I know in real life can really be sure I'm the smartass behind all that nihilism.

[Garneta]

As much as I'd like to see whimsical fairy tales involving a tiki cat, I'd still say go for idea #1. For one thing, you DO have those two fans already, and it sounds to me like you might end up doing it later on anyway, as much as you've already thought out the story.

Also:

I need to draw a comic to learn anything new, and that's one of the reasons that I started doing an online comic in the first place.

Hmm....*scrolls down a bit*

Where it's going to go involves drawing people... a lot of people... and I can't draw people to save my life.

Man...it's almost like drawing people was a new skill that you'd have to learn and develop.

[Killbert-Robby]

It all really depends on how much time you have. But one way or another, if you really want to start drawing your own work, you're going to have to start drawing, even if you dont publish it right away. A hint I'll give is buy how-to-do-art books. I know its a cliche, and personally I never thought all these fancy guide lines and stuff would help me, but I discovered that these are actually really useful / vital things.

[BeefotronX]

Allow me to meditate on some of the things that intimidated me from seriously learning to draw.

1. "Practice 1 to 2 hours every day" does not have to mean one solid block of time. I've gotten into the habit of taking paper and pens almost everywhere, and working a bit of doodling or sketching wherever I have a few spare minutes. By the end of the day it usually adds up to an hour or so.

2. "I paid 11 dollars for this sketchbook and I don't want to fill it with crap." It's all right. Fill it with crap. Or get a clipboard and a wad of computer paper for something that feels a bit more disposable.

3. Long, involved drawings that take the better part of an hour or longer are not the only kind you have to do to get better. You go to real drawing classes and most of the classwork is like this, and it's easy to forget that there are other kinds of time frames to work in.

I would seriously recommend the Vilppu Drawing Manual. I say this because if you go through everything in order, you start off doing gesture drawings and doodles of these blob shapes, both of which are not demanding in terms of large blocks of time, and that builds up a nice loose style as you get comfortable and work up to drawing more detailed figures.

Gestures are how you get good with interesting poses since they're about forgetting the details and focusing on just getting the pose down with as few lines as possible.

The blob studies (here's a page I did) are basically taking basic 3D shapes, imagining them as Silly Putty, sticking a couple of them together, and then mashing, twisting, and stretching them around. I like this because it's an abstract of all the bending and twisting that various things in real life do, and by doing this you separate it from the baggage of having to do a complete drawing.

[C.w.]

The way to learn how to draw is to do millions of still-lifes (still lives?) of fruit bowls; so obviously, whatever you choose to do, it should include fruit. Preferrably, you could do a comic about two bowls of fruit that have witty banter while saving the world or something.

Seriously though, learning to draw just takes time. It almost doesn't matter what you're drawing - as long as you're doing it, you're going to get better at it.

[NakedElf]

Even if you are mildly faceblind, as far as drawing comics is concerned, I don't think that's necessarily such a problem. If you were drawing portraits, then yeah, that could suck. But if you have a particular style you want to use, and you know your proportions, then drawing faces can become pretty rote--after all, the eyes *always* go in the same spots on the head unless someone's getting their eyes gouged out...

Facial expressions might be harder (if you're not generally noticing them on others, I can see difficulty depicting them,) but even those can be broken down mechanically so that you say, 'Okay, Bob's supposed to look angry, hrm, here's my angry face template, yeah, I'll draw him like that.'

[Dragonkingdoms]

I'm slowly learning, too. At first, all my work was MS Paint copy and paste crap, then it moved to scanned crap, to scanned and poorly colored crap, to scanned and slightly better colored crap... to scanned, better colored, character story overdone crap. Lesson from this?

The better your work becomes, the easier it is to notice some of the things that are wrong with it. I've seen the changes that SergeXIII, Linkara, Claude, and many others have made in their comics. Now, it's our turn.

[Killbert-Robby]

Oh, and a good way to start drawing is, in my opinion : Be a copy cat. Just draw you favorite artist's work (My walls are covered in Penny Arcade, VGCats, a little PvP). Yeah its not exactly scoring high on creativeness, but you'll see how THEY do their stuff. For example, cant figure hands out, draw it in someone else's style. Just dont stagnate on this. Once you use their style, alter it. Decide "No, round heads isnt right, I want SQUARE heads.", and do it. Eventually this'll morph into your own unique style. It just provides you with a spring board.

Oh, and dont publish this imitation work. Not for copyright or anything, but just because its practise really.

[Black Sparrow]

Oh, and a good way to start drawing is, in my opinion : Be a copy cat. Just draw you favorite artist's work (My walls are covered in Penny Arcade, VGCats, a little PvP). Yeah its not exactly scoring high on creativeness, but you'll see how THEY do their stuff. For example, cant figure hands out, draw it in someone else's style. Just dont stagnate on this. Once you use their style, alter it. Decide "No, round heads isnt right, I want SQUARE heads.", and do it. Eventually this'll morph into your own unique style. It just provides you with a spring board.

Yep. That's how it starts. If you really want to draw, find comics that you love the style of (preferably something of a simple, cartoony style) and trace them. At the same time, it would help to study how to draw anatomy. Have Beth do some poses for you and just sketch ROUGHLY what it looks like, if only in stick figures. Eventually, it'll turn into something, even if it's nothing now... it might take a couple years, though.

Whatever you do, it'll be cool to see your skills develop.

[Mercury Hat]

Noooooooooooo. No, no.

Unless they are pictures from anatomy books, tracing and copying don't teach you diddly squat about how a body works. You have to learn to see how things connect for yourself. Don't learn how things connect through someone else's distortion of the body because when you do get better at anatomy, you're going to have to end up unlearning whatever you copied to begin with.

The biggest problem is that too many people who start off copying stuff just start to ape what they've seen learned artists do without understanding why. A real common example: Collarbones. Anyone who doesn't study anatomy has no idea what the hell they do, but they've seen better artists than them draw them in so, by thunder, they'll draw them, too! As a result, there are so many poor drawn people walking around with collarbones jutting into the middles of their arms that it's a wonder they can lift them at all.

So draw real people, study real people, see how real people are put together. The only thing, in my opinion, that anyone else's stuff can teach you is exaggeration.

[Vorticus]

Go for the first one! I find it's much easier to motivate myself to draw and sketch when I have a comic to draw and a schedule to keep.

[Black Sparrow]

Noooooooooooo. No, no.

Unless they are pictures from anatomy books, tracing and copying don't teach you diddly squat about how a body works. You have to learn to see how things connect for yourself. Don't learn how things connect through someone else's distortion of the body because when you do get better at anatomy, you're going to have to end up unlearning whatever you copied to begin with.

The biggest problem is that too many people who start off copying stuff just start to ape what they've seen learned artists do without understanding why. A real common example: Collarbones. Anyone who doesn't study anatomy has no idea what the hell they do, but they've seen better artists than them draw them in so, by thunder, they'll draw them, too! As a result, there are so many poor drawn people walking around with collarbones jutting into the middles of their arms that it's a wonder they can lift them at all.

So draw real people, study real people, see how real people are put together. The only thing, in my opinion, that anyone else's stuff can teach you is exaggeration.

Says the girl who started off with an anime-ish style.

Yes, you ape the other artists, but that helps teach you how line can be used to create expression and how to set up the basic features. That's why I advocate studying real anatomy at the same ime as you develop your skill with a pencil. If you start off trying to sketch full human models as realistically as possible, you'd be overwhelmed. IMO, it's best to ease into it.

[C.w.]

Unless they are pictures from anatomy books, tracing and copying don't teach you diddly squat about how a body works. You have to learn to see how things connect for yourself. Don't learn how things connect through someone else's distortion of the body because when you do get better at anatomy, you're going to have to end up unlearning whatever you copied to begin with.

Sometimes, you need to crawl before you walk. There's something to be said for copying, even tracing. If nothing else, it teaches you how to use the pencil / pen / tablet, and gets you used to the hand eye coordination required for drawing - something that a lot of "beginning" artists tend to take for granted.

We all have shortcuts and crutches that we are all constantly unlearning, and we're inventing new ones along the way. Having a crutch is not a bad thing, keeping it is.

[Bustertheclown]

Also:

I need to draw a comic to learn anything new, and that's one of the reasons that I started doing an online comic in the first place.

Hmm....*scrolls down a bit*

Where it's going to go involves drawing people... a lot of people... and I can't draw people to save my life.

Man...it's almost like drawing people was a new skill that you'd have to learn and develop.

That's just a beautiful response. Get ta scribblin' Kolter.

*Addendum*

Oh, and as far as the whole "copying from other artists' work" debate goes, I'll just throw this little dirty secret in:

I started out by copying the work of Rob Liefeld.

Copying the work of other artists is actually a trick that's sometimes taught in very reputable art schools, at least at beginner levels. It's not so much about learning specific things like anatomy, which is something everyone really has to figure out for themselves through general observation. Instead, copy-catting more skilled hands helps just plain learn the techniques of creating art. After all, once one gains an idea of how lines best work when forming a face, then it's much much easier to be able to just sit down and draw a face.

Raw technique always comes first, and style comes later. So, if you're worried about drawing yourself into a stylistic corner, don't. Just sample from a wide variety of sources while learning. Don't limit your intake. Every great artist has something to teach in his work.

[That guy]

I'm with Kat North.

You need to get better at drawing people, DRAW PEOPLE. As it's a logical step for you AND your fans, it sounds like a solid plan.

On top of that, "True-life-stories" always sound funny, but they never translate as well to illustrations. Trust me. In a universe where you can get an anvil dropped on your head or get shot off the planet as a 'practical joke' ... nothing "REAL" will seem quite as impressive.

And TIKI sounds like an excellent ongoing story. But STORY comics are not best for your starter comic. If this is your first step into really drawing, you need something that won't bug you to look back at the artwork. No matter how good you are, you will always get better... so save long-running story comics for your next big project. Comics that stand alone somewhat (even if they have story elements) are the best to begin finding your style.

EDIT:

Started out copying the work of Rob Liefield

... Rob Liefield, a man who has only a passing acquaintance with the concept of Anatomy, himself. Not a name I'd recommend studying.
(For the record, Bustertheclown, your artwork is much more appealing than any of his I've seen.)

[Rkolter]

*sigh*

Yeah yeah... I know the one I should do. It's the one I really want to do. I just agonize about drawing people. But that is starting to sound more like an excuse, and less like a reason.

I guess I better go register for the account... Heh.

Thanks everyone. I really appreciate the advice.

[RemusShepherd]

At the same time, it would help to study how to draw anatomy. Have Beth do some poses for you and just sketch ROUGHLY what it looks like, if only in stick figures. Eventually, it'll turn into something, even if it's nothing now... it might take a couple years, though.

And it's important that the model that's posing for you be nude. Preferably you'll do this while chewing opium, just before the orgy. Nudity, opiates, and orgies are all essential activities in art school, so I hear.