Creating dynamic figures quickly is fundamental for a comic book artist.
Gesture drawing is quick, easy, and fun. You should never spend more than two or three minutes on a gesture drawing, and it can be done in as little as five seconds.
When making a gesture drawing, you should try to feel the pose and convey that feeling on the page. One of the best ways to do this is to actually take the pose, noting the various twists and turns that occur in your body and the way those positions affect your muscles.
Try this: Bring one leg forward and lean your torso over it. Can you feel the muscles in your thigh contract as the weight of your body shifts to that leg? Or try this one: Clasp your hands together and raise them high over your head in an exaggerated stretch and then lean back. Do you feel your lower back contracting as your abdomen stretches out?
Translate those feelings to lines on the page. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate in your drawings. Gesture drawing is about communicating an idea, not making a beautiful work of art. Have fun with it. Use any drawing tool you have handy: a pencil, a ballpoint pen, a crayon, a broad piece of charcoal, or a fountain pen.
Try different approaches. Pick up a ballpoint pen and make a drawing without lifting the pen from the paper. Allow it to flow around and through the drawing as you observe your model. Try holding the pencil so that you learn to draw with your entire arm, not just your wrist and fingers.
Gesture drawing is a great way to warm up when you get to the drawing board.
Make it a daily practice. From there, you can then move to more complex figure studies.
If there is a college or art center in your city, check to see if it offers figure drawing sessions you can attend. If it doesn’t, look for websites that have interesting photos to reference. These two websites were set up for artists looking for figures to draw:
• www.posemaniacs.com. This website has thousands of poses, and you can rotate each pose 360 degrees. The male and female models are skinless computer renderings (so that you can study the underlying musculature of the bodies). This will improve your drawing and help you better understand anatomy visually.
• www.artists.pixelovely.com. This website is full of photographs of both clothed and nude models. The home page allows you to choose whether you want to draw clothed, nude, or both and allows you to select the subject’s gender (or draw both sexes). You also select the amount of time you want each pose to be displayed.
This is a sketchbook page of one-minute gesture drawings.
These are good examples of two-minute gesture drawings.
These five-minute figure studies were drawn in pencil.
These gesture drawings were made with a ballpoint pen. A ballpoint pen is a good tool for this exercise because it forces you commit to the marks you make.
Foreshortening occurs when a figure or object is viewed at an unusual angle.
In this photograph, the model’s leg is very close to the lens, causing it to seem unnaturally large in relation to the rest of her body. You can use this effect to create dramatic drawings in your comics.
Start with the body part nearest you when you draw a foreshortened figure. It will serve as a reference point and help you determine the size and placement of the model’s other features.
Now draw your own foreshortened figure, using your construction drawing as a reference.
Look at a picture of a figure for one minute, taking mental notes and committing as much information to memory as possible. Note any visual information that will help you draw the image when the picture’s no longer in front of you. Is one shoulder higher than the other? How are the elbows, knees, and feet placed? What is the figure’s vertical midpoint? Its horizontal midpoint?
Minimize your window or turn away from your monitor or photograph and complete a figure drawing of the subject in two minutes, using a blue pencil.
Pick up a ballpoint pen, look at the photograph, and make a two-minute observational drawing on top of the pencil drawing. Note what you got right and wrong.
Drawing several figures within the same panel is one of the first major challenges a budding comic artist faces. I’ll show you a couple approaches that you can take, but one of the best ways to overcome this hurdle is to make a habit of making multiple-figure compositions in your sketchbook. A quick Internet search will provide you with interesting photos taken from a variety of vantage points.
Observational drawing requires you to make a visual analysis of whatever you intend to draw. The subject really doesn’t matter; it could be a still life, a car, a feral cat, or a group of people. I begin by looking—really looking—at my subject. I note plumb lines, angles, quadrants, and midpoints.
My approach to drawing a group of people is very similar to my approach to drawing a foreshortened figure: I begin with the person in the foreground; it’s the shape that takes up the most space. When I have established that figure, I use it as a reference point to help me place all the other figures in the composition.
It’s best to draw the closest figure first when you’re drawing a group of people. Then use plumb lines and quadrants to help you place the other figures.
You can transform an ordinary photograph into a dynamic drawing. The photograph serves as a springboard for the drawing and can help you visualize a difficult pose or composition. Once you have blocked in the basic shapes and gestures, you can take as many liberties as you want.
