W
hat exactly makes a comic page professional? What separates the struggling amateur artists from the pro artists working for the big publishers? Other than their bank accounts and their egos, I mean. Is it figure draw- ing? Composition? Storytelling? Perspec- tive? Technique? Well, it can be all of those things, or not really any of them in particu- lar. It’s usually a combination of things, and they can often be relatively minor.What I try to do in this column is puzzle out what those main stumbling blocks are for an artist trying to break into comics. It almost always comes down to the fun- damentals of art; those things I mentioned above. But it can also be something more elusive, such as style. Comics are fun to draw, and learning the fundamentals is hard, so many artists try to skip all that studying and rely on raw talent and an excess of busy line work to cover up their faults.
This issue, we have a very nice sample page submitted for a critique by the talented Antonio Rodriguez, and he’s not one of those guys. It’s rare that I see a sample page with this much going for it. Antonio has obviously been doing his homework and is working hard. His page is extremely well composed, with good camera movement, nice backgrounds that show some under- standing of perspective, clear storytelling, and even some fairly good figure drawing! He’s really choosing his shots well to tell the story in the most interesting way, and he’s expertly leading the reader’s eye from panel to panel by placing the center of atten- tion in each panel to create a C formation on
His storytelling is fantastic. He opens with an establishing shot, as well he should, showing us we’re indoors, observing a couple watching the news on TV. I so often see beginners draw shots like this from behind the sofa only to see the sofa is up against the wall in the next panel, meaning we were somehow looking out from inside the wall! Antonio wisely avoids that trap by placing the sofa in the middle of the room in panel three. He’s decorated the room with pictures, a plant, a bookshelf, exposed brick, etc., not just a blank wall in an empty room, like so many beginners try to get away with. He then smartly goes from that long shot to an extreme close- up with no cluttering background, introducing the characters. Then he goes to another, even better establishing down-shot, and right back to another extreme close-up for the kiss, before ending with a medium shot to show her glowing.
The elaborate backgrounds in panels one and three allow him to eliminate backgrounds in the other panels, where they would be distracting clutter. So many beginners have either too little backgrounds or too many. This is first-rate stuff in these respects, and I just don’t see that in most sample pages. Take a bow, Antonio. Well done!
So Antonio’s no doubt gotta be thinking, “For cryin’ out loud, what more do I need to do to get work drawing the X-Men for Marvel?” Maybe you’re thinking that too. Well, as the old expression goes, “Close, but no cigar” (I guess they used to give you a cigar when you won at a carnival game or some- thing). At any rate, sometimes it’s seemingly little things that can hold you back. Little things here and there that maybe by themselves seem trivial, but when they’re added together, the work becomes just subpar enough to get that dreaded rejec- tion slip (though frankly I’ve inked many, many far worse pages than this for Marvel and DC in my career). But let’s see what can we do to help Antonio get to that next level.
The big, primary problem I see here is simply the loose sketchiness of the pencils. This is like a page from the 1980s, during my heyday (yes, I’m that old). I preferred inking loose pencils like this because I could take over more and make a
bigger contribution. I was no mere tracer. But the days of loose pencils are pretty much long gone. Today, most editors want everything nailed down tightly in the pencils so that nothing can go amiss in the inks. Most pencilers just want the inker to lay down clean lines and not screw anything up. They don’t trust the inker to be able to add anything worthwhile, and may even resent it if they do. And many current inkers prefer tight pencils because they’re not pencilers themselves and don’t really have a finished rendering style of their own. They don’t have a solid knowledge of anatomy. They mainly just know how to do pretty, controlled line work. (Current inkers can send hate mail to me care of DRAW! magazine.) Inking has become such an extreme specialty that figure-drawing ability is no longer needed. “Just follow the pencils, Bub.”
It used to be a fairly standard practice (particularly on rush jobs) to put an X wherever you wanted solid black, rather than taking the time to color it in with the pencil, when the inker just had to erase all that pencil after he inked it anyway. I always preferred to add my own blacks and lighting, and eras- ing pages by artists like Gene Colan (were there any?) was a smudgy nightmare where half the ink came up with the erased pencil lead. Today, I guess editors think X’s are being lazy, and prefer that you color in those blacks in pencil. Especially on a sample page, where you’re trying to impress the editor, why would you want to take shortcuts, anyway? Save that for when you’re getting steady work, and the editor is calling you asking where the pages are. So as good as panel one is, it’s bordering on “breakdowns” (typically pencils with no blacks or rendering added), rather than finished pencils.
Another thing that sticks out to the inker in me is the com- peting patterns of the plant and bricks in panel one. Detail can create gray patterns, and I don’t like to put gray on gray. I mention this only so you’re aware it can be a problem. It’s a minor thing, but if I were inking this page, I’d make the plant a black silhouette.
Panel two starts revealing some weaknesses. As you can see in Figure 1, the noses are consistently poorly drawn, for
FIGuRE 1
example. Her nostril is too low (for the standard ideal), and his is too high. Her mouth is vaguely defined, and the lower lip is too thick. Both of their right eyes are too close to their noses, another consistent fault I noticed. A good way to gauge eye placement is to draw the tear duct directly up from the edge of the nostril (on a slight curve, since faces aren’t flat). His glasses are way too small, and the nose cushions are mis- placed (they belong behind the lenses). As I said, these are seemingly small problems in the overall scheme of things, but they begin to add up.
It’s generally not good to show disembodied hands. It can be confusing to know to whom they belong. Here, I think it’s clear enough that it’s his hand, but when you take a closer look in Figure 2, he’s not quite holding that remote like a person ever would. It’s not really in his hand, but just lying across his fingers. Hold a remote and you’ll see what I mean. Can you see your forefinger? So often it really helps to act out the pose you’re trying to draw. He also didn’t bother to draw the remote in perspective. Many artists “eyeball” perspective, and if you have a sound understanding of it, that’s usually okay, but to my mind you need to get it closer than this.
Linear perspective may be the most consistent weakness of even published comic artists. As an inker, I corrected the per- spective in almost every job I ever inked. I wasn’t asked to, I just found it easier to ink buildings if I found the vanishing points. Ignorance of the rules of perspective won’t stop you from getting work unless it’s egregious (as I think it is in pan- el three here) because editors, bless ’em, don’t understand it any better than you do. But it really stands out to anyone who does understand it, and perspective errors can make people “feel” there’s something wrong, even if they can’t quite put their finger on what it is.
Panel three looks great at first glance, but when you take a closer look (see Figure 3), it actually has a number of prob- lems. Since we’re on the subject of perspective, I’ll start with that. Perspective can be fairly simple, but it’s easy to go wrong if you don’t really know what you’re doing. A little knowl- edge is a dangerous thing, as they say. The main problem here is that there’s more than one horizon. Once you decide where you want your horizon (a critical first step beginners often ig- nore at their peril), which is high in this case, since we view- ers are up high looking down on the scene (the horizon rises or lowers with the viewer), things parallel to the floor like the front side of the sofa should recede to a point on that horizon off to the right, which they do. The lines on the front end of the sofa should recede to a point on the left, which they also do. Good man, Antonio! So far, so good.
However, everything else in the room except the sofa and figures recedes to a lower, closer horizon (see Figure 4), and everything is too small in relation to the figures. I sat a figure of the girl on the bed the size she would be if she were where the bed is (see Figure 5), and you can see she’s way too big for the bed, and couldn’t fit much into that minute night table
FIGuRE 3
(whose drawers are strangely off-center). A simple trick to find how large a second figure would be at any distance once a first figure has been drawn is to extend lines from any two parts of their bodies to a vanishing point on the horizon. Here, I used the top of their heads and their right knees. Thank you, Andrew Loomis. For this and many other drawing wonders, I highly recommend his book Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth, now back in print at last from Titan books for a paltry $40.
You could correct this double horizon problem by hav- ing the sofa and figures also recede to the lower horizon, or you could correct it by making everything in the background larger, receding to the same horizon as the sofa, as I did in Figure 3-A. This is the proper solution, because unless the background is more important than the figures, you should always draw the figures first, then create the background to fit them.
In Figure 3-B, I corrected and enlarged the chair. You wouldn’t want to sit in a chair with a straight back like that. It would be very uncomfortable, and would fall over back- wards easily. Chairs are designed with the back and rear legs at an angle, which I’m sure you know if you just stop to think about it. This is a very common mistake most begin- ners make. In Figure 3-C, I enlarged the guy’s head a bit. We typically make heads smaller than normal in superhero comics to make the bodies look bigger and more powerful. But for normal people, you should draw the head normal
FIGuRE 3 (REVISED)
FIGuRE 5
A
B
C
D
size. The average figure is about seven heads tall. The “ideal” figure is eight heads tall.
In Figure 3-D, I also enlarged her head and drew in her left eye. I simplified her neck because you don’t want a lot of extraneous lines on a woman’s neck area. They just make her look old. On women, the fewer lines the better whatever part of the body you’re drawing, usually. I redrew her right arm at an angle just because diagonals are almost always more inter- esting than verticals. I shortened the fingers on her left hand and raised it to the angle Antonio started to draw just because I think it’s a better angle. I drew in her left upper arm to show that he’s not really gripping her arm; he’s just holding it with his fingertips.
His thumb can’t be at that angle because it’s physically impossible (try it), and because his hand would have to be enormous for us to see both the thumb knuckle and finger knuckles with the hand open enough to encircle her arm. Ev- eryone has trouble drawing hands, but if possible, try to act out the pose, and things like this will become more apparent.
The hand is also a problem in panel four. As I show in Figure 6, her thumb is too short (as Antonio’s consistently are) and it’s unclear where her fingers begin. The hand is not as much of a problem as their noses here, however. His nose is practically gouging out her right eye. I know from experi- ence it’s difficult to draw people kissing. You have to angle the heads a bit more to give the noses some room. His glasses are once again too small, and her eye is again too close to her nose. Her nose tip can dip down like Antonio has it if you’re drawing the Wicked Witch of the West, but otherwise it’s bet- ter to tilt the nose tip up slightly.
I also don’t like to see a dark shadow on a face that isn’t also on other things in the panel, which is something so many weaker comic artists do. If his face is so shadowed, why isn’t hers? Why isn’t her hand shadowed? Where is the light com- ing from to cause a shadow like that on his face and nothing else? It’s as if her face is a flashlight. Lighting needs to be fairly consistent. It should make some kind of sense. Artistic license allows for some leeway, but try not to get too illogical.
Panel five is good, but as I show in Figure 7, his head is pretty tall and thin. The ear needs to come back more. Remem- ber that it’s behind the jaw. The glasses are also once again a problem. So as I said, these are all relatively minor problems, but they add up to keep Antonio out of the big leagues. Now that I’ve made him aware of them, I think he should be able to correct them rather easily. There are several good books on perspective at the bookstore. The biggest hurdle for Antonio, and so many others, is going to be cleaning and tightening up his finish style. The easiest way to do that is to slavishly copy your favorite artist. That’s what all the top artists did when they started out. You can worry about being original after you break in. A light box may help if your pencils are messy, or some artists sketch in blue pencil and tighten up in graphite.
Good luck to you, Antonio, and thank you for submitting your sample page. If anyone else would like to get a Rough Critique from me, email me at [email protected].
Bob McLeod is a veteran comic artist who’s worked on all the major titles for Marvel and DC, and is the author/illustra- tor of Superhero ABC, published by HarperCollins. He also teaches at the Pennsylvania College Art & Design.