How to Draw Comic Book Characters

By Pamella Neely Everybody wants to learn how to draw comic book characters. The secret to doing it well is actually much simpler than you would think. All you need is a certain kind of paper. It is called tracing paper, and you can get 100 sheets for five dollars or less. To some people, using tracing paper may seem like cheating, but actually copying a master's work is a time-honored tradition among artists, and a superb way to learn the secrets of your trade. You use tracing paper by putting a sheet of the semi transparent tracing paper over whatever image you want to draw. And then you follow your pencil along the partially covered lines underneath the tracing paper, tracing the lines as you go, thus re-creating the image. For your first trace, just copy all the lines, pulling the paper away every few minutes to see how you're progressing. You won't end up with a very attractive image, but you will be teaching your eye and your hand to work together in a co-operative way to create the image that you want to be able to draw freehand. After you've done your first trace, you can either move on to do a second trace that looks better than the first one, or you can try to draw the image freehand. You will find that even with one practice trace under your belt, you measure the distance between the lines were accurately. The same image that you had trouble drawing before suddenly starts to look a lot better. Give yourself some congratulations. You can either keep practicing freehand or you could go back and do some more traces until you really master the way the original artist created the cartoon. That's how to copy existing cartoons. Even if you want to create your own cartoons, it's a great way to learn how the masters drew their cartoon characters. But you probably want to learn how to draw your own. That takes an awful lot of practice, but here are some pointers to get you started. Start sketching everything you see. Start simplifying images so that you can render, say, a cat, in less than six lines. Study the character of your subjects, and try to show animals' and peoples' characters through your simplified drawings. This may mean making some body parts, like hands or feet or ears, larger than they are in reality, in order to accentuate different personality traits of your subject. It also means studying the body language of people and animals so that you can depict some of their emotions simply by how they hold themselves. Being able to convey emotion in your comic book characters is essential, so you should study facial expressions and learn how to convey a smile or anger or surprise with just a few lines of your pencil. Learn to tell a story. As a cartoon book artist, your images convey a story. So in addition to being able to simplify images and convey emotions, you need to create images that tell a story in a clear simple way. The time-honored technique for doing this is to use frames, usually 3-6 frames for each cartoon strip. Let yourself do a couple of drafts before you finalize each phase of the story you are telling in a single frame. Also be willing to redraw your cartoons when you get a better idea for how to illustrate a certain part of your story.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com

Pencil Sketches - A Popular Tool Among the Artists

By Murtaza Habib

The aim of sketches is to record some valuable information for the study purpose in the long term. It's like a rough work of final product and it is a free hand drawing with many overlapping lines. Sketches are series of many disconnected lines that produce to develop an image. The tools used to create sketches are pencil, pen, watercolor, clays and many more. The most preferable painting tool is pencil by most artists from the day when graphite was found.

Here are some points that an artist needs to consider, if he wants to draw sketches using pencil...
1. Pencils: - The hardness of pencils varies from 2H to 6B.
H pencils are very hard pencils; the grades available in this kind of pencils are H, 2H and HB. B pencil are soft pencils, the grades available in this pencils are B, 2B, 3B, 4B, 5B and 6B. An artist can select the pencil grade by considering the different factors like atmosphere, paper quality, drawing subject, etc.
2. Sharpener: - Sharpener is very important tool while creating a sketch using pencils.
It helps to sharp the pencil wedge for the better quality of images, make sure that you do not sharp the pencil point.
3. Eraser:- It is a useful tool to remove extra lines or soften lines.
The best eraser for sketches is kneaded eraser. This eraser has a very soft and sticky surface that can easily remove graphite from the paper. The best feature of this eraser is, it will not create smudging. Plastic erasers are also used to remove the lines but the worst part is, they create smudging heavily.
4. Paper:- If you will use best quality paper then it will give you attractive image.
Make sure that the paper should not be totally smooth. If you use slightly rough paper, then it will give nice appearance to your sketch.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com

Ten Useful Tips For Beginners in Sketch Making

By Ginger Stokesk , If you have just started trying at hand on sketching, you should read the valuable tips given here. These will help you in sketch making.   

1. You should first understand that sketching cannot be learnt in a day. It is an art. To become proficient in this field, you need to work hard and practice a lot. The more you practice, the easier it will be to draw.
2. Sketching is a free hand drawing made with pencil on paper. For making good sketches, you should have proper supplies like sketch pencils and paper. The quality of supplies can affect the end results.
3. Sketchers hold pencils in different styles like tripod grip, overhand grip and underhand grip. However, there is no best style. You should choose the style that you are most comfortable with.
4. You should start practicing with simple figures like straight lines, curves, circles, ellipses, squares and triangles. Though, most people think that it is easy to draw such figures and they do not need to work hard, but it is not so. Many people cannot even draw simple figures with free hand. Mastering simple figures will help you to control your hand movement, which is the first step to drawing a good sketch.
5. Once you become proficient in drawing geometric figures, you should start drawing figures of landscapes, homes, and pets. Gradually move to the type of sketches that you want to draw. For example, if you want to get into fashion designing, you should start making free hand drawings of mannequins draped in different outfits. Similarly, if you want to become a landscape artist, you should spend quality time in natural settings capturing its beauty in your sketchbook. If you want to become a cartoonist, you should draw caricatures of people and scenes.
6. Proportion is a critical part of drawing good sketches. For example, if you are making a portrait, you need to have a proper idea of distance between eyes, size of eyes and length of nose. Even a mere change in the angle of face changes these proportions. Therefore, a sketcher should be able to properly estimate the measurements.
7. While making a sketch, you should first focus only on the outline. Always work on detailing afterwards.
8. Shading helps to give a three-dimensional look to a drawing. It also helps a person to visualize whether the object is close or far away, whether it is stationary or moving, what is the texture of the object, what time of day it is and so forth. Therefore, you should pay particular attention to shading. Learn different styles of texturing. Invest in good quality soft pencils of different grades for shading your sketches.
9. During the initial learning process, do not be too critical of what you have sketched. Learn from your mistakes and improve with every drawing.
10. Last but not the least, get training from an expert. You can join a drawing class or learn some skills and tricks from a private tutor. You can also take the help of online drawing tutorials for learning how to sketch.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com

T-shirt Design screenprint.