ART LESSON: How to make a BORING page INTERESTING!! Ive been asked thousands of times over the years, whats the toughest thing to draw. My response is usually The hardest thing to make exciting is the boring or non-action sequences. Why? Because these pages take more thinking than doing a huge explosion on the page. Lets use the image below as an example: The writer would give me a outline of a plot and I am pretty sure that it read something like Peter Parker opens the door and standing on the porch is Eddie Brock(the human form of the super-villain Venom from the Spider-Man comics). Thats it. That was probably all I had to work with. Now the problem becomes...how do you make a person on the porch interesting to look at? Ill walk you through some of the steps in my thinking... 1) BODY LANGUAGE - in this shot I put Eddie Brock in a casual, almost cocky, position. Why? Because he is the bad guy and he is so over confident with his abilities that hes willing to walk right up to the house of his enemy and ask if hed like to play. But he does so with an ease and relaxation. 2) DRAMA - Not much to work with here, since standing on a porch wouldnt excite most of us. So I took the only thin left, and that was Peter Parkers reaction. I didnt put his face on the page so instead I showed the emotion through his hands. The look and position of his hands convey surprise that Venoms human form is at his doorstep. 3) DEPTH- One of the other hard things in drawing comics is that we are given a 2D piece of paper (which is flat) and we need to create the illusion of 3D (which is not flat). For me the easiest way to get there was to move the camera behind the character opening the door (in this case Peter Parker) so the reader was given a First Person Perspective, making it seem like YOU were opening the door. Then I put the big hands in the foreground to show that the drama and to cover some of the Eddie Brock character. This layering helps in the creation of depth (or 3D) by making things seem like there is space around everything. 4) BACKGROUNDS- Here I drew some bushes and you can see a hint of a fence and another house behind Eddie. This information is to tell you that the house where Peter lives is in a neighborhood. It also help in Step #3 by being the third piece of layer on the page. Foreground=hands. Middle ground=Eddie Brock. Background=the neighborhood. 5) DETAILS- Look at Eddies shirt. I chose to put a pattern on it and made it a turtle neck, because a plain t-shirt would have been less interesting. Then I gave him a jacket over it just to break up the pattern and to have multiple places to add color. Also, running down the right hand side of the page is the screen door. The screen give me another texture/pattern to play with. As do the detailed lines in the giant hands. And then the shadows on the bushes in the background to tell the readers there is a light source (in this case the sun). So the next time you see a silly, boring page, especially the opening page to a comic (which this page was. It was page 1), you may want to ask yourself If I was drawing would I put as much attention and thought in the boring pages as the action/explosion pages? The answer, from my perspective, is you should put even MORE thought into these pages. How else do you make them interesting? And how else do you make Stan Lee and Marvel proud? TODD
Posted on: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 05:28:46 +0000
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