How I Draw

I am not an incredible artist, but I like to draw.  I do it a lot at work actually for the kids.  They are forever asking me to draw things.  Mostly the girls want dogs and cats and bunnies and rainbows.  The boys want action pictures, Batman and Robin, Star Wars things and the like.  The action type pictures are more up my alley, I enjoy drawing that more.

When I am actually trying to draw something ‘good’ I usually use a reference of some sort.  Most of my best drawings have started that way.  Looking at other pictures, in comic books or even taking pictures or pausing a video.

I thought it would be a bit interesting to actually document this process at least once to share with you all.  I am not claiming to be a great artist, in fact I personally know at least three people that can knock anything I draw out of the park on their worst day.

That being said, this is a drawing I have done today and here is the still from a video that I used for the main bit.

I moved the right hand as mine was only down to keep my balance on a slow kicking motion.

I almost always start with the body lines, they generally help me with getting the pose I want and keeping the proportions at least close to proper.

Then I start to fill out the body, I usually start with the head and work from there.  I still find perspective and overlapping parts a bit tricky, sometimes it takes a few attempts to get things right.

As you can see the kicking foot actually extends past the rough in to make it the right length.  The guy being kicked could use a little work on the reaction.  Basically though it is a very simple outline to the figures.

Batman is a bit more filled out now, a bit of definition to the muscles, and the dude getting kicked is a bit more buff and has pants on now.  Generally the style that I draw in is a bit more cartoonish, not is a silly way, but in and ‘easy to animate’ way, like the New Batman/Superman Adventures style.

Here I have just erased all the construction lines, makes it look a bit cleaner.

And then tightened up the lines a bit and added some shading to help it look a bit more 3-Dimensional.  There is a bit more detail in here than I typically do especially when I am drawing at daycare.  I am inspired to do this after picking up the volume 1 of the Justice League comics drawn by Jim Lee. 

Clearly that level of skill would/will take me a lot of practice to be able to do.  That and maybe a few years of art classes!