How to Draw Comic Book Characters

Josh always wanted to learn how to draw. As a child he would spend hours scribbling away. His parents always saw his true potential and invested a lot of time and money in helping him perfect his skills. They got him all the possible drawing tools, got him enrolled in drawing classes, they even took him to museums and places with serene views for inspiration. But Josh had already found his passion, he only wanted to draw comic book characters, and thus, began his life long affair with creating comic books. Today he is a successful comic illustrator and author.

If you are reading this, I presume you have some talent for sketching and drawing. In any case even if you aren't exactly Van Gogh, you can still learn to draw comic book characters. Once you have the practice and skills, it is fairly easy to draw comic characters.

Drawing Comic Characters

Exposure
Before you begin to draw characters it is very important that you go through as many comics as possible. This is essential to understand the various drawing styles and techniques. Part of the journey to perfect any talent is to practice as much as possible. Keep sketching and trying out different styles but along with this, it is equally important to find and keep your signature style. Try not to imitate but discover your own trademark stroke. It will also help if you can take drawing lessons from a trained professional. Even if you yourself are pretty skilled at sketching you must go back to very basics because drawing scenery and human forms is very different. Human figures are not everyone's cup of tea.

Methods
There are mainly two techniques to draw characters from a comic book. One is where the image is drawn using blocks much like the human wooden mannequin, which is used to teach art students, the other method is the use of long strokes to create the profile of the figure. The basics of line art drawing for any raw sketch is drawing dark straight lines to mark the major bones in the body. While drawing these characters, one must remember that these figures are highly exaggerated as compared to other types of sketches of human forms.

Detail
To draw these characters in action, for example punching, crouching and jumping, keep in mind that the muscles alone can't help you create the movement. The bone structure must be exaggerated so that the muscles can appear sturdy. Keep in mind little things like the hands etc., especially when drawing female characters. The nails of male characters are drawn square and the nails of female characters are drawn oval.

Movements
To make the movements more prominent, remember that other facts come into play, for example, to show a kick you have to make the air seem as if it got lifted and don't actually show the impact. The reader should only see the aftereffect of the kick and not the kick actually happening. What I'm trying to say is that if the character is kicking the ball then his leg must appear as if he is bringing the leg back after the kick and the ball should be just gaining height in air.

Once you have perfected the art to draw comic book characters, remember to tell the villains apart from the good guys by their costumes. That means the mean guys should have such costumes, that by just looking at the figure you now he is bad. Usually the goods guys are more charming looking whereas the bad once are more rugged and mean in appearance. Now that you have the basics under control do enough research so that you can draw characters with ease and finesse. Happy sketching!