Comic Book Illustration: Boarork Draft

In this video I’ll walk you through the drafting process for a comic book illustration I created of Boarork the Brute – an original character I came up with some years back.

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What’s most insightful, even to me going through this demonstration, is the progression of workflow and style that has gradually evolved throughout the years. It’s a profound and very surreal experience to see your art work transcend to new levels simply through consistent repetition.

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The big take away here is that the development of your style isn’t necessarily something you can control. It refines itself through action, and ultimately it’s the result of your dominion over the tools you use and the process you go through to produce your art work.

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It doesn’t seem to start out that way though. In the beginning our artistic style is directed by the work of those we admire most. My style for instance was derived from a number of well-known comic book artists such as David Finch, Greg Capullo, Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee – plus a few others.

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Their aesthetics were combined and blended together, one by one, to create the desired look I wanted to see in the work I was producing. Being mixed into one, these styles formed a look to my art that seemed unique yet recognizable at the same time, and most importantly I had captured a style that met my own expectations.

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Overtime this hybrid style refined itself and took on a life of its own as it melded with the new techniques and workflows I later experimented with.

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Boarork the Brute represents a point in my artistic development where the look of my art and the process I went through to create it closely mimicked that of David Finch’s, particularly in regards to the amount of shadow I included within the composition and my approach to cross-hatch rendering.

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David Finch had a knack for breaking down his process in a clear and concise way, which was able to be replicated. It was an analytical approach that allowed me to build my illustrations up in manageable stages. For a long time it worked, and eventually I got real good at following through with it every time pencil went to paper.

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That was when I changed things up and began experimenting with a variety of other approaches. This is a key thing I’ll be speaking about in this tutorial because it’s something that often gets overlooked – What happens when you reach the epitome of your process? How do you progress beyond it and remain engaged?

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We’ll also discuss the importance of attending to mistakes, and how making them in the first place is the best thing you can do to level up your drawing abilities and get that much closer to comic art mastery.

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I hope you enjoy this video and that you get a ton of value out of it. If you do find the tutorial useful, don’t forget to share it with your fellow art pals. They’ll most certainly thank you for it, and so will I!
 

Until next time, keep on creating, keep on practicing and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.
-Clayton

 

Software Used: Manga Studio/Clip Studio Paint

 

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