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Boiled Brain



Ask any budding Comic Artisan - Drawing is tough… really tough.

And the reason it’s so tough is because of the epic amount of calculating we need to do to get our drawings looking right! Here I was thinking being an artist would be about the furthest you could get from being a mathematician. How wrong was I!

We know the ingredients we need to use to make a convincing replica of reality on paper - Composition, Perspective, Proportions, Placement, Form, Depth, Dimension… just to name a few...

But the trick is figuring out how they all fit together to create the synergy that is an epic Comic Book Illustration!

When you’ve got to remember all those things at once, by golly is that taxing on our poor old brains.

So taxing in fact that it’s not unlikely we’ll drop the ball in one area or another just because there’s that many things to juggle all at once. It gets to the point where we just can’t keep up!

What’s the solution here you ask?

The trick is to break the process down and build your drawings from the ground up, one step at a time. It’s about simplifying your method so that your mind can keep up with the all-important fundamental principles that need to be considered at each stage of the drawing.

We artists have to learn to pace ourselves. Instead of tackling our illustrations as a whole, we’ve got to small-chunk them down into bite sized pieces to make them manageable.

And that’s the point I wanted to make here in the latest slide for my next Figure Drawing Foundations Course from How to Draw Comics . NET.

I figured taking a more literal approach this time around might provide an opportunity to inject a little more humor into the piece.

As you can see we’ve got Professor Clancy here going into overload mode as his brain struggles to juggle multiple drawing principles at once. – Mr Brain was obviously a treat to work on, I couldn’t wait to jump in and tackle all those juicy details.

I hope you enjoy it – I’ve got more previews coming soon so stay tuned, and keep on creating. :) -Clayton


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