Author: Jim Shooter Page 21 of 25

All right, we’re in the backyard of this suburban home. Three young men are arriving. Look at her, the Invisible Girl. You get a pretty good look at her. You’ll see her feet later, trust me. You get a pretty good look at her, enough so that you might actually recognize her if you saw her again. Look at the acting going on here. It’s clear that these guys are arriving and they are excited. What is she saying? Even if you can’t read the balloon, you know she’s saying, “Stay back boys,” just from her body language. Cool.

Read More

Why this one? This one is an old comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and it was probably done at a time when the page rates for artists were around ten bucks a page, fifteen bucks a page, so it was probably done very quickly. I guarantee you, Jack didn’t spend a great deal of time pondering each panel. You couldn’t do that if you wanted to earn a living. He didn’t give it a lot of thought. He did it from instinct more or less. Nonetheless, it’s a great illustration of fundamentals.

Read More

For general all-around drawing information, the famous Andrew Loomis books are great.
Figure Drawing for all it’s Worth – Jim said, “Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth has the best section on perspective I’ve seen.”
Drawing the Head and Hands
The Andrew Loomis books are out of print but can be downloaded here:
http://alexhays.com/loomis

Our buddy Kyle has done a wonderful, essential book on cartooning and comics:
Kyle Baker, How to Draw Stupid and other Essentials of Cartooning

Will Eisner has some highly regarded books available. Best for more advanced students:
Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist

The classic style guide no writer should be without:
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Some good information on writing are Syd Field’s Screenwriting books:
Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

The Screenwriter’s Workbook (Revised Edition)

The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver: How to Recognize, Identify, and Define Screenwriting Problems

Also:
The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady

William Goldman: Five Screenplays with Essays
William Goldman – Four Screenplays
These are a couple of Jim’s favorite books:
Great to read if you want to write science fiction:
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Fascinating book written by a cultural anthropologist:
Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going by Marvin Harris

(continued)

Now, I’m going to tell you a whole bunch of other stuff that may not mean anything much to you yet, but then I’m going to walk you through a particular comic book and I’m going to show you examples. These are little miscellaneous tidbits of info that I’ve had beaten into my head by various Learned Masters over the years. Simple little concepts and observations that are useful for artists. As always, writers should understand these things, too. They’ll help you be a better visual thinker. 

As you walk around the world you see things at eye level. Am I right? You don’t usually walk around standing on your head, or with your head tilted.  You see things like you’re seeing me now, from your eye level, looking directly at the subject. That is the most common point of view, obviously. That is the easiest one for people to grasp instantly.  Show something, anything, in the way people would ordinarily see it and they have the best chance of understanding instantly what you’re showing them.  So, if I have one shot to let somebody know we’re in a theater, this kind of shot, eye level, is most likely to be clear at a glance.  It’s what you’d see if you were there.  A natural point of view. 

Read More

The first great secret of drawing better is using your eyes.  Don’t laugh.  Once, with another group, I leaned an umbrella against a door and asked them to draw it.  I gave them a minute, I think.  I watched them.  Most of them glanced at the umbrella, then hardly looked up from their paper.  Some got the umbrella more or less right, but made it too tall or too short in comparison with the door.  Some made the door too narrow or too wide.  Some were so worried about the umbrella that they got the door handle entirely wrong.  One guy drew an umbrella that wasn’t furled and strapped—basically, he just made one up, rather than draw the one in front of him.

A lot of people just don’t use their eyes enough.  You need to really look, measure and compare elements of your drawing to each other.  How tall is the umbrella compared to the door?  Does it come up past the door handle?  And you need to draw the actual umbrella.   

I find that even people who draw pretty well just plain don’t look with care at all the elements.  They’ll get most parts of a figure right but fake the wrinkles on the sportcoat.  You see, without trying or even noticing, we’ve all learned a bunch of glyphs—symbols for things—and they have a way of creeping into and weakening our drawings.  You get the sportcoat right, but do your wrinkle glyph on the sleeves at the elbows.  You’ll get a person’s face right, then do your hair glyph.  You’ll get the building right but draw window glyphs instead of the real windows.

Read More