Cropping Shots for Sequential Comic Book Storytelling

1. Introduction: Hey, how you doing? It's Clayton here. And in this lesson, what we're going to be learning about is how to crop the panels of your comic book sequences. In other words, how do we frame up the scene inside your comic book as it unfolds from one panel to the next? Now, depending on the way you go about this, you're either going to end up with a sequence that's hugely immersive or one that's just kind of like it feels a little flat, a little repetitive, doesn't quite hit that cinematic immersion that we're looking for. I'm going to show you with this simple trick because I use it all the time within my sequences, how much you can bring to your comic book sequences as they play out simply by pulling in that camera, and placing the main subject within the window of your story exactly where they need to be in order for them to make the most visual impact possible and to keep your readers hooked. Without further ado, I say that we jump straight into this and get started. If you have any questions along the way, be sure to drop them in the comments, and I'll be happy to answer them for you. Alright, let's do this. 2. Setting up the Panels: Alright, so here we are in Clip Studio Paint, my favorite drawing application of choice. As you well know, I'm using the legendary line art brush by Mark Brent, can download it for free. Off of her website, it is absolutely wonderful this brush because if you've ever seen any of my lessons before, you'll notice that it draws beautifully just like a pencil, except digitally. All right, what we're going to do first up is we're just going to draw up some panels. Can be any sorts of panels. We're going to try out a few different dimensions here. Where's my ruler tool? I'm going to grab the ruler tool here and clip Studio Paint. It's right there on the left. We've got figure ruler selected. We're making sure that we are on rectangle. We're going to zoom in first. There we go. We're going to be laying out a sequence here. All right? We're going to keep it fairly rough to begin with, because in these initial stages of the comic book page drawing process, we're thinking in very simple terms, broad terms, okay? Macro. What I mean by macro is we're thinking of the overall image. We're not getting caught up in the details. And you'll notice that I've got one long skinny panel over to the left, another long skinny panel running horizontally across the top, I'm going to have one that's got a little bit more height to it underneath, and then we're going to have a relatively squared off panel at the end there. Okay. And you'll notice that I'm creating some gutters here. That's the gaps between the pens. I want to try to keep those consistent. You know, a lot of the time, what I see in beginner work is that they won't pay enough attention to getting these gutters correct. We need to make sure they're ship shape lined up as accurately and consistently as we can possibly get them. So you can see that trying to keep that gutter spacing nice. It's a little side note, little extra bonus for you to keep in mind. Then we're going to do a final one here to the bottom right, we're just going to stretch that out. There we go. Now, this ruler tool serves as a guide that the pencil is going to conform to. As we run it around the frame of the panel that we want to draw down onto the page. Pretty nifty stuff. It's one of my favorite tools here in Clip Studio Paint. So you can see I'm very precise with my panels because I know that it leaves us with a professional look, a professional level of quality that we really do want to try to capture within anything that we're drawing onto the page. I feel like this one could do it a little bit more space. There we go. And that is just our basic comic book page layout that we've done in landscape mode. All we've got to do now is run our pencil around these ruler guides, and, you know, select your desired thickness. I'm going to go with a thickness around about this, you know, something reasonably uh, you know, defined. I'll leave us with a nice decently thick edge. Nothing too thick, though. I don't like frames that are too thick. That's a personal preference, but we just run our pencil around the outside. You can see how easy that is, by the way. Super duper easy. Now, why have I selected to do these panels at varying dimensions, okay? Some are long vertically, some long horizontally. Others are a little bit more square. Well, it's because on a comic book page, you never know what you're going to get. You are going to be working within panels of all different shapes and sizes sometimes. And so you've got to know how to work within those ranges across a spectrum of potential dimension that these panels are going to be presented in. And so here we go. We've got our panels drawn up. We are ready to rock and roll. Now, I'll bring this to a certain level of completion, but as I said, what I'll be showing you here is a part of the comic book page drawing process that I really tackle at the very beginning before I add in any refinement, any details, any design, and certainly any rendering. This is all layout stuff. So we're working with Menkan models, very roughly drawn figures and extremely basic backgrounds. So here we go. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to zoom out here. Now you know why I'm doing that it's because I like to work from a distance. In the final edit of this lesson, though, you will actually see a zoomed in representation, so you're not going to miss much at all, I promise you, you're going to get a close up, detailed view of exactly what's going on. But the thing is, for me, I can't actually work close up, especially in these initial stages. So I can't impress on you enough how important it is to work from a distance. It gives you an overall look at how the composition is coming together, so keep that in mind. All right, we're on our pencil tool. Let's go ahead and do this. 3. Drafting, Cropping, Composing the Sequence: Now for this sequence, I'm going to I don't know, let's do a basic action hero type sequence. Maybe we'll have a female character, a male character mix things up a little bit. And we're going to keep it pretty loose and mundane. Here's the thing. You don't actually have to necessarily think about how you're going to frame it up just yet. We're working digitally, so anything kind of goes. I'm going to draw in a head here. Alright. And we're going to be placing the camera below this character. We had a little bit of perspective them. Now, some framing is going on here, absolutely. Is it the final framing, though, not necessarily? Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that usually these panels can be split up into thirds. Okay? In fact, every one of these panels can be split up into thirds. And on each of these thirds, where the line intersects. So at these points, usually it's a good idea to put a prominent focal subject on those intersecting points. Now, you can also have it so that maybe you've got a character here, this might be a close up shot of their eyes, and they could be taking up two third columns, okay, one and two. Now, that can happen along the rows on top of that, okay? And if you work with these thirds, usually what you're going to find is that you're able to capture relatively decent compositions. Now, I'm going to fly kind of blind here as far as my thirds are concerned as I'm sketching up these panels. I'm just kind of going with my feel at the moment, but I do think about this. I'm conscious of those thirds as I work. So just something to keep in mind, a little insight into what my brain is doing as I lay down these well, these different elements within the panels. Okay? So I'm going to have this character here, and we might have his arm coming out there, and then maybe a fist All right, so arms coming forward, Fs is coming up. And then I'm thinking we'll have another character down here. This character is going to be placed just underneath the initial one that we drew up. This will maybe be the lady character, so you can see that she's set a little further back. All right. Now, here's where the framing comes into play, and it might still be the final framing, but I want to show you something real quick. All right? We're going to have her arms going back in space there. Okay. Now, I want to give her a little bit more room. As you can see, things aren't exactly lining up on these thirds like we might want. So we need to fix this because it's not looking right. Things look awkward. They look squashed. So I'm going to make a selection around this character. Now obviously, if you're working traditionally, this is going to be a little bit more difficult. But any drawing application is going to allow you to do this quite easily. Now, I've made a massive boo boo here, and I've actually drawn. There's a a very unfortunate mistake to make because it makes this process much more complicated. But what I'm going to do here is I'm going to copy and paste what I've just drawn into this panel onto another layer so that I can work on it independently of the panel frames themselves. Okay. Control C, Control V onto another layer. Alright, so you can see that there are on separate layers there. Now, the reason for this is because we're going to be doing a lot of moving around, a lot of shuffling. So I want this character to be placed a little higher. Okay, up here a bit more. And to the left is what I'm thinking. Remember, we're considering those thirds, these become quite important, and we want to give enough room below this figure to allow a decent amount of exposure for the figure below. Okay, we want to give them some more room to shine, and we may even want to increase their size a little bit. So you can see here this is the framing process that I'm talking about. We're just getting everything placed in position where we feel it's going to work best. And if I place this character higher on where I think that third is going to intersect. So around about here, I bet that placement is going to look fine and dandy. Okay, cool. So that's working well. But then this character up the top, I don't feel is going to fit in with what we've got going on with these two characters. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take this one down here and I'm going to shuffle them across to this side. There's going to be a point where the thirds come down and intersect on this character's head. Just let me draw that in there for you real quick so you can see what I'm thinking about in a visual manner. Might be a third here and a third here. You can see that we want the focus of the character to be on their head. Alright. That's what I'm thinking about, which means that as we redraw in the character that we wanted coming in from the front, we're going to bring them closer to the camera. But I'm thinking, and, hey, let's mix things up a little bit here. Give this character's head an alternate angle to the one below just to keep things nice and varied. So I'm going to have it so that this character is going to be coming toward us, but they're kind of bent over, right? So that means that we're going to have a little bit more room down the bottom there. All right? They're flying toward us, just like Superman. See that? Beautiful. Now, we have gone through a process of framing of just taking you through it. That's what I'm talking about, okay? We have readjusted the placement and the poses of these characters. We've made it so that Look, let's bring her fist forward here. That might look a little weird. Let's have another crack at that. So this would be her shoulder upper arm for arm fist. There we go. Beautiful. It's a nice strong fist that we've got going on there. Okay. And then we got the character above, which is a little larger. Now, further cropping is required. I want to bring him closer. I want to make him take up more of that space. Why? Because it's gonna help to produce more depth. Within this shot. Now, what that's going to mean is I need to bring his leg up here, okay? It's sitting way too close to the character below. So cropping, framing, call this what you like. It basically all means the same thing when I'm referring to. I get my eraser out there, get rid of those off cuts. There we go. So that's it. As you can see, you don't need a whole lot, right? You can basically go in there, make the adjustments you need to make, and then you're set for the next phase of your drawing. You know exactly where everything's going to go, how big it's going to be, and where in relation one character is going to reside with another character in the panel in the same space. Okay, cool, so let's move on here. Now, don't worry. We will go over the top of these characters. We'll find them a little bit so that we can have a little bit fun with a little bit of fun with drawing these characters and the subject matter within the panels. But I do want to just hit the point home here that we are using this cropping technique specifically in the earlier stages of the layout thumbnailing process for our comic book pages. Okay, moving on here, we're going to well, we'll have one character. Let's say, I know what we'll do. We'll do it like a sideshot of the characters as they're flying toward the camera. So this will be the lady in front. We'll have her leg coming back there. That might be a bit of an awkward pose. We'll see how that goes. But you'll notice that she's a certain size right now. I'm actually going to make her much bigger as we continue forth here. All right. So she's going to have her back kind of twisted up. We're going to bring that arm over here. You can see how gestural I am with my figure drawing in these early stages, gives me room to make mistakes, to rework the drawing if I need. And you will indeed, see me rework my drawings again and again. Look at this. I'm completely repositioning the head here. And I got no worries about doing that because the initial head I laid down, it was very simple. It was super, super basic. Didn't take me a lot of time to draw, didn't have a lot of invested time and energy into it. So I can make those changes with absolute freedom and not waste a whole lot of time in putting in all this work into a flawed foundation that just wasn't going to turn out in the end. So this is why it's important to start simple because it means that you are going to be able to make the changes you need to make if required. All right. So there we got her pelvis and her legs drawn in at the back there. Now, I'm feeling like we could adjust her body, so let's go ahead and do that. I'm simply going to make a selection around the upper half and just rotate the body up slightly. Now, I'm liking her for the most part, but I do feel like there could be a little bit more movement within her. So I'm going to adjust once more, dispose Okay, I'm going to bring the head up to about this point. So we've adjusted the head twice here, and it hasn't taken us a whole lot of time at all on each iteration. So this really is a phase of exploration. Now I want a little bit of a bend happening within her arm here as we bring it forward. Now it is going to be foreshortened away from us. So that's important to keep in mind. Alright, there we go. Done. So she's positioned to a certain point. And next up, we're going to add in the other guy. So he's flying off into the distance. Now, most of his head really should be covered by his upper body there. Now, here's the thing. I'm going to be creating some overlap between these characters later as we adjust their cropping. We have his leg coming up here. Yeah, it wasn't just the bee hind of the lady that we were drawing. It's also his behind, so, you know, we have equal opportunity here. All right. And what we're gonna do is we're going to have his arm coming out here toward us. But let's lift. All right, increase the size of the forearm there so you can see that some nice dynamism and foreshortening happening. It's pretty cool. All right. Great. Now, again, things aren't placed exactly how I want them here, so it's time to do some shuffling. This is definitely a technique that I utilize every single time I draw anything down onto the page. I'm going to have him sitting on this third, okay? That's about the cropping that I want for him. I'm going to lift him up so that his head, his noggin there is sitting on where those intersecting thirds would roughly occur. Okay. Now, it doesn't have to be exact, but it should be really in the ballpark, if possible. Look, I'm going to make him even bigger. Maybe we'll make him take up the first or the last rather, two third rows. There we go. Done. Now, here's where the magic's gonna happen. I actually want her overlapping him, and what I can do if I want is I can just paste her onto another layer. You really do need the layers working for you if you are utilizing this te technique to a significant degree. All right, let's go ahead and we'll increase the size of her. Now look at that. Look how much span we get on her. All right. Now we'll move her around about to there. I'll probably end up increasing her fist size. But you can see there that his leg is creating a nice frame for her over the top. Unfortunately, her body is creating a little bit of a tangent in that lower region. So I'm going to bring her down a bit more. I might even increase her size somewhat, and that'll just about do it. Okay. I'm liking that framing a lot better, at least at this point. So I'm going to go ahead, get my eraser out and get rid of the off cuts. Wonderful. Next up, we need to reposition him. I'm not liking where his leg is on this side at the moment, so I'm going to go ahead and just lift it up so that it's coming out more that way. What that does is it creates a little bit more of an extra overlap between the characters there. That's good. All right now I've got to go ahead and actually adjust his pelvis there. We'll bring that leg once again up around her head. Now that is intersecting with the top of it, so we either have to keep it clear or we have to create some significant overlap. I'm going to opt for keeping it clear and we may be to lower we may be able to lower this leg. Let's go ahead and do that. We'll lower it to around about this point. Let's just see. Let's shuffle this guy around a little bit and potentially adjust his position entirely. All right. Maybe down here is going to be better for him. You know what? I'm going to redo his pose. Here's the thing. It's a process, as you're drawing in these characters, you're going to discover different things that you like, things that you don't like, and hopefully wind out with a better outcome by the end. Now, for this guy, I'm going to change him up a little bit. I'm going to have him turning around and looking at her. He'll be creating a little bit more of a body twist as well. So now we're looking more at the side of his pelvis. All right. And I don't want to I don't want to represent his booty too much here just because I don't want to Like, I don't have a problem doing that, but I don't want it to look like he's posing too much, you know? So maybe we'll make it so that his leg is actually coming down here, because, you know, in that initial shot, it kind of is going in a downward direction. So we'll have his leg coming down there, and then this one over here will sort of be coming up around top of her face. Now, I do feel like we're missing something in this region. So this is also about thinking in terms of how you're going to fill up the space. Within the image, like, how are you going to utilize that negative space? Where does it need to be utilized? You know, here I'm thinking that I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to create a forearm and a fist. There we go. And then here, I'm going to bring out his arm, bring out his forearm, and then boom, there we have it done. And then he's going to be looking over his shoulder, like I said, except we can't really see his face now. So maybe we'll just have him looking forward. Well, then again, let me mess around with this for a moment. You know, it's such a it's such a creative portion of the process, you know, actually going through and figuring out where everything is going to sit plotting out the scene. I'm liking that a little bit better. So we'll go with it, and I'm going to create some shape there in his torso, in his pelvis. You can see these edges that I've incorporated. Okay, and I think that's looking good. What I'm going to do next is I'm just going to lift her a little bit higher to about here. Just because I think that that'll work better. And then I feel like her arm is a little too close to the top edge of that panel, so I'm going to bring it down lower. Okay, look at that. Look at these small tweaks that we're making to frame up the scene. Not just that, but also to ensure that the artwork itself is fit in the most optimal way inside the panel, okay? That is the most important thing is just to make sure that it actually fits You might have a cape or something that's going to flow up over here. Okay, great. Beautiful. Let me take a sip of coffee here. Yum. Coffee is an important requirement as well. Make sure you put that on your checklist of necessary steps to take within the drawing process. Take a sip of coffee. Good for re hydration. Some will say that it dehydrates you, but I say it rehydrates because mostly water, I have a watery. I don't like to drink proper coffee. It's all instant coffee for me, but I digress. Let's talk about these next few panels. We have one and two. These are a little bit easier because they have dimensions that aren't so severe. All right. And what we're going to do here is we are going to show the mega Boss. All right. He's going to be a giant. And I don't like boring camera angles. So instead of just showing him from the front at an eye level, I'm going to pull the camera down and show an upward representation of him. Now, we need to pull this sequence together, okay? So I'm giving you so many bonuses here in this lesson, because guess what? When it comes to sequential storytelling, this boss here with this baddy that we're laying down on the page, he could be anywhere. If we don't show these characters in the same scene as him, they could be in completely different locations and we wouldn't know any better. So think of this not only as an introduction to the villain, but also as a establishing shot. This is something that once again, a lot of new wonderful people to the comic art craft miss in their sequential storytelling. Alright, so this is going to be his legs there. Give him nice big tanky legs. Look at that. Beautiful. Just sketch it in there. Have fun, get the energy flowing. Alright. Now, I know it's easier said than done. Really. You know what the funny thing is? The longer you've been drawing for the more competent you become, the rougher your work starts to look. Isn't that weird? Well, it's true. It's definitely true. Okay, so I'm going to have you know, this isn't going to be a fancy pose. It's gonna be a power pose, though. So we're going to have his fists coming down here, done. And then we're going to maybe have this arm coming up, and he's going to be, you know, reveling in his power. That's that's what this arm is all about. That's going down and then back up away from us. Cool. Now, we don't want to necessarily have to cut and chop up this dude. So we're going to create a brand new layer above him for the characters that are flying toward him. Alright? And so we're going to draw our first character here. So this is the dude character. He's on the right in this scene. So looking back, that means he's going to be placed on the left. Now, don't be afraid to overlap a few things, okay? Let's have him overlap the leg of this monster of this bad guy. I know that I'm drawing some pretty crazy, foreshortened angles here, Bashots as well, of the characters. You know, I like to make things difficult on myself. That's for sure. This is going to be his legs. You can see that they look like Michelin man legs because they're so foreshortened. Look, we'll have this arm coming out here and it's going to sort of be coming toward us. Alright. Sam with this arm It's coming toward us. So if you've ever, like, the arms are going out the back, right? They're sort of coming out the sides and then they're being pulled back. That's what I'm trying to show there, anyway. Now, these legs are looking a little too stumpy, so I'm going to go and edit them, at least this one. You know, here's a secret to my art. I usually just look at how bad it is initially and fix the mistakes within it. And I think that's really the trick to becoming a decent artist, at least in my technique, the Clayton technique is that, hey, just know what mistakes to spot and then how to fix them, you'll be as good as gold, alright? Now, I don't want to be spreading his legs too much here. I, uh, maybe we'll bring that leg out just a little tiny bit more down to about there. We'll see. I want it to be nice and dynamic, though, this is going to definitely be certainly a shot to behold for this guy. So, let's actually bring his leg down to about this point. Cool. That'll work. And this one's coming out there, so we'll have his foot be placed on that angle. Cool. That's looking really good. You can just imagine a nice lens blur on this guy in the back as they fly toward him. And then we're going to have the lady on this side, so she's coming up there. I'm going to place her head right underneath his armpit. Again, creating that nice overlap because here's the thing. Sometimes we have a tendency to avoid overlapping elements on the page, but we should not avoid this so much because it creates a beautiful amount of depth when we can actually utilize it effectively. All right? So let's just hold down the undo button on that one. We're going to have another crack at it. I'll create a little bit of a twist within our body. Now, here's the thing. She's closer to us. So let's take advantage of that, right, because we can create multiple levels of depth within this scene if we're smart about it. We can have her in the foreground, the other character, the other hero in the middle ground, and the bad guy in the background. I'm going to put her pelvis on a little bit of an angle here. I like to create a bit of a twist in the bodies of my characters simply because what it allows me to do is just make their pose more dynamic. It allows me to add more movement to it by default. Okay, so here's the thing, though. I'm going to need to make it so that her legs are for shortened appropriately. All right. Now, this one's going to be coming down, I think, a little further forward. Do I like that? No, I don't think that's working very well. Let me just maneuver her toward the left some more. Okay, that could work. I feel like this leg needs to come down on more this angle. That's what I'm thinking. That's what I'm feeling. And this leg is going to come forward. And I'm thinking, then we'll have the lower leg come back again. Look at that. A beautiful amount of depth is now happening within her pose. I'm really digging that. And then what we can do is, of course, you know, we can have this arm coming back toward us. So now we're going to have her body. Oh, this is great. I'm really feeling her movement. You know, that's always a good thing when you can really start feeling the movement of your character. That's when you're able to bring some life to the pose. Alright? So we're going to look at the difference in the tilt of the shoulders and the pelvis. That's what we're looking for there. That's what we need. And if we're smart about this, what we'll do is we'll bring her arm up here, okay? So she'll have her fist there, and then she'll have her forearm and then her upper arm, and Brum it comes back into the upper body there. Now, that is a good looking pose. I'm thinking we could still give it a little bit more length, though, on her arm. So let's move it out here some more. We could probably even give it more bend, too. So I just bend the pose of my characters to my will, and that is the wonderful, you know, gift, the privilege that you get as an artist is you get to kind of draw your characters, however you like, and nobody can say anything about it. Well, they can say something about it, but, you know, what are they gonna do, draw something better? It's everybody's choice as to what they draw. I think if you have put in the years of effort to become an amazing artist and you want to draw things in a certain way, then you have earned that right, in my opinion. And if anybody wants to complain about it, they should learn how to draw and draw things in their own way. Now, I'm not happy with that arm pose, so I'm gonna redo it. I know what I want to go for, but I just haven't executed it exactly in the right way. So, you know, that's something that you're gonna find. Sometimes you got a really great idea. You just didn't execute it right. So don't give up on it. Just have another crack at it like I am. You'll notice I never settle. Well, I rarely settle on the initial thing that I come up with. So, you know, I would suggest leaving it a little bit open, trying out a few different options and just see, you know, see what you can come up with. Now, her other arm is going forward. So well, you know, maybe we'll have it repositioned out here. That could be cool. But that wouldn't make sense for where her you know, it wouldn't make sense for the angle of her upper torso. So we'll just leave it as if it's going forward there. I mean, that'll work. Great. I think we're done. I'm gonna make her a little bit bigger. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make a selection around her. Once again, here we go with the cropping. I mean, it's kind of cropping, scaling, framing. It's all the same stuff. But the thing is that if we make her a little bit bigger here, we are going to be able to create that beautiful beautiful depth that we are always striving to capture within our work. Okay? Look at all the overlap that's going on here. That's good. It's something we want. I go to move her fist back. Arm is looking a little bit too long for my liking. All we need to know is where the positioning of the fist is going to be, and then we can sort of rejig the foreshortening of her arm accordingly. Okay. Look, I'm even thinking that we bring the fist back to a roundabout here. I think that'll work even better. There we go. Done. Ah, actually, I liked it better the other way. But hey, you got to try things out, you know, you never know what you're gonna get. But look at that. We've got some nice anatomy going on, some for shortening. It's all looking absolutely fantastic. And now we're onto the final panel here. Alright. And for this one, look, Hey, you know what we're gonna do? We know that these characters are in the same scene together, okay? We know that. That's information that's important to us as the reader. So now what can we do? Well, we have the luxury of doing a nice, close up, zoomed in shot of the villain's face, okay? And we know that he's looking right at them. So zoom in here. And we'll get a nice detailed shot of his head. So we're pulling the camera in tight. Notice that I've cropped his face just by default. Now, will I crop it more? Maybe. Maybe I will do that. You know what it'd be good? It'd be good to maybe put his head on a bit of a different angle. Okay, so let's just capture his head from this side. There we go. So all I need to do is just get the basic structure of the head down first. We're scribbling it in there. Try to resist the temptation of getting too ahead of yourself. When it comes to your art, you don't want to start refining too early on is what I'm saying there, because, you know, you need to get this stuff down first. You need to know what the blueprint is. That's what you're defining here, the roadmap. If you don't know what the roadmap is, you're going to get lost and you're going to go down bad roads that lead to nowhere. So make sure that you've figured out the territory, you know, that you know where it is you're headed. I'm going to here's the cropping process right before your eyes. Now, let's actually place him on a completely different layer just so that we're not mucking anything else up. Alright, and here we go. Look at this. Look how fun this is. We can just go in there, sort of figure out where we want his head to be, and then we're done. That's working well. Nice, easy one for us. Fun one, too, especially when it comes to the drawing portion. But as far as the subject of this class is concerned, okay, cropping your panels. We've gone through that, okay? That's done. For this part of the process, it is done. It's solid. It is ready to rock and roll. So I couldn't be happy with this. This is a good layout. Again, we know what's happening. We know where everything's going to go. And I'm so excited to jump into the I guess you could call it the refined sketch where we start to figure out what kind of anatomy is going on. You know, we could leave it here, but I want to give you a little bit more than just basic mannequin models. So we'll quickly grow through this and refine it a tiny, tiny bit. But as I said, that is the cropping mechanism that's at play of just taking you through it. You can see that on each one of these panels, we carefully framed up exactly where these characters were going to go and how large they were going to be, what sort of overlap we were going to see, okay? And what you'll notice first and foremost is that every single one of these character shots have variations incorporated into them. Let me draw and talk here. As we work. I'm going to place all of these layers into a single folder. Okay. There we go. And well, you know what? I think that we could probably draw straight over the top of what we've got here, but I'll make a backup just in case. 4. Refining the Sequence: Okay. So as I was saying, what you're going to notice is that we have a whole bunch of variation that we've incorporated into each one of these shots that we picked for the characters. We have some close up shots. We have some pulled back, medium shots. No shot is the same, though. Look at how dynamic the characters are, okay? You can see the amount of for shortening that we've incorporated into them. You can see that it really does feel like they're coming out of the panel, out of the page. This is what creates an immersive story, an immersive sequential experience for your reader, for your audience. And that's really our goal at the end of the day as comic book artist, is to create an experience which is as immersive as possible. You can see here that once we've got the basic sketch down, it becomes so easy to just draw right over the top. And what's more important than that is it's less stressful than just winging it. Like, we know where we're headed now. We've got the game plan. Now we just got to work over the top and have fun with it. Are we still going to make mistakes? Sure, but that's okay because guess what? This isn't the final line art, either. Wouldn't you know it? There's multiple phases of the development process for a drawing that a drawing should go through. It's not a one end done sitting at the drawing board. You're gonna want to come back to it? You go to want to mess around with it? You know, try out a few different things, see what works, see what doesn't you know, hopefully, by the end, you're able to come up with something that is gonna knock the socks off your readers, okay? So this is his head done. Let's give him a little bit of a hairstyle. You know, I like the 80s and 90s, so I'm going to give him a little bit of a crazy hairstyle, you know, something like this, maybe, make it a little bit longer. There you go. Sketch in some hair there. You'll notice that I'm not getting too crazy with it, except for the style. But as far as the amount of time I'm putting into it, you know, usually I would fall into the trap of rendering the heck out of everything, but not so much here. No, we're going to, you know, remain chill and just draw a little something in there like that. Enough here to, you know, go over the top with some refined pencils once we're done, once we're happy with it. Alright, now, once we've gotten this far, it's time to well, do the hard part, which is a foreshortened body, not as easy as you would think, but we're going to have a crack at it. Look, probably what we're going to be seeing here, first and foremost, more than anything else, is just his pecks. That's mostly what's going to be visible. We might see a little bit of the sternum, but that's about it, okay? We're not going to see much else there. We got his leg, of course. We'll give that a little bit more of a refined shape, but it's pretty much what it's going to be. All right? We don't need to add too much more to it. From there, we can draw in the trapezius muscles. Alright, there we go. I like to really bring the tendons through on the neck of my characters, especially in a shot like this. You might even see some shoulder muscles behind those trapezius muscles. You can see that I've just sort of fudged them. I haven't really double checked that that is anatomically accurate, but it looks right. And sometimes just having it look right is enough. So that's the dude done. Let's tackle the lady character. Okay. She's at a little bit of a distance here, so I'm going to be fairly vague on her facial features. You know, if you're ever wondering, how do I draw characters from a distance? This is sort of how it's done, right? You just take the details out and you focus on just the primary elements alone. Not really much else. Alright, so that's her face drawn in. I'll give her a little bit of a hairdo, too. Now, that hairdo is going to run up behind the character that is in front. Okay, I'll give her a funky looking 80s hairstyle, too. Something like that, get the eraser out, get rid of the hair line. There we go, and maybe just this little line here. Maybe this one as well. Okay, done. So you can see, it's really that easy. That's kind of the level that we're taking it to here. Next up, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to draw in a little bit of anatomy for her. Now, what does anatomy really allow you to do? It just helps you to construct the body. All right. It's a tool, just like perspective, just like foreshortening, like anything. And I find that knowing anatomy really helps you to shape the body accurately. It gives you the ability to kind of go in there and just ensure that the structure and the functionality, okay? The mechanics of your pose checks out. A lot of artists, they end up with broken looking poses. And it's not necessarily that they're bad at figure drawing. It's just that they don't have a solid understanding of anatomy and the restraints that are placed on the human body. Okay. We can only bend our arms and legs so far. Now, can you push it? Yes. Can you push it to the limit and do some really intense poses? Heck, yeah, you can, 100%. But that comes with time, experience, practice, and understanding the process of stylization and how all that good stuff works, which is, well, outside the scope of this lesson, but we'll certainly do something on it because it's important. It's important for sure. Now, I'm going to go ahead here and I'm going to make a selection around Henogon. And then what we're gonna do is we're actually going to increase its size, and we're going to reposition it, too. I've gone ahead and just accidentally rotated my canvas there. Whoops. Alright, there we go reposition around about there. Now, this is similar to the cropping techniques that we were talking about earlier, you know, where we just go through and reposition things how we want them. You know, I love working digitally for this reason. A lot of people will say, That's cheating, but guess what? They made an eraser for a reason in traditional art. You can see that that's cheating. Having another star at your artwork to make it better to bring your vision to life in the exact way that you want it to be, I don't think that's cheating. I think that that's just being smart, really. And uh and critical of your work, you know? You've got to be critical and you've got to know how to fix it in order to create something that really does stand out from anything else that's been created out there. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of rubbish artwork. There's a lot of stuff out there that just isn't it's not cutting it. And unfortunately, it's actually published work. You know, I hate to put anyone else's stuff down, but some people got to up their game, okay? It's important to see where the flaws in your work are so that you can draw effectively. Remember that drawing in any art form is a communication process, okay? You're actually trying to give the reader a message. You're trying to tell them something. And if they're getting lost in translation all the time, then you haven't done your job effectively. You know, that's just the truth of the matter. And you can say, Oh, well, that's just my style. Well, you want until the cows come home. But ultimately, if the audience is looking at what you're laying down onto the page, and they just have no idea what it is you're trying to say with your art, if they can't follow the story, especially in a comic book illustration sense, you know, you're really kind of drawing into the wind. Nobody's going to get what it is you're trying to get across to them. Okay, so we've sort of sketched up her pose there. It's fine. It's not my best pose. I'm not super happy with it. Probably her arm could be lifted here a little bit more, I think. Let's go ahead and do that. You know, talking and drawing is definitely a challenge for any art teacher, I would say. But one thing that I really like about it is it enables you to sort of disconnect just enough to not overthink things. Alright, done. Now, we were gonna give this guy a cape. So I'm going to make sure that that's incorporated into this first panel for the sake of consistency. And that'll hide all of that back fudgery that I went through before. Isn't that dandy? Alright, don't have to worry about backing that to me if a cape is covering it. There we go. So that is panel number one, done and dusted. Let's be through the rest. All right. We'll start with the back of this lady's pelvis. Now, here it's really just going to be a process of incorporating the anatomy, refining a few things here and there, the shape specifically. The shape of female anatomy is especially important just because you've got a minimum amount of lines to use. You don't have as much to define their anatomy, unfortunately. If you start to use more lines than you need to for the female body, what ends up happening is it starts to make them look either more masculine or it ages them. Okay. And look, I don't make the rules on that. That just tends to be the visual effect that comes about when you start to add in a little bit more detail to the ladies. So I would say, try to avoid that if and where you can focus on shape more than anything else. Feeling like that leg needs to come up even higher. Yeah, I'm very particular about how I draw my female characters and the way that their anatomy ultimately ends up looking. You know, it can be overdone, of course, just like anything. But, I mean, you can overdo male anatomy, too. You know, look at Rob Lifeld's work, which I love. I love Lob I love Rob Lifeld as an artist, 100%, but you know, what made him stand out from the rest was the way in which he just went full on with the anatomy, you know, he went overboard. He went over the top with it. And that was really cool. That requires skill. The thing is, he got a reaction from the audience, and back in the 90s, they frigging loved it. They loved it in the early 2000s, too, you know, I always say that the 2000s, the naughties as they call it, they were great, too. They were just as good as the 90s. And I think the 80s as well. Some people would probably argue with that, but that's fine. I like that era a lot. I think you've seen a lot of innovation. A few remakes started coming about during that time, but it really was a lot of new stuff was still being created and styles, and, you know, people weren't afraid to explore and to see the different options that they had at their disposal. And I think that is something that's missing a little bit. You know, we're so afraid sometimes to travel outside the box and of what's already been done. So worried about, you know, over emphasizing certain aspects of our characters, whether they be male or female. But in the end, this really is what helps people to to connect with your work in a unique way. It gives your art a specific identity. And having an identity to your art that is recognizable, whether you might say or see it as good as bad as good or bad, I think that it's a wonderful thing to have. It sets you apart from the crowd. And that's always something that you're going to want to have as an artist. Now, ultimately, at the end of the day, you're going to learn a lot of rules, a lot of the fundamentals of what makes Artwork work. You learn about anatomy, about perspective, and all that other wonderful stuff that is, you know, it's not exactly the most riveting thing to practice to become a good artist, but it is necessary, I believe. But once you get there, once you've figured it all out and you know what you're doing, hey, don't be afraid to break the rules. I mean, I think that that's an important thing to do. Definitely break the rules. I would encourage you to break the rules because in the end, you have the opportunity to do that, and you sort of take these techniques and you make them your own. You make your own stuff with them. They become aids when you get into trouble, a helping hand for you to work out your problems, problem solving techniques, really, you know, something's looking off with the perspective and you know perspective, then you can troubleshoot your way out of those issues, those perspective problems. If you don't know perspective and you see something off with the environment, it looks distorted or slopy in weird ways, then that's well, you're stuck in the mud, then you're not going to be able to figure it out without the helping hand of a mentor, somebody who's more experienced. So yeah, as much of a pain as it is to learn the fundamentals, I would certainly tell you that it almost certainly is going to pay off most of the time. It's not a confining thing either. It really is going to help you out in a big way. Now I have to figure out how this part of the body is going to fit together and I've made the center point of her body a little ambiguous there and incorrect. I'm going to fix that. Okay, so the center of her back is going to come down into this area. Once I know where the center is, I can kind of construct the rest of her anatomy around that point. Okay. Then we have this bit coming up, down. Okay, we have this bit in the center. All right, that'll do. That'll work. It doesn't have to be perfect just yet. You know, I could probably spend hours just on this lady. I am a slow artist. I'll tell you that. That's one of my weaknesses as an artist. I wish I could be faster. I wish I could speed up a little bit. But unfortunately, I'm just I've accepted the reality that I'm always going to be a perfectionist and I'm getting better at it. It's very hard for me to be satisfied with anything that's not exactly how I think it should be. Okay, now, we have got that you know, I find that shaping the glutes of a female character is especially important. So I'm going to take a little bit of time just to perfect that. It is important. People judge that kind of thing visually. All right. Next up, let's add in her hair. For her face, it's pretty simple because she's facing away from us, so we just have to do a little bit of an outline there, maybe draw in her ears at the back, bring them down a little lower. Okay. And then the rest is just her hair. Okay, so we'd have a jaw line coming down like so, back of her ear. And the hairs gonna be flowing out like that. Alright. We can get our racer out now, get rid of the back of her skull. And that's looking great. You as for this stuff, we can get rid of it because we sort of we got the anatomy figured out in there. You know, that's still gonna lead up into her neck area, of course, but, you know, it's done. It's done and dusted, okay? So once that's done, you can draw in the rest of her hair around the top of her head, around the back, and beautiful. That's good to go. Great. Let's move on to the guy at the front. We'll move a little faster through this. He's going to have his hair there. Remember, because he's a little further away, we can get away with less detail being incorporated into him. Let's go to have his ear there foreshortened arm. Alright, let's put some time into this fist. Remember that when it comes to your comic book illustrations, the hands of your characters and the faces are always going to be two areas that you really want to hone in on. Why? Because people pay attention to them. Why? Because they're trying to connect with and relate with your character. All right. There we go. We can even add in a little bit of muscle structure there for the arm. Look, I'm getting carried away. I do love anatomy. Anatomy is fun. It's like a jigsaw puzzle when you think about it. It's just figuring out where the right pieces go really at the end of the day. Can see how fast I'm going through this just for the sake of time. I'm rushing it a little bit. There's going to be mistakes that I'm making probably, you'll have to forgive me. But for the most part, I think it's working pretty well. Notice that I'm drawing in his body, one muscle at a time, like I'm literally constructing over the top of that initial drawing using the muscle structure. And that's what I mean. It's just the best aid ever. It really does help you out. Now, as for his behind, we're going to how did I draw that in there? Yeah, it looks like his body actually twists up a little bit, so we're going to place in the hip structure there, draw out his leg. That's all good to go. And then, you know, we might have a little indication of his booty on that side, but not too much. You know, it's partially obscured because we're looking at a side view of his body there. And I'm going to keep it rough. I'm going to keep it scribbly, just 'cause, you know, that's the aesthetic that we're going for evident. Once that's done, we can work our way up the rest of the body. Now, here we're going to see the lats come around and down going to come up again. Okay. Now, once you have really gotten a handle on your anatomy, you'll notice that it loosens up in much the same way that mine is loosening up here. Obviously, I was much, much tighter once upon a time with my anatomy. And I think that a little bit of creativity, caricaturing comes in later on down the track. As you become a more experienced artist, you sort of you want to have fun, you know, I think. It can be hard to have fun again with your art after you've been spending years of study at the drawing board. I can actually be very difficult. Now, something to keep in mind is that men, you know, they call this centerpiece of the back view of the pelvis. I think they call that cleftalHizon. Now, it's important to note that that is actually shorter on men than it is on women, a little something to keep in mind there. I'm going to make his hair run off out the panel. Just because otherwise, we're going to end up with a tangent. And then we have his cape there. So let's draw in the rest of the cape. Let's go to partially obscure that hand on the opposite side. That's fine. We want that obscuration. It's going to give us some depth. And now he's done. Now, just think if you were to go over the top of this once again with a pencil, you'd have a decent amount to work with there. Now, I have forgotten to actually draw in her breast, so we'll just place that down, like, so that's done. Next, we've got these characters down here. So this is probably going to be the most complex penel. We're going to spend a little bit of time on this one, but we're still going to be fairly quick with it. So we'll start with the ladies since she's in the foreground. All right. And this is just about defining the lines that we really want to keep here. All right. Once we know that, then we can clarify it. That's what we're doing. We're just bringing clarity to what we want to have there in the final image. Okay. There we go. So we got this leg coming forward. You'll notice the rhythm here that we see in the glutes as one leg moves forward and one pushes back. That is something that's important to know. Okay, there we go. And then we have that leg coming back. So that's fine. That's actually working really well. I don't want to get too more detailed there because otherwise I'll have to bring everything else up to that same standard. Right now, we're going to have some overlap there, of course, between the character in front and this lovely lady character. I'm going to reshape this area a little bit. There we go. And then we're going to have her lats. Bring those up. We'll have shoulder muscles. Okay. And then we'll also maybe get a peek at the breasts there. It's a little hard to tell. I do think that the ribs won't be as prominent as we've drawn them there. So we'll be able to see the breast pass them. Okay, especially because just of the angle of her torso, then we can go in, draw out her arm. Now, I know that this is a little bit messy. What I would encourage you to do if you're following along, because it can be hard to follow scribbly, messy artwork. I would suggest use this as an exercise to practice loosening up. Practice loosening up. Really try to understand that in the beginning of anything that you set out to create as a pencil artist, you're going to need to have a certain amount of energy behind it, and that energy can't come from being too careful. You really got to be able to get the gesture ing, okay? Even in the anatomy, not just the pose itself, but the actual anatomy, the way that you shape your character's body, that gestural stylization almost needs to be present. It's what brings your work to life. And if you don't have it, it's going to feel dead on the page, and that's just the truth. That is just the cold, hard truth of the matter. Okay, so this is going to be her fist on this side. We're gonna give it a little bit of shape. Okay. There we go, done and dusted. And once we figured that out, it's time to yest it. We're going to draw in her hair. It's going to be coming out toward us. As you can see, got a nice amount of foreshortening and perspective applied to it. Which is what we want. We'll have a little ear here, for sure. Little ear here. It rhymes. Now, maybe that hairs in fact coming down a little too far on the front of the face. I'm going to actually get rid of the front of the face and just redraw it out. There we go. And then we add in the other details. These gestural direction lines that sort of show the movement of the hair, how it's combed. That's what I think about as I'm laying in these lines. So you might consider the same thing. Like, if you're combing out this hair in the direction you wanted it to flow in, how would you do that? Never have hair that's just straight that's not being affected at all by the elements or the momentum of your character's movement. Otherwise, it comes across as fake, unfortunately. Sure. And fakery is the last thing we want to be producing within our art. Why? Because Well, it's going to break the suspense of disbelief that we are trying to cultivate within our artwork. Suspense of disbelief is an important thing to maintain at all times. Why? Because it makes for more immersive and engaging experience for your audience. Makes them feel like this could really happen. Maybe it could be really happening to them. You know, I mean, in a sense, they gather character in the story as they're reading it. I'm feeling like this breast is probably a little bit too visible for the angle that we're looking at the character on, so I'm going to bring it in. Okay. That's a little better. And now we're going to tackle the guy. So he's in front here. All right, we'll get rid of some of these overlapping forms. Alright. There we go. You can see how that all of a sudden reads way more clearly. And now we go through the same process, right? Now, as I said, this is going to either be difficult or it's going to be fun. I'm not going to say it's going to be easy, but it will be a fun puzzle to solve if you know your anatomy. If you don't know your anatomy, there's probably going to be a little bit of a headache for you. It about at this point because we are drawing characters from the bottom up the back view. I mean, you know, that's one heck of a view to draw a character on. It's pretty darn difficult, in fact. And so if you're not well acquainted with the human body, if you don't know how to maneuver it around inside your mind and picture it from different angles, then yeah, is this going to be easy? Hell? No, it is. It's not at all. So you've got to really just be patient with yourself if that is the situation that you're in, and it probably is if you're not an advanced artist. You know, this is in some sense, what we're going through here is an advanced process where we're sort of just being really loose with the anatomy and we're sketching it in there. But the actual cropping, which is what this lesson really was the focus of, that's something that should be considered even as a beginner, you know, how you frame your panels. It's not talked about enough. I don't ever see it really being taught. I mean, to be honest with you, there's not a whole lot of lessons out there on comic book illustration, specifically in regards to sequential storytelling. You know, there's a lot of nuance to this that just it's difficult to learn about because there's not a whole lot of information on the specifics that are out there that is out there. And so you find yourself kind of guessing your way through it, trying to figure it out, wondering why, you know, you're not getting those jobs that you expect to get from the comic book studios, wondering why you're not getting the likes that you want to see on Facebook and Instagram. And it's a lot of these little tiny issues that, you know, unless you watch a lesson like this, you just would be completely unaware of. Like, that cropping process just makes your work look way more dynamic almost immediately. And I'm not joking. It really does. That's why I do it every single time I draw because I know that it works. And I mean, you saw it for yourself. I don't really need to sell it to you, but I guess my point is that if you can learn as an artist, just starting out about these little nuances that aren't common knowledge that are really only learned through going through this stuff on your own and stumbling through. Like, I just learned this along the way. I tried it out one day, and I was like, Damn, this actually works. This is making my artwork look better. I'm going to stick with it. And so that's how some of this stuff is actually discovered. And, you know, the thing is, is a lot of the artists who are discovering it, they're working in the industry. They're not teaching this stuff. They're sort of, you know, working on comic books. That's their day job. That's what they do. They don't have time to actually sit down and do a class that's in depth like this. Now, his legs are a little bit funky. I'm going to get the eraser out and reshape them a little bit here and there. But anything is going to look funky when it's this foreshortened. Let me just tell you that. Have you ever, you know, really looked up at someone from a lower angle, like, really looked up at them, like a dramatic low angle. It's kind of weird. Like the whole the whole body, the whole face, especially if you're looking at someone's face, it shifts, it morphs into something that's, well, kind of strange to look at just because we don't often see people's faces from that angle. Now, I learned about this back when I was kind of dabbling in the video game industry. Well, you know, I actually worked in it funly enough for a long time. Well, for a few years. You know, I felt like a long time. Yeah. But I remember the guy who taught me three D modeling. He told me early on that you've got to basically keep in mind the same things that you would keep in mind if you were drawing. You got to keep in mind that shape. You go to make sure everything looks good from every single angle. Whether you're working with polygons or contours. Now, I'm going to add a cape to this guy. It's going to come out behind him there. So we'll draw that out. And you can see that the lines that I've just added in, there's another little bonus for you, along with the lady's hair. These are directional lines, okay? So they're all sort of bringing our line of sight into the middle. And that's where the big villain guy is. Notice how we sort of blended the scenes, didn't we? We got him in there, but we made sure that the heroes that are coming to basically attack him, they are present within the scene, too. Then finally, we're going to go ahead here and we're going to do the bad guy. And I don't know. I don't have a design for him, so I'm just going to make it up. As we go, I'm going to give him, like, a skeletal face, maybe. Yeah, something like that. Make him look really horrifying. Yeah, I'm still working from a distance here. So it's going to be a little bit vague as to probably what I'm laying down onto the page. I can really go gung ho here on his design, though, because, you know, the next shot is just a close up of his head. This is probably going to be the only time I ever draw him. So I can make it as complex as I want this design. And hopefully I won't ever need to use him for anything else if I decide to do that. I do love just making up characters on the fly, though. You never know what you're gonna get. Okay, there we go. Got some kind of crazy headdress thing going on there. Then we'll get the pecks drawn in. Those are done. All right. We are going well on time here. Beautiful. We've done quite well, in fact. Now we draw in the abs. You know, this guy, he hits the gym, okay? He doesn't miss He doesn't miss a day at the gym. He's got to, like, take out the good guys. Can't be slacking off. Alright. There you go. So he's going to have, you know, partially some of his glutes showing probably at the back there. You know, don't be afraid to draw glutes either on men or women. They are a significant part of the human body, a huge muscle, in fact, and they're also fun to draw. So there's that don't be shy about it. I think as an artist, you can't be shy about drawing anatomy. Go to a few life drawing lessons, try to desensitize yourself a little bit to it, and you'll find that you grow a new found. Well, you just start looking at the human body, I guess, from a different perspective, which is not a bad thing, trust me. And I've just drawn his hand around the wrong way. So I'm going to go back there. There we go. That's better. That is better, believe it or not. I know it doesn't look it, but it is. We'll draw some knuckles on his fist. I'm going to increase the thickness on that line of the guy's cape in front. Then what we're going to do is we're going to go in there and draw in his knees and we'll make it so that they're covered with some armor so that we don't have to get into the nitty gritty of all of that. All that knee anatomy, which I don't mind. I mean, knees are pretty easy to draw, believe it or not. I just draw them like a skull, you know, like this. Hey, that'll actually add to the design, so I'll leave it there. So we got some big quads happening within his legs there. So here's a little tidbit of trivia, I guess. I always had trouble drawing legs. Couldn't work them out for the longest time. I remember them. I literally remember them giving me so much grief back in the day. They were a thorn in my side as an artist. But I worked hard at them. I practiced them more than anything else. And then after a while, I was less comfortable drawing arms than I was legs. So that just goes to show that you get better at that which you practice most. That would you practice most. And it goes for anything. So think about what is it that you want to what is it that you're having trouble with right now? Is it legs? Is it something else? Figure that out, and then once you've figured it out, practice it practice it more than anything else, because that's what's going to allow you to get extremely good at it and actually master. Okay, if you want to know how to defeat the challenges or overcome the challenges that you're facing within your art, you simply need to just face them head on. Kind of like playing a Mio game. You're going to get these difficult levels, and you're definitely going to die. You're going to fall into the larva, you're going to get hit by fireballs, and you're going to have to restart the level. And it's going to go that way until you finally figure out what the technique is, what the secret is to overcoming those obstacles. Now, I don't feel like this guy actually has enough shape to his legs. I feel like they could definitely be better. So I'm going to bring this quad forward. I think that's what I'll do. Sometimes you got to really exaggerate the anatomy in these more foreshortened views to kind of hit the point across. All right. We'll do the same thing on that side. There we go. That's feeling better. Look, those legs look like they're coming right at us now. Done. He might have some belt on as well. We could give him that up here somewhere. Fantastic. Maybe we could even give him a leg band of some kind. I got a little bit of a tangent there with the guy's arm, but that's fine. It's not too much of a big deal. In this instance, anyway. Then over here, what's happening? We've got I guess that's his arm. I think that might be his arm coming in behind her, so we'll draw that in. But I'm going to increase the thickness of the line around her behind because we don't want to lose that in the detail. If you ever find that something's not standing out as much as you want it to, just give it a thicker outline, and that'll solve that situation. Okay, that'll just about do. We could even create some speed lines here. Okay, sometimes they make all the difference. Increase the thickness on the legs as they come toward us. And that panel is pretty much good to go. Next up, it is time to lay in the face of our villain. Okay? And this is gonna be a fun one. I love drawing faces. I mean, there's so many aspects of comic book illustration, character art in general that I love. Now, we're looking up at him, so we have to consider that because it's going to determine what shape we pick for the eyes of our character, for the other facial features. I'm going to place down his nose now. Now, his nose is sort of missing, right? Like, he's a skeleton dude. So that means that the opening of his nose is going to come right up probably above the eyes. Probably about to there, I would say. Okay, cool. There we go. Let me sort of figure out how I'm going to shade that. I'll do a few different holes, actually, in his face. It's important to understand the skull structure, too, especially when you're drawing these upward views of your characters. Okay, we're going to have his brow up here. It's going to connect onto the nose, by the way. We're gonna get a decent amount of detail and shading in this area. Now, with a close up shot like the one we're dealing with here, of course, more detail is going to be necessary. You know, that's just what's going to end up happening. All right, there we go. And then as for his mouth, I'm gonna draw in some teeth. Like so. There we go. Get the eraser out again and lay in the bottom set of teeth now. Okay. I'm going to make them kind of sharp but kind of regular teeth, too. Once that's done, we'll start kind of getting them in there. Alright, now, they're rough. They're scary looking. Just what we want for this character, this villain, we want him to look scary. Of course, we can go in there with the eraser. Erase weigh some of the divisions within the teeth. So we'll be left with something like that. And then we're going to lay in the details for the rest of his face. This is where we get to really start incorporating some of those gooey details that are really going to bring him together. You know, I don't know where I pulled this dude from. He was floating around in my subconscious brain somewhere. I suggest that you fill up your mental library as much as you can and do so with the kind of subject matter that you would like to ultimately end up drawing. If you really love drawing superheroes, then I suggest you start going through all the Marvel movies that are out there, all the DC movies. You know, really try to fill your mind with not just inspiration, but an understanding of how different things look, different creative choices that other people have come up with before you and try to figure out how you can implement that within your own work. I'm not happy with his nose, so I'm going to undo that. Okay, I'm picturing, like, how far would t 5. Outro: That wraps up this lesson. I hope that you get a ton of value out of it and that you put some of the techniques and the methods that I showed you here to good use whether you're in the really early stages of just laying out your comic book sequence, figuring out what you want to show in terms of the subject, the key focus that you want to present within that panel, how to crop it frame it, position it, give it that depth that is going to pull the audience right into the story. And then, of course, taking it further, right? Maybe you're at that stage. Maybe you're ready to move on to the more refined step within the drawing process that really allows you to start bringing that initial foundation together and visualize it as something that could be polished and turned into a finished piece of art later on down the track. We went the whole mile we really didn't cut any corners. We left no stone unturned. At least on this subject, I hope that moving forward, you will consider it, that you'll be conscious of it and that you realize what it can bring to your art. Like I said, I've seen plenty of artists out there who will present a comic book sequence, and almost every single panel is the exact same sized head and positioning cropping for their characters. And it just results in a flat, boring looking visual sequence that really doesn't have the impact that it needs. To hold an audience's engagement. And that's always what we're looking for. That's like gold to us, the attention of the audience. Well, that's it for me. Until next time, keep on drawing, keep on creating, and I'll see you next time. Bye bye for now.