Draw in 6 Retro Comic Book Styles !

1. Introduction to the Class: Hey, my name is Sam, and I'm a Belgian illustrator and cartoonist. I love American comic books, especially the ones from the 1880s and 90s. To me, that really was the golden age of comics. And it's still inspires me to this day. In this course. I will take you through six styles from the 1980s and 90s. And I'll show you a few illustrators who use those styles and what the common points are. And then we'll practice those points. I'll also give you a task after each lesson that you can practice those points with. When I was a kid, I didn't just draw Spider-Man or wanted to be a comic book artist. I want it to be Spider-Man. And I actually did in a way, I became a professional dancer. During my dance career, I always kept drawing st cartoons to magazines. I made posters for performances. But as an illustrator, I tried to give my characters the most dynamic movements, the most graceful movements, the strongest poses. In this course, I'll also show you how to color comics digitally because we want to color it in a way that when you see the illustration, It's as if it came from your cousins attic where you've found his stash of eighties nineties comics. So that grainy texture, a little bit yellowish paper. That's my goal for this course. So at the end, you can draw superheroes in your favorite style that will open that hatch in your soul and make all the nostalgic feelings pour out. So let's get started. Sharpen that pencil, dip deck brush, turn on your computer, and let's go. 2. The Blocky Style: Thank you so much for starting this course. I look forward to seeing all the artwork that you make. For this first lesson, we'll start off with the blocky style. Here are some good examples of the blocky style genre mean a junior used it a lot for a period. And then here you can actually see how he does it. Can see the sketches, straight lines he uses to create that effect. Joke with Stata has the same thing here in these lakes and other parts as well. Very straight lines. Jelly, very similar style. And in this drawing you can see as well. Using these trade lines to Mike Mignola was an early adopter of this style. And most artists were influenced by him. So Frank Miller made it very popular when he did comics like 346 styles. I thought it would be fun to use the same character. So gambit from the X-Men in a standing pose. But I wanted to use slightly different standing poses that maybe fit each style better. Finding poses is a fun process that you can do with pencil or on a computer. Or you can even use photo references if the Bose is a bit tricky to draw well from your imagination, you can follow along with me using a pencil and paper. But I would suggest using digital software just because that's what I'll be using to show you. And it's much easier to edit. I chose this pose because I wanted to pick a pose that would look good in a silhouette. Since a lot of artists using this style work with silhouettes. And then I changed the arm a little bit. Yep, looks good. And then put the muscles in. Then you start adding the blocky shapes. So make sure to keep all the lines streets. Since this style is not realistic, I felt after finishing the lines that it didn't really look spectacular enough. So I use the warp tool to kind of tweak it. And I ended up making the torso shorter and legs longer. And then the next step is actually inking on a separate layer. Keeping the lines as sharp as possible. Also, playing with the line weight, make sure to turn your pens pressure sensitivity on so you can play with the thickness of the lines. And as you can see, my my underlying sketch is pretty rough. So there's still some decision-making involved in gang and that's also the fun part of it. So I'm not just tracing, I'm still drawing. Then the next step is spotting the blacks. So on another separate layer, I use the thicker, thicker pencil to just drop the shadows. The light will be coming from the top-left. Everything on the bottom right gets a shadow. This year is a little trick. Copy the line layer and fill the whole body with one color. And then you can put a mask on that layer and you can easily stay within the lines. So I use the lasso tool to get those really sharp, crisp shadows. And then of course you delete the other color later. That's why it's such a bright color, so it's easy to select and delete afterwards. Then we go and clean it up and add that feathering more, I should say those little stripes, the little blocky stubs that people using this style use. And in some parts you can even cross hatch, use thinner or thicker lines. The thought behind these is actually that you are representing a fade. So if you would have a picture, um, so the, the shadow would gradually turn into the light parts. Since we have this really graphic representation, the little blocks represent the fade from black to white. The face is a very important part because that, that's where your eye goes to first. So I left that to last so I could get a sense of the drawing and then play with it a little bit. Also in this style, hair is not just soft, you can make sharp, blocky hair even. Finally, the coloring in 1980s and 90s comics, the color is pretty flat. So I kept it flat. Finally, just add the post staff and those little mechanical gizmos on them. Let's check the silhouette. Yeah, it looks good. There you have it. Blocky gambit. Okay, let's practice. This is the under drawing you can use, you can take a screenshot of this or if you're old school like me, you can even just trace it by pausing, turning up the brightness of the screen and then tracing it on paper. So a quick recap. We want to exaggerate proportions, make the muscles blocky and straightened curves that would normally be smooth like in this case the k, for example. Just a few tips. You can make the point the bat ears way bigger or the muscles, the biceps huge but the joints narrow. Just play with it to make it more expressive and cooler. And always keep the silhouette in mind. Enjoy, I can't wait to see your drawings and see you in the next lesson. 3. The Cross Hatch Style: Thank you for starting my second lesson. In this one, we're gonna do the cross hatching style. It was a super popular style in the early nineties. And it was used by a group of Marvel artists who then are formed Image Comics. So let's take a look at some examples. This is Will's potassium, and it's very clear to see here how he goes from dark to light using two directions of lines. So cross hatching. So Todd McFarlane, he took this to a whole other level as you've seen, so many different directions. Also, thick lines, very thin lines, dots here also you can see all the different directions. He uses, different thicknesses of lines. And Jim Lee took this also do a whole other level where you can even play with light and make something look very shiny. Just by using all these different techniques. This is the theory behind crosshatching. Body is made up of different shapes. So let's take this arm here for example. There are basically three dimensional ovals, different types of shapes that are put together. And if you think again about our light source, then we have shadows that fall on those muscles. For crosshatching. It's also important to think about the even deeper shadows. So there's the soft shadow in the very deep shadow. Of course. You blend those all together and you get like a very realistic skin tone. But yes, we are working with black and white. So that's why the cross hatching was developed. So especially here like those areas where you have three grades. Grade one grade to grade three, basically comes from having a white cross hatching and black. But I want to show one more, which is the one where the deepest parts of the black you highlight. And then you add cross hatching in those as well. So it's basically cross hatching the darkest parts with highlights. So let's say our main light source is coming from here. But then what if there is a reflective surface and some of the light goes there and hits those dark spots. Right? Especially like these. These areas is where the light is getting reflected from bouncing off of other surfaces. You can use any of these three crosshatching ways. Yeah, let's put that into practice. For this tie line, narrowed the pose down to these four poses and then chose the one on the right and fill in the muscles and start inking. Now this is just the outlines of the outside basically because the cross hatching will come later on a separate layer. And note that I don't really close the lines. Even leave spaces like on this forearm here. And the hair is also more realistic. So a lot of lines and just start at the bottom and then the top, and in the middle we can slightly crossover, but the space and the middle is basically the reflection of the light. So the shirt goes on another layer as well. Design of the pants, stripes goes according to the curve of the muscles. Then again marking where the shadows will drop. I did a first run of the crosshatching but the pen was too thick so I didn't like it. So I started again, made sure to use the parallel lines, cross hatching and this little teardrop thing that many of the artists use. And then you start slowly adding the lines, making sure to apply pressure to the pen so they start thick and thin. Q Rob crosshatching. And then over here, this is what's called feathering. And this is used in most other styles as well. And you'll often see the one with the space in-between. I'm not sure if that's because they just intake quickly, a little open space in the middle, or if it's done for effect. Either way you can use both of these. Then some final edits. I didn't like the face crosshatching. So when delete it bad and the shadow color the eyes. Move the box a little. And here we go. Cross hatched gambit. Okay, So for the cross hatching task, let's use the Cape Crusader again, I mapped out all the muscles. So this is also where the shadow would fall it. So maybe you just focus on the stomach, the picks, the stomach muscles in the legs and try to see how many of those different styles you can use. So a quick recap. We had the equally spaced outlines, gradually spaced out lines, cross hatching, the teardrop feathering. So the tip was to keep the crosshatching lines themselves thinner than the outlines of the body. Alright, so I look forward to seeing your art and commenting and giving you some tips. See you in the next lesson. 4. The Realistic Style: Hey, thanks for coming back. And today we're tackling one of the most difficult styles. That realistic style. It was very popular in the early 1980s. And before that, actually, most artists who started off in those styles they developed under styles as they went along. Specifically Frank Miller started in that style. But today I'm kinda looking at David mass of jelly. Yeah, I'll show you some examples. So this is the early Frank Miller I was talking about. You can see very realistic, especially this picture here. I always thought this was a real person. Maybe he based it off of a picture. Then another artist builds in cabbage in the early eighties, very realistic. You can easily see that it's Tom Selleck, John Travolta, sting, and Michael Jackson with just a few lines. But like I said, I'm looking at David muscle belly for the for dropping the shadows today. Mainly very basic feathering and spotting blacks in big patches. Of course, striving for that perfect anatomy. I didn't go off of photo reference this time. I just took one of my sketches because I really liked the weight of it. So leaning on the both staff I think will give me a good chance to make it a realistic pose. So I took this one, then made some digital sketches. Drop the shoulder a little. And then it's time for our sequence. Here we go. So let's go through the process again. Sketch ink, dropping the colors on a separate layer. Then on another layer again, I think where you're going to drop the shadows. In this case, for this style, we're going to use mainly feathering, dropping the shadows on the muscles, also on the clothes. And then always keep flipping your drawing left and right. Because you'll notice things that you usually don't see when you look at it for a long time. So for example, I realized the head was too big. So I made a new head, cropped it a little bit on a separate layer. You see dropped the eyes, added some more shadow, drop the hair. And here you have it. Realistic gambit. For the task of this round, please use a photo of yourself or of a celebrity. Reduce the opacity of the layer and on a separate layer, trace the outline. Also trace the major lines and the clothes. You don't have to be too precise. Then another layer on top of that dropped a major shadows. Again, this can be pretty broad. Helpful trick is to squint your eyes a little. That makes you able to recognize the darker areas easily. I'm adding the hair in a different color here. So now if you hide the picture and reduce the opacity of those layers, you have your under drawing. Then you proceed like I did with gambit with our three layers. First, the outlines. Below that, the color on top, the blacks with feathering and the tip is, don't forget the light source and remember that the feathering is a transition from black to white. Already. Please upload your drawings and I can't wait to see them. Bye-bye. 5. The Clean Style: Welcome to the next video and this time we're going to look at clean style. Why do I call it clean? Well, because you basically only draw the outlines of the characters. It's a style that became popular when manga and anime from Japan came to the West. Let's take a look at some examples. These are some manga, anime examples from Katsura, automobiles, academic. And you can see the very crisp outlines in American comics. Paul Smith uses this style so you see you delaying the line on the leg, just one line. Even the blacks have really crisp outlines, no feathering at all. And in later years, frank quietly still uses this style. Basically the character is just one outline. But of course you make up for that with a lot of detail in the backgrounds, for example. Okay, let's get started with the post. Because this style is mainly just an outline. The pose is very important. So it took me quite a long time to get the dimensions right as well. I even cut the body in three parts and rotated each part little bit to get that graceful pose. Also made sure to keep the head small and legs long, like in manga. And to get some of that dynamic movement, I had the width blow really hard, so the hair goes all the way to the left. And even the t-shirt as well. Then made sure to keep the face very clean and crisp. As few lines as possible. There we go. Here are our steps again, linework, color at the staff. Making sure to add some detail, like on the belt or a t-shirt, the hair. And here is our clean gambit. So for this style is task, I thought it would be fun to draw a woman this time. So since in general, for drawing women who use less lines and for men. So he had the proportions for a woman are different. If you oversimplify it. Broader, men have broad shoulders, straight, straight hips. Women have narrower shoulders and wider hips. Even more simplified, it comes down to a triangle or an hourglass figure. So you can screenshot this figure or trace it, or come up with your own. And then basically just draw the outline. Make it as clean as possible. Keep practicing and don't forget to upload some of your drawings. I can't wait to see them. See you next time. Bye bye. 6. The Retro Animation Style: Next, we're looking at our retro animation style. And we're talking about the 1980s and 90s. So retro back then, it's kind of retro, twice removed now. And what they were looking at saying dose 1940s, Fleisher Studios, Superman cartoons, specifically Bruce them made this style really popular again with Batman, the Animated Series. And I got some awesome style. So let's take a look. Not just bruce, Tim, but Darwin Cook and others use this style to great effect. The characteristics are very few lines similar to the plain style we looked at earlier. This comes from the process of animation, where it's easier to animate a character if they have less lines. Stick to very basic shapes and even merging shapes into one. Like here, the shoulder muscle and the triceps are basically just one curve. And the haircuts can be very 1940s and 50s as well. Like film Anwar or **** Tracy style. This is the pose I chose. Honestly, this is a very simple style, but that doesn't mean it's easy. It feels quicker to draw in this style as well, because there are less lines to draw. But finding that perfect line or arch can take time as well. This is also the only style where I used the oval tool to create perfect ovals for the knees. In this style, it just looks better if you have a perfect shape. Dropping a two tone shadow is easy digitally. If you draw completely black shadow on a separate layer and then change the opacity to about 30%. It looks like you pick the darker tone of each color, but actually it's just all transparent black. And here is our GKE animated gambit. This chapter is task. First, draw a figure with all the proper muscles in place, basically like a balloon Marshmallow Man. And then start tracing the outlines only using curved or straight lines. Sometimes it looks really cool. Sometimes not like this neck part, for example, I had to fix. And then you're left with the under drawing of your retro animation character. And you can use that to go off of for your drawing. Remember to use as few lines as possible and to drop a two tone shadow. I hope you have fun drawing skills. I really look forward to seeing these specific week. So she calls. Alright, see you in the next video. 7. The Cartoony Style: Hey, welcome to the final style, which is the cartoony style, super fun one, and maybe my favorite one. It's little bit difficult to categorize cartoony. Basically it's exaggerated characters and mostly for comic effect. Or to make it look really cute. Also the characters can look like they're made out of petty or rubber. A good example is Hillary Bardot who made those what their covers. And in the 80s he also had spider ham, Spider-Man parody. I would say maybe even Sam Keith could be considered cartoony. But that leads already into other areas as well. Because then you might even consider parts of Todd McFarlane cartoony. So, yeah, let's take a look at how we can make exaggerated characters in the cartoon style. You're basically just start sketching and see what comes up. I kind of wanted to go off of that banana face, gambit kind of hair so exaggerated even more. Then just standing wasn't really funny enough to me. So I found a seated pose. Just kinda have him like bounces foot up and down. In the cartoony style, you could use whatever type of shadowing, crosshatching you want. It doesn't really define the style. The fact that it's funny or disproportionate is more important. So I'll just take you through the phases, sketch, line work, the coloring, and the staff, and then just thought the mouth didn't fit. So change the math. There you have it. Funny little gambit. For this lesson's task. Drawing stick figures is the best way to find funny characters. I mainly start with the head and the hips, and then just try to move those two as far apart as possible. Then the spine. And then just see if you add the limbs, what kinda funny poses you can come up with. So just fill pages and pages of these stick figures. And when you feel like you have a good one, just add some more volume. If you do this on a different layer than you can always erase. The expression may be changing into another one. Or try different body types like this is a skinny one for example. And then just pick one of them and start fleshing out the body parts. Don't feel like you have to stick to close to real anatomy because they can be kind of gamete in this style. So please have a go at it, fill a couple of pages with circles, and pick a good pose, and then start fleshing it out. You can use any of the other styles actually. So you can have a cartoony crosshatched character. You can have a cartoony, clean character. Anything is possible, Just make it look gummy and funny. Thank you for trying out the six styles with me. As I always say, I can't wait to see your drawings, especially this one. Cute, cartoony, funny drawings. There's one more episode where I show you how to colorize your drawings in a very retro style. So please check it out. Alright, see you there. 8. Colorizing in a Retro Style: Okay, thank you for joining me in this bonus episode, how to colorize your illustrations in a retro wave. You will need digital software for this. I'm using Adobe Photoshop, especially because I will explain it in the terms of that program. I'm sure other programs can do it as well. But yeah, it'll be under different names and maybe different ways of doing it. Okay. I'm gonna do this in real time, so bear with me. So what you need is these layers to start off with. We have our background. Then one of the gambits drawing. Then I found this coffee cup, coffee cup illustration on a PNG file. So the transparent background. And we need an old paper texture as well. Let's start with this 1. First, go to mode and make sure your drawings is on CMYK, RGB, sometimes the temperature we need CMY, then name our layer. **** big piece. It's a good idea to always name your layers because we'll end up with about 30 layers. And then if they're all just called copy, copy of, Copy of Copy, be really complicated. So always name your leaves. Gambit base is just our normal. Again, I'm going to copy that duplicate layer. And I'm going to call it black. But now I want to select color range, the black fuzziness to where it will pick up everything. Now we copied the black, but we want to delete everything which is not black. So inverse the selection. And we have only the black key idea for now. Now, duplicate the base again. Call it excuse me, color. Same thing as before. So we wanted to select Color, Range, skin color. Use it so it's only the skin color is inverse selection. Delete, check. Yes. This is only the skin. Right? Now, I want one copy. Let's name it. Colors. Or colors will keep as its height gambit base. Bye for now. Again, now. But I wanted to show you is this scheme. First. Go to Filter Pixelate Color Halftone and set it to false. So this is like what magazines actually used, pack them to print. So instead of just a flat color and it printed small mixtures of different points to make up a color. Sorry, explanation. Yeah, that's that. When you look at an old comic opera really close, it's just dots, right? That's what we're recreating. We want it for the skin color and we want it. So again, Pixelate Color, Halftone. Or if it's more than four, if you put it to eight, it becomes a really big dots in, it loses an effect. So that's why I want to set it to four. We have those. Next one. Again, go to your gambit base and make three copies. You call this one. See this again? One more game, at least. Let's go one-by-one. Let's go to y. So we have our wind layer still looks like just a regular gambit, but good to be. Click peak leg layer and go to Blending Options. Now, this one is the one right here. Unclick everything But why? Now it's only yellow, only the yellows. If we go to M, you will save the blending options. Unclick everything. But again, Blending Options everything but see. Just the other one, the k is actually black. But since we already have only Black, Black Sea, why altogether makeup every color, but we have them separately. I am dividing it in these colors is because in old magazines, that's the process they used for adding colors. So they have these multiple layers with just one color. But sometimes because of the printing process, they didn't line up accurately. And then you'd have like misprints kind of indent that creates this retro feeling. So that's what we're going to recreate. Use, use the Move tool and go do one of those. I'll show you in a close-up. So now let's say we go to the cyan and I go down, down. You see two is already enough to nudges with the arrow key. Let's put the yellow to the right. 1233 times. And then which one was three. When you zoom out, it's barely noticeable, but now we have those skin tone colors, starting their mom again. But this is a little bit too much. So we want to reduce the opacity, the skin one. Let's do it like 50%. Old colors, maybe 20%. Right? Now. Let's use this one and duplicate it. The bottom as well. Now this, we want to, layover, wanted to use blending modes to play. But it's quite strong. Maybe reduce the opacity of this layer. This one. It's good or a coffee cup ring. It also can play with it, but reduce the infancy. It's also in old comics. You could kind of, the paper was very thin. You can see through. So what's written two on the other side, It's kind of peeking through. It's to that effect as well. Let's get one of the other gametes. Okay, so I'm gonna morning to be transparent. Let's try some blending new. It's always good to duplicate the sphere. It's deeply. And then of course, on the other side of the comic, there's some text. So lets me draw beaks queen. And automatically they add some text. So it's more Excuse please, please, please, please, please, please. Right. So now this is text, but I want to rasterize it and make it into an actual. Now it's not selectable as text anymore and because it's on the other side of the page, reverse sequence. But now I want to erase some stuff warm person, we want to keep seeing these crimes. Let's maybe instead of a square portraits sheep. So, but I wanted everything mistake septicaemia. So let's group all the gametes into copywriting from gambit, the bleak names. Now, Excuse me. Yeah, you can experiment with it a lot more. So some tears in the paper. It also looked better if you have more of a background. So I'm not just gametes standing there, but if you actually things in the drawing behind him and then texture of the paper will drop in those images as well. So, yeah, it looks good. Cool. Alright, thanks for sticking with me. And yeah. Go and experiment with it yourself, with your friends and family and see if they can get it really looks like it was made in the eighties or nineties and get some tips from them. Thank you. Bye.