One of the best ways to learn to make comics is to copy other cartoonists. I think of it like a musician covering a song. In the Comics Room, one of the things we do is color layered drawings, beginning with a version in yellow, followed by orange or red and then blue, all one on top of the other. Then we use black, either color pencil as in these drawings or in ink. There is something about drawing in quick color layers that helps us really find the image. When we’re drawing it four times on the same page we become familiar with the picture in a way that is physical, like driving through a new neighborhood four times, just repeating the route in order to learn the lay of the land quickly.
Set a timer for one minute, close your eyes, draw one of the characters from memory. Repeat this three more times. Make sure to draw whole bodies.
Set a timer for two minutes, keep your eyes open, and draw one of the characters from memory. Repeat three more times
Set a timer for four minutes and draw yourself dancing with one of the characters.
Repeat but draw yourself having coffee with a different character.
Repeat, draw yourself with a third character and you’re both fishing.
Last frame is the fourth character surprising you with flowers while you are at the stove cooking.
Make sure you draw entire bodies and don’t include any words. These should be silent drawings.
If you’re doing this in a classroom or with a group of people, it’s good to stand up and walk around and look at everyone’s drawing.
The value of this exercise is there are so many different kinds of drawing going on. You’re using the same pen, paper, and characters drawn from memory, but the characters show up in a completely different way when you are drawing them with your eyes closed. When you draw with your eyes open, the line really changes and the type of concentration you experience also changes. When you come to the third part of the exercise and draw yourself with a character dancing, your drawing has to include interaction, you have to imagine the place where the scene is happening and what might be in that place. What kinds of things do you need draw to show that you and a character are having coffee together or you’re out fishing? The thing that’s surprising is that if you just start drawing yourself with a character, the scene seems to unfold by itself. This is a very good thing to experience. This is very good for you.
Drawings made during class by a student in Making Comics 1, UW-Madison
Your assignment: Divide a piece of copier paper into 16 chambers but folding it twice long ways and twice short ways and then draw your Flair pen down the creases. Choose a character from the Face Jam exercise and copy it into the first panel on the left. Change the characters mood into its opposite in four frames. Repeat this with three other characters, getting all your simple line work done first, then go back and add patterns and solid black. This will take time and it is very good for your hand to practice making good solid blacks with a Flair. Don’t be tempted to get your solid blacks done faster by using Sharpie or a fatter black marker. The idea is to give your hand the practice it needs to do this with just a Flair pen. This is a good time to listen to some music or a podcast or playing a show in the background while you draw.
These characters were drawn in 60 seconds. We started with a grid of 16 chambers on an 8.5 x 11 piece of copier paper that had a caption area at the bottom of each rectangle. We all used black Flair pens. First we passed around the pages, each of us writing something in the caption area like a personality type, or a proper name, or an occupation. We had just 15 seconds. When all the captions were filled, we passed the pages again, drawing a character based on the caption in 90 seconds and then passed the paper again. Each page features 16 characters drawn by 16 different classmates. It was an intense exercise that gave everyone 16 original characters to work with for later assignments.
