Comic Resources for Everyone

Here you go: ~How I draw braids~ 🩷🙏

Hello, friends!

I reworked the ol' "Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents" lecture from my comics-teaching days, figured I'd share it here. If you want a free, printable PDF for yourself or to share (especially if you're an educator), you can find it at the bottom of this same lesson on my website.

Overview of some topics when it comes to drawing characters who are burn survivors.

DISCLAIMER. Please keep in mind that this is an introductory overview for drawing some burn scars and has a lot of generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. I'm calling this introductory because I hope to get people to actually do their own research before drawing disabled & visibly different characters rather than just making stuff up. Think of it as a starting point and take it with a grain of salt (especially if you have a very different art style from mine).

Talking about research and learning... don't make your burn survivor characters evil. Burn survivors are normal people and don't deserve to be constantly portrayed in such a way.

Starting to accumulate demos and tips from my class so I figure I’d share em! These are all themed around character design and drawing characters:

Changing proportions is the simplest way to make your character designs feel unique from one another - pay attention to the relative size of the head to the torso to the lower body.

Interesting silhouettes come from a combination of a character’s shape language and pose. When hand gestures or details break the silhouette of the pose they’re more readable.

Flow is how your lines overlap and contribute a lot to how forms read in 3D space.

Think of stylizations as reflecting the style/genre of the story you want to tell and then ask yourself what style is appropriate for this story (and/or the medium and your deadlines i.e. is the style animation friendly)

Some other things my students have asked me about that I definitely also want to address at some point:

how to make characters look the same in each drawing

avoiding same face syndrome, and by extension same body type

drawing hands (anatomy in general)

adapting different visual styles or designing in different styles

hoomans

it’s time to trace~!

heads up. the charts in the middle are very rough guides. everything about copying is super grey, you need to use your own judgement…also I have more notes