Road to a [Horror] Comic: Week 3-4

So I rolled into this week ready to try something different. I felt like I’d got a decent grip in drawing heads in profile, and was making good progress in drawing heads straight on. My attempts at drawing 3/4 head views were not going as well, and as a result, I was beginning to become frustrated and drawing less.

That was a key thing for me because, as I point in THIS POST, drawing this comic had come a key element in my weekly routine which included writing as well as drawing. Taking on an extra project has somehow filled me with renewed motivation for all of my creative pursuits, chief of which is my writing. I quickly found that if my drawing faltered, so did my writing, so finding a way out of the funk I found myself in became a high priority.

So I decided to change my focus again, away from faces to the forms of the body and postures. the characters in my story are not all just going to be talking heads. They will do some walking around, a bit of tangling with alien life forms, and a little bit of falling down dead, so I figured I ought to learn how to draw the body.

After much effort and many failures, I discovered that I could do a passable version of someone walking, and once I became a bit more certain of the proportions and limb lengths, I tried a number of other poses.

Not sure what that person is doing. But encouraged by my efforts, I wondered if I would be able to put muscles and skin and clothes on these skeletons.

Okay, so it’s another man walking. I also managed to come up with some dude that looks like Neo from the Matrix:

So a mother week has passed and I feel like I have made progress. My expectations are realistic. I don’t expect this comic to be the best thing ever, but I want it to be acceptable. Good enough. To finish off the day yesterday I thought I would have one last go at a 3/4 head, and this is what I came up with:

I was happy with that for the end of week four, so I figured it was a good idea to stop there.

If any of you are interested to find out more about what I’ve been up to, you can follow me on Instagram, where I try to keep up to date posting more images as I journey towards a completed comic.

Thanks for joining me. I’ll be back same time next week, where I will hopefully have more fleshed out examples to share, although I am quite keen to start on a storyboard…