Road To A [Horror] Comic: Week 8-9

I don’t feel I’ve been as productive this week as I could have been. A number of things have cropped up in my personal life which have meant writing and drawing have taken a back seat this week, but never fear! I have made some progress in my drawing, and I’m achingly close to starting on the actual comic itself, realising that I will continue to improve as I progress.

What is the point in not trying something? I’ve heard the argument ‘what if I fail?‘ Well, nothing. I’ve also hard the phrase ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained.‘ If we are afraid to strive for something beyond our current abilities, we are destined to stagnate, I feel. The worst that could happen with this series of blog posts, is that no one reads them, or worse, someone reads them and ridicules my efforts. That’s Fine. I’m perfectly capable of assessing the success or otherwise of my output. I can see when something does not work. The purpose of this series (other than to entertain myself) is to show progress being made towards a goal.

I hope I’m making progress. I think I am. I am fully aware that this is a process, not unlike my writing, where I will be working for some significant time until I am happy with my output, and longer still until I can can call it great. So onwards with that journey…

I started out the week seeing if I could put everything together and draw a decent full person, legs and everything! Turns out that drawing people is quite difficult, and whilst these efforts would pass as actual people, they clearly need more work!

But undeterred, I went on. I won’t be drawing a comic full of heads in profile, so I need to work on bodies.

All I can say about these two, is that their proportions are, broadly speaking, correct. They have the correct amount of arms and legs, and their clothes fit. Yay me!

I switched up here a bit, but stayed with full torso. I tried to make the style more comic-book-art style, and to that end, I must admit, I copied this one. I don’t have a problem with that, as I’m not passing it off as my own idea, nor am I making any money off it. I think there is absolutely a place for copying other work from people whose skill is greater than your own. The same is true with my writing. I read a lot, and in doing so, seek to emulate the authors in some of my own work. I think copying is the first step on a journey towards finding your own style. So to that end:

Yes, he looks a bit scary and yes, I’m a horror writer, but I was not going for the scary look with this one!

Another strange thing I discovered: drawing a female face is quite difficult. In the same way that when I write anything, it turns out like horror, when I draw a face, it always seems to end up looking masculine. So here are my first couple of attempts that look vaguely female-ish:

For my final offering of the week, I cheated a bit, in that I used an image I had already drawn and just added hair. Hair id not as easy as you might think, but with limited time this week, I just added something to a portrait I had already drawn and I’m not too displeased with the results: