It is with a heavy heart that we present the last blog post from Jesse Hamm. It is a testament to his talent and legacy that his passing was mourned by so many individuals and organizations in the industry of which he was such a valuable contributor.

–Comic-Con

On the first of this month, we lost cartoonist John Paul Leon, age 49. Social media quickly filled with praise and laments from comics fans and professionals alike. If there had been any question of his greatness, it was firmly answered by the outpouring of appreciations by many of comics’ top luminaries. Clearly, he was an Artists’ Artist, revered by the best in the field.

Unfortunately, tributes on Twitter aren’t the ideal place to explain an artist’s merits, and readers new to Leon’s work might not understand what sets it apart. Today’s comics industry is full of impressive talents—why is J. P. Leon held up as a rare exception? I’d like to explore a few of the reasons he’s so highly esteemed, even among artists who themselves are considered great.

One thing that’s immediately apparent in Leon’s artwork is how well-researched it is. The settings, props, clothing, vehicles—everything is brimming with authentic detail. Where another artist might toss in a generic end-table or throw-rug, Leon shows that he’s done his homework: the curves, ornamentation, and designs on every piece of furniture, every curtain or lampshade, every industrial machine look as though Leon was standing there on the day, recording it all.

Not only is every likely structure and appliance present, but so are the odds and ends that accumulate around them: puddles of grease, scraps of paper, pens, towels, snacks, tissues—Leon included them all, making his worlds look more believable and lived-in than virtually any you’ll visit in comics. Consider this pharmacy scene (1). Details like the bottle of hand lotion by the register, or the Spanish translation (recoja) below the “pick-up” sign, would only be included by a careful observer, and they help bring the environment to life.

It’s also notable that he excelled at ordinary settings, such as this pharmacy, or the occasional law office or hospital room (2). Many artists will bring their A-game when drawing hot cars or spacecraft or other “sexy” subjects, but then phone it in when drawing anything “boring.” Leon instead seemed to relish the challenge of drawing every subject he put his hand to, whether ordinary or fantastic.

Another of Leon’s merits was his ability to force black areas into a scene.

I once spoke with a martial artist who was learning to solicit moves from his opponents. He had earlier learned how to rebuff the attacks his opponents freely offered him, but now he was learning how to corner his opponents into offering only those attacks he felt like rebuffing. He said he was learning to control the fight, instead of merely reacting to it. Visual art offers similar opportunities. When you’re first learning to draw, you try to understand where shadows would likely appear in a scene, and then you add them accordingly. But after mastering this approach, you’re free to improvise. You find that shadows may be added in unlikely places, not because they would necessarily appear there, but because your understanding of how light works enables you to plausibly fit them where you wish.

J. P. Leon was an expert at this. His scenes are often drenched with shadow—not added haphazardly or without credibility, but with the authority of a life-long student of light, who knows how to fit shadows plausibly wherever he wills them. Armed with this skill, he used shadows to lend weight to objects, tie scenes together, create mood, direct the eye—whatever served his narrative.

In this panel (3), the far wall is black, the ceiling is black, there’s heavy black on the nearest figures and equipment, and on the left wall—are all these heavy shadows justified by the lighting? Maybe, maybe not. But what’s important is that we believe they are, and that they serve the image.

Not only had Leon mastered the use of black areas, but he used white to good effect, as well. In each panel of this crowd scene (4), he draws our attention to the black-hatted main character by rendering all of the other figures without heavy shadow. Or in this shot (5), he drops out all of the interior foliage of the tree, rendering it only in silhouette. This allows the reader’s eye to fall directly onto the main figure without undue distraction. He adds and subtracts detail and white and dark areas at will, controlling the visuals to serve the narrative.

In the examples cited above, you may have noticed another element which distinguishes Leon’s work: the rough character of his lines. Many artists who take great pains to draw realistically will carefully finesse their lines, giving great attention to every curve and texture, and rendering every contour with smooth precision. Leon avoided that approach. His lines are brusque, blocky, laid down in a quick, no-nonsense fashion, as though he’s sketching road directions on a napkin. His preference for this method has been shared by many other great draftsmen, including Alex Toth, Austin Briggs, Noel Sickles, and Robert Fawcett. Its advantage is a bold immediacy which is lacking in more polished art.

Leon clearly understood that the length, location, and angle of a line gives readers all the information they need to understand the form the line portrays. If those three attributes are handled properly, it’s unnecessary to add careful nuances or inflections to the lines. The reader doesn’t need to see delicate feathering, or precise little curves, because the accurate summary offered by the more basic linework is sufficient. We quickly grasp the character of each drawn object and move on to the next.

Few artists have the courage to rely so heavily on such rough linework as Leon did. The temptation to “help” the drawing along with finer lines is unrelenting. When you don’t know exactly where a line should go, or the correct angle needed to portray the underlying form, it’s so comforting to hide behind some extra feathering and fancy inking. And even when you know your lines are correct, it’s hard to trust readers to know they are correct. What if readers won’t understand these simple, unadorned lines? Maybe they need to see more fussy nuance? Leon was not vexed by such questions—or, if he was, he chose to ignore them. He knew where to place each line, and he let it speak for itself: gruffly and frankly.

Leon rarely tied himself to an ongoing series, more often drawing sporadic single issues, so his work can be difficult to find. To those new to his art, I recommend the trade paperback Batman: Creature of the Night, collecting a recent four-issue series he drew for DC. There, you will find hundreds of pages of prime John Paul Leon to enjoy, well worth your careful attention.

Image credits:

1. Ex Machina Masquerade Special #3, copyright 2007 Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris
2. Batman Creature Of The Night book 4, copyright 2019 DC Comics
3. The Winter Men #4, copyright 2006 Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon
4. The Winter Men #1, copyright 2005 Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon
5. Batman Creature Of The Night book 4, copyright 2019 DC Comic

Among the flaws that most often mar the work of amateur cartoonists is poor cropping. That’s when the panel borders either hew too close to the subject, cutting valuable information out of the panel, or fall too far from the subject, leaving information in the panel that’s distracting or irrelevant. I often see in amateurs’ work panels that are cramped and unclear, or that include acres of dead space that do nothing to serve the story. The skilled cartoonist learns to crop a panel wisely, comfortably framing the elements that are important to the story and cutting out the rest.

Suppose your script says that a character in Panel 1 has arrived at a cafe to meet a friend. At your thumbnail stage (see my column on Thumbnails— Carousel 12), you’ve already chosen an angle of view from which to show the action: from over the friend’s shoulder, let’s say, as the arriving character enters through the front door. Precisely how much of each element should be visible? Crop in too closely, and readers won’t be able to tell where they are (a bar? a restaurant? Have I been here before?), or whether the seated character is important. But reveal too much of the surroundings, and the reader may be distracted by the setting and the other customers, failing to zero-in on your key characters. How can you quickly and smartly decide what to include and what to crop out?

Here are four questions that get to the heart of the matter:

1. How much must readers see to understand the action?
2. How much must readers see to understand the circumstance?
3. How much must readers see to understand the mood?
4. Is the crop aesthetically pleasing?

Let’s take these in turn.

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1. ACTION

This one is rather obvious: you should show enough of the characters’ behavior in a panel to ensure that the reader understands what’s happening. Still, many artists fail to do this! Is the character shooting? Show us her gun. Is he typing? Show us his keyboard! I suspect artists grow so preoccupied with drawing the character’s face or body that they forget to clearly include the character’s actions.

And by “action,” I also mean speech. If characters are speaking, the reader must see what they are saying. For this reason, I recommend adding lettering to the panel before deciding where to crop—even if only a rough pass of words sketched in, to estimate the space the lettering will need.

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2. CIRCUMSTANCE

This priority is even more overlooked than action. Artists often forget that in order to understand a scene, the reader needs to know the characters’ circumstances—namely, who else is present and where the scene takes place. As a reader, I often find myself wading through a scene where a character is yelling at someone—but it’s unclear whom! And are they outdoors or indoors? At home or elsewhere? Is it night or day? The artist should have left a broader margin around the key figure to include the answers to those questions: trees, furniture, a sunny sky, other characters, or whatever.

This is also a good time to consider the vertical crop: How much extra space should you leave on the top and bottom of the panel? Is it necessary to see the characters’ faces, the tops of their heads, or their feet? Must we see the ground beneath them, and/or the sky above? Sometimes these elements are needed; other times they may be cropped without losing relevant information. What’s important is that you make that choice deliberately, based on the needs of the scene, rather than letting habit make the choice for you.

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3. MOOD

This priority is perhaps the hardest to judge. Sometimes, even after leaving the perfect amount of space to reveal a character’s actions and circumstances, you find the panel isn’t giving readers everything they need for the scene to work. The problem here is that stories aren’t just about events; they’re also about moods. How should the reader feel about what’s happening? The spaces you leave (or don’t leave) around a panel’s key elements will help create the mood you intend.

Suppose you’ve drawn a character sitting thoughtfully at the edge of a meadow. The reader will probably feel that thoughtful mood more strongly if you pull back, revealing more of the pastoral surroundings. You may even strengthen the mood further by including a broad expanse of the starry sky above. Readers won’t need to see more of the sky or the meadow to understand the story’s events, but they may need to see more of those things to understand the character’s feelings.

Alternatively, suppose it’s an action scene: Your hero is hemmed in by enemy forces. Here, it may serve the mood to crop closely on either side of the hero’s face, underscoring his claustrophobia. (To make this crop work, you may need to reposition some of the panel’s key elements, so they’ll remain clearly visible near the hero’s face instead of disappearing beyond the panel’s borders.)

In any case, it’s important to decide what mood you’re aiming for in each panel, and crop accordingly—without obscuring the characters’ actions or circumstances.

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4. AESTHETICS

Having considered the other three questions, we come finally to the panel’s composition (a subject I covered in more detail in Carousel 29). Even aside from narrative concerns, objects in the panel should be clearly seen and pleasing to look at.

Our main concern here is a problem known as tangencies, which often occur near a panel’s borders. Tangencies are when the nearness of certain lines in a drawing implies a false relationship between the objects those lines represent. For example, if the line I use to render the back of a character’s head happens to touch the line I use to render the panel’s border, it may accidentally look as though the character is leaning his head against the panel’s border. Or, if the bottom border of a panel passes across the character’s ankles, it may look as though he wading in a puddle, instead of merely being cropped at his ankles by the border.

Avoid tangencies by examining the edges of each panel before inking. Look to see if any odd relationships occur between the lines of your drawings and the panel’s borders. If you notice a tangency, adjust the drawing by pushing the drawn object further into the panel, or further out of it, until the tangency is no longer evident.

This may seem a lot to absorb, but once you grow used to answering these four questions, it will become second nature.  When placing their panel borders, most professional cartoonists probably answer these questions without even realizing it. But they are useful questions to ask yourself consciously at the outset, in order to build a strong habit of cropping thoughtfully.

Finally, here’s a drawing method that will make cropping easier: When I’m tackling a new panel and haven’t decided how it should be cropped, I sketch it large, on a new layer, separate from the rest of the page. At this stage, there are no borders; I’m just arranging the objects and figures and ensuring that they’re in proper perspective. Once I like the overall look of the sketch, I place borders at the edges, cropping the art in keeping with the four priorities listed above. Then I resize the panel and fit it into the page where it belongs, stretching or squashing it as needed. I draw the actual pencil art over this rough, adjusting the figures as necessary if I squashed or stretched them. This method allows me to draw freely and then crop freely without having to draw my art into a predetermined space, which can be inhibiting. (When working on paper instead of digitally, you can sketch the panel on a separate sheet, crop it, and then redraw the cropped rough into the actual panel on your comic page.)

Cropping is part of the grammar of comics, like choosing where to end a sentence in a novel, or how long to hold a musical note in a song. Choosing wisely where to crop each panel will strengthen your work and make it more uniquely yours. Embrace the challenge!

See you here next month!

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Carousel by Jesse Hamm appears the third Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

Artists are often given the following advice: “Draw what you see, not what you THINK you see.” This may sound profound, but what does it mean? How are we supposed to distinguish between what we think we see and what we actually see? Truthfully, there is merit to the advice, but we need to unpack it further before it will do us much good.

When people look at the world around them, they must sort through all sorts of visual information to make sense of things. That black rhombus to my lower left is my phone; the field of tan surrounding it is my desk; the white region above the tan field is the far wall. As I move about the room, other colored shapes enter my eyes, demanding interpretation. The grey below me is the carpet, the white above is the ceiling, and there are books and furniture besides. To complicate matters, shapes shrink and grow as I move closer or farther, and they seem to change shape as I examine them from different angles. How do I identify everything I’m seeing?

To interpret the visual information we collect, we form fixed ideas of what objects look like under ideal circumstances. So, when I think of my phone, I picture a black rectangle, as though I’m looking at it straight-on. Then, when I see a black rhombus on what I know to be my desk, I know it’s my phone, though viewed from an angle. The same is true of most other objects, too: we tend to imagine them in an ideal state, uniformly lit and facing the viewer in a way that best reveals the objects’ overall shape. (Try picturing a man, a hand, or a fish. You’ll tend to picture the man standing and facing you, the hand palm-out with fingers splayed, and the fish lying horizontally, with head and tail both visible. You likely won’t picture the man from above, the fish from the front, or the hand with fingers curled, even though you may see these sights in nature.) I call this flat-packing: we grant each object a simple shape in our minds so that we can later identify the object, by comparing the colored shapes we see in nature to their “flat-packed” counterparts in our minds. This also aids in thought: It’s easier for me to think about an object if I picture it in its simplest form, rather than picturing that object from every possible angle and distance, and in every possible light.

Unfortunately, though this method of mentally simplifying objects makes it easier to see and think about them, it also makes drawing them more difficult. Our drawings suffer when we attempt to draw objects that are angled or lighted in ways that don’t match our flat-packed ideas of how they appear. The brain doesn’t want a rectangular phone to be shaped as a rhombus, even when the phone lies at an angle that makes it appear as a rhombus. The brain doesn’t want fingers to shorten as they point toward the viewer, or pale objects to darken as they fall into shadow. To a great extent, drawing is a struggle to ignore the brain’s shorthand summaries and instead record the shadows and shapes our eyes actually perceive.

This is what’s meant by the advice to draw what you see, and not what you think you see.

Even when we draw from our heads, rather than from life, the challenge persists. My mental version of how long a finger should be will block my attempts to draw a foreshortened finger, such that I’ll keep lengthening the fingers as I refine my sketch, even if I intend them to point directly at the viewer. I may understand, from memory, that fingers shorten into a circle as they angle toward the viewer … but part of me still wants those drawn fingers to resemble the splayed fingers of the flat-packed hand my brain has filed under “HAND.”

How do we overcome this tendency, and draw objects as they truly appear? Here are several techniques:

• DRAW UPSIDE-DOWN — Instead of drawing from a photo that is right-side-up, turn the photo 180 degrees, and draw that. This encourages your brain to see only shapes and edges, rather than identifiable objects. By reducing the depicted objects to unfamiliar shapes, you can prevent your brain from pushing you toward the flat-packed images that it typically favors.
• DRAW NEGATIVE SPACES — Instead of drawing an object, focus on the empty spaces around or within the object, and draw those. In other words, don’t draw the donut itself; draw the hole, and then the outer circumference. Drawing the edges around the object and its parts helps you see only lines and abstract shapes, rather than the symbol your brain typically substitutes for the object.
• COMPARING LOCATIONS — When deciding the placement of any feature in your drawing, compare the feature’s location in the reference photo to the locations of the object’s other features. For example, does the upper edge of Lady Liberty’s sleeve align with her eyebrows, or is it lower, or higher? Do any of her fingers touch each other; if so, which ones? Specific questions about the features’ relative locations will ensure your drawing’s accuracy better than merely asking,”Does it look right?”
• MATCHING ANGLES — When drawing a diagonal line or edge you see in a photo, try to determine the precise angle of the edge. Do this by holding up the thumb or forefinger of your nondominant hand and matching its angle with that of the edge in the photo. Then, without tilting your hand, lower it near your drawing for reference, and sketch the desired line at the same angle. (It helps to do all of this with one eye closed, so that your angle of view remains consistent.) This comparison method will eventually train you to judge angles without using it. Just by looking, you will be able to see whether the edges in your drawing match the angles of edges in your subject—a skill crucial to accurate drawing. 

The methods I’ve outlined here are designed to be used when you draw from observation, such as from life or from a photo. However, after you develop your objectivity that way, you can bring the same objectivity to drawings you make from memory. You will recall what it feels like to ignore the flat-packed images your brain assigns to objects, and you’ll remember how you isolated the shapes and edges in your observational drawing, in order to draw those, instead of the symbols upon which your brain often relies. Your remembered experience of drawing objectively from photos will help you accurately depict images you’ve dreamed up yourself. In essence, you’ll draw what you’ve actually seen in your mind’s eye, not what you think you’ve seen there.

See you here next month!

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Carousel by Jesse Hamm appears the third Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

Welcome to my 30th Carousel column! This month marks three years of my columns here on Comic-Con’s Toucan blog, and I’m glad to have you all aboard.

Today I’d like to describe six steps that will help you, the Artist, prepare a comics script to be drawn. Comics scripts don’t always arrive on your desk in their easiest-to-draw form—even when you’ve written the script yourself!—so it’s useful to comb through the script before you begin, in order to iron out any potential wrinkles. Supposing you’ve agreed to draw a comics story and the script has arrived in your inbox, what should you do before grabbing a pencil and diving in?

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1. First, give the entire script a brisk read-through, beginning to end. This will familiarize you with its overall mood, and help you begin to visualize the story you’re about to tell. Even before you begin thumbnailing each page, this initial read-through will allow your subconscious mind to start formulating ideas.

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2. Next, save the original script in a digital folder (see Carousel #10 for tips about using folders), in case you need to consult it later, and make yourself a second copy that you can chop up and change. Comb through this “edit copy” and delete or consolidate as many words as possible. The dialogue should remain intact, but you’ll want to get rid of any lengthy descriptions or asides that are inessential to the task of drawing the story. Sometimes the writer will “think on paper” with passages like this:

“Ben casts his troubled gaze out the window. He had never liked autumn days. The falling leaves remind him of death. ‘Autumn,’ he sighs, reflecting on seasons past. Think of this panel as his ‘Michael Corleone looking out at the lake’ moment. Use plenty of shadows and have fun with it!”

This, you will reduce to:

BEN (troubled, looking out window): Autumn.

You’ll need to trim the script as much as possible because you are going to be glancing back at it often while you draw, and you won’t have time on those occasions to wade through any superfluous text.

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3. Count the panels on each page of the story, and include the panel-count beside each page number. The heading of each page should look something like this:

PAGE 1 (5 panels)

Panel 1

(And so forth.)

This panel-count will help you judge at a glance how much space you should grant each panel on that page. Three panels? Plenty of room to play in! Eight panels? You’ll need to do some squeezing.

If the writer has already included the panel-counts, count the panels anyway. Sometimes a writer will accidentally miscount the panels, which will cost you time and effort if you are thumbnailing a supposedly five-panel page and suddenly realize the page has six panels. (This is especially true of inset panels, which writers may fail to include in their panel count. If you were planning to squeeze Panel 5 into a narrow space, but then you discover in Panel 5’s description that it includes an inset panel, you’ll have to rework the whole page to make room for that inset. Count insets!)

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4. Isolate the script of each comics page on its own page of text. Twenty-page comic? Twenty-page script. You don’t want the descriptions and dialogue for Page 1 to continue onto a second or third page of text, because then you’ll be flipping between multiple script pages while you draw Page 1, which is a hassle. If, instead, the script for each page of comics occupies its own text page, you can refer to it in its entirety at a glance.

Hopefully, deleting superfluous words (as we did in Step 2) will reduce the text of each page enough to fit it on a single sheet. If not, shrink the font size enough to make it fit.

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5. Print out these script pages: one sheet of paper per page of your comic. Keep a cork-board near your workspace where you can pin up whichever page of script you are working from. This will allow you to glance at the script while you draw without cluttering up your screen with a text window—or, when drawing traditionally, your desk with an extra sheet of paper. (If you have multiple screens available, such as a laptop AND a tablet, you can skip printing anything and use one screen to display the script page while you draw on the other screen.)

However you arrange it, it’s important to refer to the script while you work because you’ll need to ensure that your characters’ faces match the moods described in the script. Otherwise, you risk forgetting that the shouting face you roughed-in earlier was supposed to look happy, and on your final pass you may end up making him looking angry, or vice versa. Many comics have been hampered by the omission of details that the artist forgot somewhere between the first read-through and the final art. Avoid that mistake!

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6. Read the whole script again, this time prepared to add notes in red (or any color that stands out from the text). Circle or highlight any locations, objects, or outfits that are unfamiliar to you and may require reference. This will give you a  “shopping list” to refer to later when you gather reference photos to inform your drawings. (It’s best to gather reference all at once, after thumbnailing but before pencilling, so that you won’t have to interrupt your drawing time to hunt for it, piecemeal, later on.)

Look also for any panels where characters must interact with their surroundings, such as by opening a door or grabbing a prop, or by placing objects into their pocket or purse. Highlight those moments, reminding yourself to include a door or prop in that location, or to add a pocket or purse to the character’s outfit beforehand. For example, Page 1 of a script might say, “She enters  a nondescript house,” but later, Page 19 might say, “She ascends a stairway near the foyer; pulls a flashlight from her purse.” If you designed a stair-less house without checking the whole script, or failed to include a purse with her outfit from the beginning, you’ll have to go back and amend the intervening pages. Avoid that trouble by adding notes like “PURSE” and “STAIRS NEAR FOYER” to the description on Page 1, during this preliminary pass.

There. Now your script is ready to be thumbnailed! (Check out Carousel #12 for advice on that topic.) This whole process will take a couple of hours and may seem daunting, but it will fast become second nature, and in the long run it will spare you from a thousand little hassles that arise when you haven’t prepped your script. We all have our preferred methods, and these steps aren’t sacrosanct, but do give them a try and see if they don’t improve your workflow, and your results.

See you here next month!

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Carousel by Jesse Hamm appears every month here on Toucan! Starting in March, Jesse moves to the third Tuesday of each month.

Aspiring comic book artists are often admonished to work on their perspective, their anatomy, and their storytelling, but I don’t often hear “composition” listed among those admonitions, and when it is mentioned, it’s rarely well defined. “I like the composition in this panel, but not in this panel,” a pro might say, while critiquing your work. When asked to define “composition,” the pro may squint at the ceiling and reply, “It’s the arrangement of the parts of a drawing to make the drawing look good.” How do I arrange the parts of my drawing to make it look good? “Well, it’s complicated.”

It is complicated, but good composition is crucial to good comics, so let me attempt to simplify it.

Understanding composition begins with recognizing that the nearness of objects to each other has meaning. Suppose you saw a football field, empty except for two people who are both standing on the 30-yard line, close enough to touch each other. You would assume that those two are companions, or that they have mutual business on that field. But suppose instead that they are farther apart: One is on the 20-yard line, the other is on the 80-yard line. In this scenario, their mutual presence on the field may simply be a coincidence. Now suppose they are standing at opposite ends of the field, facing away from each other. This suggests enmity: They both apparently need to be on the field, but are trying to stay as far from each other as possible. In each of these scenarios, the figures’ proximity to each other suggests a meaning to the observer.

Art carries a similar dynamic. A circle drawn two thirds of the way down a piece of paper, and one third across, will look randomly placed. But a circle drawn in the center, or nestled into one of the corners, suggests intent. The centered circle will seem to carry great importance, as though the artist is insisting that you notice it. The circle tucked away in the corner will look as though it’s trying to hide. Every placement of every shape, and those shapes’ nearness to other shapes, or to the picture’s borders, suggests a meaning to the reader. Composition is the art of arranging the shapes in your drawing so that the placement of every shape suggests the right meaning. (Composition touches on more than placement alone; color, value, line, and other elements must also be considered. But placement underlies it all, and is a fine starting point.)

Let’s consider how this might play out in a comic. Suppose your story opens with your protagonist standing on a city street, in front of a wall. If the character is standing in the center of the panel, the reader will sense that you’re claiming the character is vitally important. That may be a proper opening for a Superman story, but if the reader has yet to be impressed by your character, the panel’s center may be a presumptuous location. “HERE IS THE STAR OF THE STORY,” the panel seems to say. ”LOOK AT THIS CHARACTER!”

You may instead prefer a more modest approach, and place the character off-center, as though we are noticing this person by accident. But how far off-center? If the character is way over at the panel’s left edge, touching its border, readers will wonder why the character is so close to the border. Is it just coincidence that the border and the character are so close together? Is the character touching the border for a reason? Placing the figure a quarter of the way into the panel should prevent such questions.

But then readers will wonder why there is so much empty space in the right half of the panel. Why does a blank wall occupy most of the panel? Did the artist forget to draw something there? So, you move the character into the right half of the panel, leaving the left three quarters empty. Now it works! The reader’s gaze moves (as always) from left to right, across the empty three quarters of the panel, and lands on the character—a discovery made as though by accident. The empty space provides a path for the eye to follow to your protagonist, whom you’ve managed to introduce without presumption and without provoking answerless questions.

Unfortunately, there will be further challenges. Not only must you place the character in suitable proximity to the panel’s borders, but there will often be objects and other characters competing for space in the panel. All of these must also be arranged in suitable proximity to the borders, and to each other. To return to the example above: Suppose your protagonist is waiting with several others for a bus. How close should he or she be to the rest of the group? Too close, and your character will be lost in the crowd; readers won’t know which figure to focus on. But placed too far from the group, your character will seem aloof, antisocial. You may need to move your thumb nearer and farther from the group to find the “sweet spot” where your character should stand.

And how close should the others be to each other? Too close, and they’ll look as though they are huddled together for warmth or safety. Too far, and they won’t appear to have congregated at a bus stop.

Likewise, objects will play a role. How close should the BUS STOP sign be to the panel’s upper border? If you crop it, the reader may not be able to read it. But if you raise the angle of view to include it, you may crop out too much of the characters, making them resemble a row of heads resting along the bottom of the panel. A solution may be to pull back far enough to include both the characters’ bodies and the sign, but doing so may make the characters’ expressions too small to read. Perhaps their body language will suffice?

Every choice of placement will have benefits and drawbacks. The key is to recognize that every placement you make will affect the reader a certain way, and to favor placements that will produce the effects you want. How close should you place the character to the panel’s edges in this moment? How will readers probably interpret that choice? How can you adjust the character’s placement in order to encourage the interpretations you want readers to make? This is the sort of thinking you’ll need to bring to each panel. Putting yourself in the readers’ shoes, and moving the characters and objects around to test out different placements, will help you find solutions that work.

Internalizing these ideas should give you the grounding you need to create effective compositions. If you want to delve further into the subject, I recommend Greg Albert’s book, The Simple Secret To Better Painting. Despite the presence of the word “painting” in the title, Albert’s book is useful for any visual artist, teaching you how to compose your art to the greatest effect. Study it to learn principles that will ensure readers receive your work the way you intend, and add “good composition” to your skillset.

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Carousel by Jesse Hamm appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

I once read a book on drawing in which the author described, in detail, how to draw highly realistic figures. I followed along, applying his lessons to my own figure drawings, but was frustrated to see that his drawings were far more refined than my own, and I couldn’t discern the reason why. Finally, while poring over a certain section of his book, an offhand remark of his jumped out at me. “Of course,” he said, “each of my figure drawings takes around thirty hours to complete.” Mystery solved! I myself had rarely devoted more than a single hour to any of my figure drawings; no wonder his looked more finished and precise.

Still, I was puzzled by how little space he devoted to describing how much time his drawings required. It occurred to me that the element of time is seldom discussed in any of the books I’ve read about drawing. Techniques may be given ample description, but we’re rarely told how much time is involved. It’s as though artists live in a timeless eternity where we can wrestle each problem as long as we like, never to run low on funds or energy, never faced with competing tasks in our schedule. Sadly, this timeless ideal is not one we occupy in reality. There are trade-offs.

Here in the real world, there are several problems posed by completing a drawing too soon, or too late. I’ve already alluded to the problem of completing a drawing too soon: the results will look less refined than if you had devoted more time to it. The author of the book mentioned above typically spent nearly a week of full-time work drawing a single figure, resulting in drawings of sufficient beauty and precision to command prices high enough to justify the time he spent. Similarly, Norman Rockwell used to spend a month painting a single magazine cover. He needed that time in order to seek out and hire models, find costumes and props, photograph his models, draw charcoal studies, paint numerous color studies, and execute the final, highly detailed painting. It’s clear that allotting more time allows for more planning, more corrections, and fewer mistakes.  

The comics industry doesn’t afford artists as much time as Rockwell enjoyed, but there’s still room for many comic artists to devote more time to their pages. I’ve seen young artists produce three or four times as many pages per month as the industry standard of twenty, but they do so at a cost. They think they are proving to clients that they can deliver quickly, but in the process they often prove that their art is sloppy, rushed, and unimpressive. Devoting more time to their work could make it more attractive and salable.

On the other hand, there are also problems with completing drawings too slowly. The obvious concern is that deadlines must be met, but another concern is the artist’s household budget. I’ve met many young artists who committed to a lengthy project only to discover (too late) that the money they are earning won’t pay their bills for the duration of the project. Three months’ wages up front may sound great … but not if the work takes four months to complete!

An even less obvious concern is that of enthusiasm. Artists may enjoy drawing, but there are limits to the enthusiasm we have for each drawing we do. The longer the drawing takes, the more our enthusiasm wanes. In an interview with The Comics Journal, Jules Feiffer once said that in order to complete his first graphic novel, he had to forgo the pencilling and jump straight to the inks. “I knew it was going to be long, and I knew it was going to involve backgrounds … and I knew that if I had to pencil and ink it, I would never do it. It would never get done. It would just be torture for me.” In order to motivate himself to complete the book, he had to find an hours-per-page ratio that would not exhaust his enthusiasm for the work.

So we’re faced with a dilemma. Draw too quickly, and the work will suffer. Draw too slowly, and we’ll run out of money, blow deadlines, or simply lose enthusiasm. How do we strike a balance?

First, discover your “sweet spot”: the amount of time you must spend on each page in order to feel satisfied with both your worklife and your resulting art. Each artist has his or her own sweet spot. Some, like Feiffer, are happiest with work they scribbled out quickly. Others, like Rockwell, are not content unless they’ve crossed every t and dotted every i. Find the process and the results that suit you best.

One way to do this is to time out your art with notations in the margins. When you begin a page, write the precise time of day in the margin. When you break for lunch or for some other reason, write the time you stopped, and then the time you resumed work. (Round to the nearest 5-minute mark, for easier math.) Work the page to completion at your normal pace. When you finish, your margin may look like this:

• 8:15 — 9:20
• 9:30 — 11:05
• 12:00 — 12:50
• 1:00 — 2:15
• 2:30 — 4:05
• 4:15 — 5:30

After completing the page, add up the notations (in this case: 7 hours, 35 minutes). Do this with several pages for a rough average of how long it takes you to draw a page. 

Then, draw a couple of pages at different paces: one at breakneck speed, as fast as you can, and one in which you spend as much time as you can stand perfecting every last thing. This will give you a spectrum of the speed and quality you are capable of. Compare these results with your other pages. Which pages best exemplify your vision? Which pace are you most comfortable working at? Do you need to cut some corners and pick up your pace? Or do you need to add an hour or two to your average, to do more impressive work?

Be honest with yourself. You need to be proud of the work you do, but you also need to choose a pace you are comfortable with, because you will (hopefully) spend years at this. Find your own sweet spot between fast and thorough.

After finding the pace you prefer, aim for jobs that suit your productivity. If you like to spend a week or two on a single page, you may not be cut out for comics interiors; covers may be more your speed. If you like to work fast and cartoony, you may need to rule out comics that require thoroughly researched backgrounds and realistic detail. The key is to pace yourself smartly and aim for the appropriate venue, rather than scrambling to draw faster than you’re comfortable with, or laboring forever on details you don’t care about. Even if you make art solely for yourself, as a hobby, this process will help you set goals that fit your time and talents and satisfy you, without stressing you out.

The subjects, tools, and methods you choose aren’t the only choices you make as an artist: how much time you choose to spend is a creative choice, as well. 

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Carousel by Jesse Hamm appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

One of the challenges of drawing comics is that you have to make figures appear to be separate from the environments behind them. This can be difficult, because both the background and the figures in a drawing are made of the same stuff: lines, and the spaces between them. If the cartoonist isn’t careful, a panel can turn into a sort of “Where’s Waldo?” game, in which the reader struggles to find the characters, or to tell where a character begins and the background ends. I often see this problem in the work of inexperienced cartoonists, whose rocks and trees and buildings blend into the figures and clothing, camouflaging everything into a uniform quilt of lines and shapes. It’s easy to get so caught up in drawing things accurately that we forget to grant them depth.

The ability to distinguish a figure from the environment behind it is known as figure-ground perception. We use this ability constantly in life. For example, we use it to discern which faces in a room are people and which are photographs, or which shapes on a tablecloth are objects and which are designs. Figure-ground perception comes easily in real life environments, because our stereoscopic vision alerts us to objects’ depth, and because objects and figures often move, distinguishing them from their inert surroundings. But in a comic, where every shape lies flat and motionless on the page, artists must take special care to ensure that the figures stand out.

Consider image “0” at right. The lines in the woman’s hair blend confusingly with the windows of the building beyond her, and the busy details of the street scene compete with her face for our attention. Shrunk to the size of an average panel, a figure could get lost in those details, especial if she were turned away from the reader, or if there were more lines on her face. Let’s examine nine ways to avoid that sort of confusion.

1. Empty Space

This is the easiest and most common solution: Simply maneuver your figure into an area where there are no background details behind her head. This way, no pesky details will blend into her face or compete with it for our attention. In most cases, you can leave a blank wall or wide open sky behind your figures’ heads, and arrange any background details well away from where they would interfere with your figures.

However, comics often paint us into weird corners, where events in panels 1 and 3 mean a character must occupy a certain part of the setting in panel 2, leaving us without the luxury of pushing the background out of the way. Such cases demand other methods …

2. Halo Background

Another common solution is to prevent the lines of the background from meeting the lines of the figure. This leaves a white “halo” around the figure which clearly delineates her from her surroundings, and seems to “pop” her forward

3. Lighten Background

If you’re using digital media, a simple way to distinguish the figure is to draw her on her own layer and then lower the opacity of the background layer. This gives the background a pale, murky quality, as though fog or dust has wafted between the figure and the background. (In painting, this technique is known as atmospheric perspective; painters have used it for centuries.)

4. Thin-Lined Background, Thick-Lined Figure

If you are drawing with ink on paper, you can achieve atmospheric perspective by using thick lines to draw your figure (especially the contours) and thin lines to draw your background. This makes the background appear hazy, even though all the lines remain sharp and dark.

5. Heavy Shadow on Background

A staple of comics: heavy shadows! A heavy black shadow behind the figure will pop her forward and clearly separate her from her environment.

6. Heavy Shadow on Figure

An alternative to heavy shading on the background is heavy shading on the figure. Large black areas on the figure can make her stand out from a detailed background. Depending on the scene’s lighting, you could even silhouette her entirely, for a starker composition.

7. Greytone Background

Greytones are a great solution when you’ve failed to think ahead. If you’re perusing some finished art and realize the figure-ground relationship is unclear, the quickest and easiest fix is to add greytones to either the figure or the background. Presto: clarity! 

8. Simplify Background Detail

Here I’ve replaced the many signs, windows, and other details of the busy street scene with a simpler tableau, which is less likely to clash with the figure.

This approach is especially useful when the background is a generic setting that you can alter at will, rather than a well-established setting that must remain faithful to past representations. (Your editor will not be thrilled if you replaced the T-Rex in the Batcave with a simple IKEA shelf.)

9. Frame with Figure Elements

Sometimes, a figure carries with her the elements needed to distinguish her from the background. In this case, I’ve simplified her hair and placed some of it alongside her face, which frames her face clearly against the detail of the background. If her hair were cropped short, this function could be served by a hat, or scarf, or hood. (This is also a good reason to keep character designs simple. The busier the character’s hairstyle or jewelry, or the patterns on her clothes, the harder it will be to clearly distinguish her contours from details in the background.)

I hope you’ll find these methods useful, and I’ll see you here next month!

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Carousel by Jesse Hamm appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

Alan Davis has long been admired by other artists for his appealing draftsmanship and his command of action, humor, and other key elements of superhero fiction. His work is further distinguished by his masterful panel-by-panel storytelling. One particular example of his work that I return to often for inspiration is Uncanny X-Men Annual #11. It’s a great example of consistently clear, effective cartooning—no mean feat for a fast-paced story about ten different characters. Let’s take a close look at a 4-page segment of this story and see what the art can teach us.

The following pages were written by Chris Claremont, inked by Paul Neary, colored by Glynis Oliver, and lettered by Tom Orzechowski. These are pages 13 through 16 in the comic, but for simplicity’s sake I’ve re-numbered them here as 1 through 4.

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PAGE 1

Splash pages in comics should be used sparingly, partly because they slow the narrative nearly to a stand-still, and partly because they use up valuable space that could have been occupied by panels that must find room elsewhere. Nevertheless, Davis (or Claremont) chose to devote an entire page to this show-stopper, in order to introduce the setting which the characters will occupy for the rest of the story.

We won’t see this castle’s exterior again for dozens of pages, so Davis makes it count. He emphasizes the castle’s size by including the characters in the foreground, pulling the viewer back far enough that the figures are properly dwarfed. He also targets their destination—the massive doorway—with converging perspective lines, directing our attention toward where they will be heading for the next page or two.

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PAGE 2

Panel 1

Our connection to characters is bolstered when we see their reactions to key events, so Davis uses a wide-shot here to show us every face on the team. Though Storm and Wolverine have no lines in this panel, Davis places the pair foremost in this line-up, signaling that the rest of the page will belong to them.

Panel 2

Davis moves in to a close-up of our two leads in conversation. A frontal view would not have conveyed motion, so he shifts the viewer to one side, tilts Storm’s arm and earring, and pushes the pair toward the lower-right corner of the panel. These few, smart clues convince us that the pair are walking, even though we can’t see their legs.

Panel 3

Davis pulls back to reemphasize the majesty of the setting. This also helps sell Storm’s dialogue, which is so plentiful here that settling on her face for the entire panel would have drawn our attention to the art’s stillness, making her look like a mannequin. Viewing her instead from a distance helps us imagine that her face is moving and changing expression as she speaks.

The rolling mist adds mystery to the environment, along with a sense of scale, helping the figures appear less like bugs on a kitchen floor.

Panel 4

Davis takes this opportunity to remind us of the presence of Horde, whom Storm was just discussing, and Longshot, whom she mentions here.

It would have seemed natural to include in the background here the giant statues that loom nearby, but this would have cluttered an already busy panel, so Davis only hints at their presence.

Panel 5

Here we have the page’s emotional climax. Davis places the focus entirely on the characters by excluding the background, but he resists the temptation to inflect the panel (which he could have done by making it larger than the others, or by changing its shape, or breaking its borders). Some artists play up every kiss with great fanfare, but in the context of this story, this kiss is only a fleeting display of affection between friends, and Davis properly treats it as such.

Here and throughout the story, Davis avoids using panel inflections like those I describe above, preferring instead to rely on a standard grid of rectangular panels bounded by standard borders. This creates a sober, grounded tone that lends a sense of reality to the story’s unreal proceedings.

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PAGE 3

Panel 1

Davis here uses a vertical panel to great effect, emphasizing the lofty height of the doorway. The tiny figures’ long shadows add to the somber mood, and direct our attention toward the figures, preventing them from getting lost in the scene.

Panel 2

This panel includes dialogue from only Havok, Psylocke, and Wolverine, but Davis takes care to place Captain Britain and Storm just beyond these three. Both characters had open-ended moments in the preceding panels—Storm kissing Wolverine, Britain posing a question—so their silent inclusion here keeps their presence alive in the scene. Leaving them out could feel like they were abruptly shooed back to their trailer after saying their lines.

Still, those two aren’t this panel’s key characters, so Davis subdues them by lowering the reader’s vantage point. This pushes Havok higher than Britain in the panel, and Psylocke and Wolverine higher than Storm, giving the three speakers a visual prominence they wouldn’t have had in an eye-level shot.

Managing characters’ visual presence in these ways is important to good cartooning, especially in a book with numerous key characters.

Panels 3-4

This dialogue between Longshot and Dazzler could have played out in a single medium shot, which would have been faster to draw. But by dividing it into a long shot and then a close-up, Davis is able to increase the emotional intensity of Longshot’s performance.

Given the stark lighting here, it would feel appropriate (from a drawing standpoint) to bury Longshot’s face in heavy shadow. But this would have robbed us his fearful expression, so Davis instead grants him plenty of light, relying on his colorist to add appropriate but less occlusive shading.

Panels 5-7

These three panels offer a wonderfully effective moment of the door slamming shut. The final panel occupies only a small fraction of the page, but you can almost hear the echo of the massive door striking the floor. This is due to the quietude of the preceding panels, and the size-disparity of the door and the figures.

Davis’s decision to raise the position of the floor in Panel 6 is especially effective. It allows us to read Dazzler and Longshot’s embrace before reading Dazzler’s final line, which is interrupted by the slamming door. Had Davis located the characters’ feet near the bottom of the panel, all of their dialogue would have had to appear above their heads. This would have inclined us to observe the figures AFTER reading their dialogue, and THEN read the slamming door. Reading the figures after reading Dazzler’s interrupted dialogue would have slowed the slam’s abruptness.

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PAGE 4

Panel 1

Cartoonists are typically encouraged to stage action in a left-to-right fashion. Davis could have followed this rule by placing the reader on the opposite side of the characters here … but in this case, the characters aren’t trying to move forward. They’re instead trying to backtrack along the route they came. So, Davis properly aims their efforts toward our left.

Panel 2

The brighter a light, the darker its absence. Here, the brightness of Havok’s blast is shown more by the heavy shadows it leaves on the surrounding figures than by the “light lines,” per se.

Sometimes what best sells a drawing isn’t the subject itself, but the effect that subject has on its surroundings. This was one of those times, so Davis took care here to include the other figures, rather than isolating the key figure as he did in Panel 1.

Panel 3

This door is too broad and flat for Davis to indicate its presence in the usual way, with a doorknob or doorframe, so instead he drops shadows from the men’s hands along the face of the door; a simple, effective solution. Without those shadows, it would look as though Havok and Britain were raising their hands toward empty space.

Panel 4

Here we have a common problem. Several standing figures, as seen here, typically require a broad, horizontal composition, but the page’s layout only affords us a tall, narrow panel. Davis solves this problem by pulling back to grant the figures a horizontal band of space in the middle of the panel; he then fills the remaining spaces with a murky mist (above) and a layer of foreground detritus (below). This layering of elements—mist, figures, detritus—serves a dual purpose: it prevents the panel’s empty areas from appearing arbitrarily empty, and it establishes the setting as capacious and threatening.

Storm and Psylocke have no dialogue in this panel, but their inclusion here keeps the group’s presence alive in the reader’s mind, and gives their dialogue in the next panels a naturalness that it would lack had they appeared suddenly in those panels to deliver their lines.

Panel 5

Wolverine’s exit here is tricky. Conventional wisdom dictates that he exit from left to right…but this would make him the last thing we see in this panel—and the women have lines to deliver after his exit. If, however, he exits to the left, it will feel like he’s regressing into the prior panel, rather than moving forward into unexplored territory. The solution: he exits leftward, but toward the reader, at an angle slight enough to avoid the left-exit problem.

The cloud of dust at Wolverine’s feet conveys movement in a more natural way than motion lines could. Davis uses motion lines when necessary (such as when Britain is rebuffed, above), but when possible he will use elements like dust clouds, or trailing hair or clothing, to show motion in a less artificial fashion.

Panel 6

Most of the dialogue in this panel is Storm’s, so one might expect a clear, straight-on view of her face, with Rogue looking away from us on the right. However, this panel’s primary purpose is to signal a challenge Rogue will face on the next page. Davis therefore buries Storm’s face in shadow and in profile (a less intimate angle than straight-on), and turns Rogue’s face toward us and into the light. This grants Rogue’s reaction preeminence, filling us with curiosity about what has grabbed her attention.

That’s all we have time for today, but I hope this analysis has helped sharpen your thinking about the kinds of challenges cartoonists face, and ways to meet them. I encourage you to seek out this issue yourself to read it in full, and learn from a master!

See you here next month!

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Carousel by Jesse Hamm appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan!

Aspiring cartoonists are always advised to study human anatomy, but animal anatomy often goes unmentioned. This may be because most comics today are set in urban environments, where animals seldom play key roles. But regardless of what role they play, you can bet animals will appear in at least some of the scripts you are invited to draw. Don’t be one of those artists who screams and leaves town whenever that happens! Here are several tips that will help you draw better animals:

1. Animals aren’t furniture. To give your story authenticity and bring it alive, the animals you draw should appear to think and feel (in whatever rudimentary way they do). The best way to achieve this is to give each animal an attitude. Is the animal curious? Alert? Content? Pick a mood that suits, and dwell on that mood as you shape the animal’s expression and posture. This will grant it life, and keep it from resembling a stuffed ornament.

2. We know seated humans are shorter than standing humans, so there’s a temptation to draw seated animals shorter than standing animals. But this is a mistake, at least where quadrupeds are concerned. Quadrupeds, such as dogs and cats, sit by lowering their back legs while their front legs remain erect. The result is that a cat or dog will remain the same height whether seated or standing, and will remain the same height when seated as other animals of similar height who remain standing. (This may seem obvious, but don’t underestimate the urge to wrongly anthropomorphize what you draw!)

3. When we encounter animals in life, we habitually seek out their faces, in order to identify them and check on their moods. (Watch people in a zoo: They don’t mind if a creature’s feet or legs are hidden, but if it’s face is hidden, they try to coax it out of hiding.) This impulse also applies to visual narrative: when animals appear in a panel, readers want to see their faces. It may save time or space to crop a creature’s face out of a panel, but this tends to annoy the reader. Try instead to include the animal’s face. If that proves impossible, crop the animal well away from the neck, near its midriff, so the head’s absence won’t leave readers feeling teased.

4. The shapes of slender animals are defined mainly by their bones, but the shapes of fat or furry animals are defined mainly by their external masses. So, when drawing slender animals, such as horses or deer, begin by briefly sketching the skeleton, and work outward from there. For fat or furry critters, such as hamsters or hippos, first sketch the silhouette of the outer mass, then add details to the interior. Beginning this way, with an animal’s most defining characteristics, will help you establish its look more quickly and accurately.

5. Because horses are slender quadrupeds with long snouts, amateurs often draw them like large dogs. This never ends well. Some differences to keep in mind: unlike dogs, horses’ eyes are on the SIDES of the head, not out in front. Dogs’ eyes are spaced narrower than their ears and jaws; horses’ eyes are spaced broader than their ears and jaws. Also, dogs have thicker legs. One reason we draw horses’ legs too thick is that we expect their leg-strength to be down in their thighs and calves; it’s not. It’s mainly up in their shoulders and butt. Think of a horse as a corgi on stilts, or a hand gripping chopsticks, with most of the power located up high, and the horse will be easier to draw.

6. An animal’s rear-view is rarely its most photogenic angle. As a result, there are few photos taken of animals’ rear-ends, which means it will be difficult to find photo reference when you want to draw an animal from behind. If the animal you wish to draw is too large or exotic to find lying around your house, this lack of photo reference can be a problem. The solution: Find a front-view photo of the animal in the pose you want, then draw only the animal’s silhouette. The silhouette will be the same shape whether the animal is facing you or facing away. Once you have the silhouette drawn, you can estimate the interior details of a rear-angle view. The accurate exterior shape will usually contain your interior details well enough to “sell” the animal’s appearance to your readers

7. If you’re having trouble getting the hang of a particular animal, find photos of similar animals to compare it with. Observing how it differs from similar-looking species can help you identify that animal’s unique characteristics. For example, you may want to compare a lion with a tiger or puma, or compare a horse with a donkey or zebra. Certain size-relationships between the animal’s parts will become obvious when you see how those same features are worn by creatures with slightly different anatomies.

8. If you’re going to draw horses, you will probably draw people riding them, so here are a couple of proportions to remember. First, a human rider’s torso is generally the size of the horse’s head. (It’s tempting to draw horses’ heads smaller than that, because their heads look small compared to their giant necks, but don’t be fooled. Their heads are surprisingly large!) Also: people ride close to the horse’s shoulders, not halfway between the shoulders and tail. There is FAR more space from the saddle to the tail than from the saddle to the mane—usually the length of the horse’s head.

9. Because animals are often covered in fur, it’s tempting to become preoccupied with the fur, drawing thousands of lines all over the animal, and turning it into a fluffy mess. Don’t let fur overwhelm your drawing this way. Few animals look like fluffy dandelions; fur usually matches the shapes that underly it, cohering into a simple mass. Focus on getting the anatomy right, and then summarize the fur’s texture with a few tufts along the body’s contours. The reader’s mind will fill in the rest.

10. Occasionally your script will call for numerous drawings of an animal you’ve never practiced before. “Here comes Stumpy the Seahorse!” Deadlines may tempt you to dive right in and learn along the way, but this approach will cost time in the long run, as you keep guessing and struggling each time you draw the unfamiliar creature. Instead, gather a dozen good photos of the animal and take a few hours to draw them. This will make it easier for you to quickly and effectively draw the creature each time it appears in your story, with a minimum of time spent guessing, or finding and consulting new reference.

We’ll be taking our usual break from this column during the month of July. See you back here in August!

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Jesse Hamm’s Carousel appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan (except July and December)!

Once upon a time, inking comics was necessary because comics were printed on newsprint, and media like pencils, pastels, or paint didn’t show up very well in reproduction. Nowadays, printing technology and web displays are so sharp that cartoonists can get away with drawing in pencil or any soft media, if they wish.

Nevertheless, the snappiness of inked lines is hard to beat! This is especially true in comics, where lines that read quickly give artists greater control over the pace. Inked lines carve shapes clearly, allowing readers to absorb them immediately and move on to the next panel. Even in this digital age, with its perfect reproductions, I doubt inking will ever disappear from comics.

However, drawing in ink poses special challenges. Inked lines are less forgiving than the hazier lines found in softer media. Each hard, black line makes a clear, unambiguous statement—and any errors will stand out clearly as well! It’s therefore important that we bring as much skill and precision to the inks that we can. Here are several tips to help with that effort:

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1. Every new project is an opportunity to try new tools or a better approach. When beginning a new project, pick a favorite panel that you pencilled previously and try inking it a few different ways, with different tools and at different sizes. Compare them and decide which approach you like best. For consistency’s sake, you’ll probably need to stick with your choice for the project’s duration, so choose tools that are easy to use and that deliver attractive results.

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2. Take extra care when inking eyes and lips. Sloppy inking elsewhere, like in the hair or clothing, will be overlooked, but a badly-drawn line on the eyes or mouth can kill a likeness or expression. (The same is true of hands, which are second only to faces in their expressiveness. Be sure when you ink each finger that your lines bend in just the right places.) Also, ink the irises after inking the lids and lashes. It’s easier to control the direction of an eye’s gaze when you draw the iris within existing eyelids, rather than by drawing the eyelids around existing irises.

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3. If you’re inking digitally, add the black areas on their own layer at 50% opacity. This allows you to see what lines you are covering up, and to make judicious choices about where you might erase some black to clarify a drawn object. Once you’ve settled on the right arrangement of black areas, bring the opacity back to 100% and merge the layers. If you are working on paper, lay a sheet of tracing paper over your page and block-in the shadows with pencil, erasing as needed to achieve the right look, or laying down new sheets to try other arrangements of shadow. After finding the right arrangement, you can remove the tracing paper and confidently dash-in your blacks with a large brush, knowing already that your composition will work.

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4. It’s tempting to switch pen sizes often, especially when inking digitally, but numerous variations of line-width are typically unnecessary and can be distracting. Comics panels are designed to be read, not lingered on. Just as we enjoy a consistent font in a prose novel, uniformity of line-width in a comic helps smooth the read. To suggest distance when inking backgrounds, it may be useful to switch to a thinner line … but if you do so, take care not to pack too much detail in there. Thinner lines permit greater detail, but distance is portrayed better by less detail, because objects tend to grow hazy when they are farther away.

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5. When you work digitally, revisions may threaten to become an endless task, because you can always zoom in closer to find more errors. To avoid this trouble, don’t make revisions until after the page is inked. Then, when you’re ready for the revision stage, reduce the page to the size at which it will appear in print, and examine it for errors. Circle each error you find in pink, on a new layer. Then, zoom in to correct only those errors you circled. Any new errors you notice after zooming in won’t be visible to readers and should go uncorrected.

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6. Comics can be inked quickly or slowly, depending on what line quality you desire, but generally I would say quicker is better. In addition to being more deadline-friendly, quickly drawn lines have a certain smoothness and snap that reads easily, whereas slowly drawn lines tend to wobble or stiffen. In order to avoid sloppiness when inking quickly, picture in your mind the basic, overall shape of each line before making it. Is it straight? Curved? Is there a corner lurking near the beginning or end? Imagine your hand is a race-car driver on a rainy track: Giving it a glimpse of the road ahead will help avoid spin-outs. With practice, drawing this way will help you throw down whatever line you need, quickly and smoothly.

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7. When inking digitally, consider keeping your panel borders on a “locked” layer between the ink layer and the pencil layer, to minimize chances of accidentally merging the pencil and ink layers, or accidentally inking directly on the pencil layer (mistakes that can cost hours). If you don’t plan to amend the pencils often, you can also lock the pencil layer to avoid inking on it. Use the “lock transparent pixel” button (beside the “lock” button), so that you can still adjust its transparency level.

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8. When inking a weather effect like wind or rain over other art, draw it on a transparent sheet (if working on paper), or on its own layer (if working digitally). This way, you can later lighten, delete, or adjust any lines that interfere with figures or faces.

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9. For maximal control when inking with a brush, it’s best to drag the brush-tip away from you, rather than pushing it as you would a pencil.

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10. Your natural wrist movements (when inking according to the tip above) will follow an arc, curving diagonally away from your torso. If your page is fixed in one position while you ink, you’ll have to bend your wrist in uncomfortable directions to ink any lines that don’t follow that arc. To avoid this, rotate the page as you ink, positioning it so that each line you are inking matches the natural sweep of your wrist. (To rotate the page while inking digitally in ClipStudio, hold down the “shift” and “space” keys.)

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11. When inking a long, smooth curve, it helps to fix your attention an inch or two AHEAD of the tip of your drawing instrument, as if you’re dragging the line like a sled after that moving spot. (Looking directly at the tip, as you would when inking short lines, invites line-wobble.)

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See you here next month!

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Jesse Hamm’s Carousel appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan!