How to make a comic (or look good, trying)

I keep a lot of art crap around my house. Way too much, in fact. I have stuff I bought but never opened, stuff I used once and discarded... I have backup stuff for my stuff in case my stuff gets broken. Despite the fact that some of them are in perfect working condition and many of these items cost a good amount of money, I could pretty much care less about them...

But my art bag is a different story. It is a magical place that contains a medley of things all suited to one task -- pencil work. And it is my happy place.

Inside my art bag are my tried and true can't-live-without-it items. I get asked a lot what kind of stuff I use when drawing, and especially when drawing comics, so consider this your comprehensive guide to such things from my perspective, only. In other words, feel free to go out and buy some of this crap, but take the time to find out what tools work best for you...

The first thing is, of course... pencils! A penciller has to have pencils, and people will tell you that you shouldn't use mechanical pencils to draw anything. These people are known in the comic industry as idiots.

I am a pencil SNOB. I'm serious. The way people feel about coffee, guitar picks (sorry, honey :) ) and other minutiae, pales in comparison with how utterly stuck-up I can be when it comes to pencils. If I ever wake up to find my house stocked only with #2 pencils, I will lock myself in my room and not come out again until I have something better. Not that I don't use #2 pencils -- I do, a lot -- but having one pencil is never enough.

The black Papermate pencil you see in this photo is the GodJesus of pencils. It weighs approximately 20 pounds, was crafted by Agnar the Mountain Troll, and was originally meant to be used to slay dragons and stuff. It has no eraser. What is done with this pencil, cannot be undone. Ever. It is loaded with the same .05 Graphite that was given to Moses on the same day that he received the Ten Commandments.

THE BLACK ONE as I refer to it, even in real life, in all caps, is mighty and quite expensive, but just as useful to me are the other two pencils in the picture, and indeed they are sold at the price of approximately $5 for a pack of ten. I try to keep a bunch of them on hand, in both .05 and .07 graphite. I find .03 lead to be too small and lacking in "give" when it comes to drawing. Those fine lines are nice, but for my purposes, they don't really show up when I copy/shrink my comic pages down. Speaking of lead, I prefer Staedtler, but Pentel HB works in a pinch.

Equally wonderful and useful are my colored pencils. I say colored pencils because that's what they are -- Prismacolor (nothing compares, let's be honest) despite the fact that they are not colored, per se: cool grey 50% and white. I use these to block in large areas of shade when I don't want the rough look of straight black lead. The white is a nice thing to use for highlights and doesn't allow for regular pencil to cover it, easily. Since I've been digitally toning the pages for Varulv, and erasers are my preferred highlighting tool in small spaces for detail work, I find myself using these guys less and less, but in covering a huge area of an 11x17" page, they are life savers.

When it comes to erasers, as it is with pencils, one is never enough! The blue thing is that magical item you may have heard me raving about on Facebook the other night... I finally got batteries for it! And let me tell you, I've been using these things for five years and am convinced there is no better erasing tool available anywhere. Fine details are a cinch with this puppy. For those of you who've never heard of an electric eraser, the concept is simple: Press button. Eraser tip spins rapidly. Anything you touch is erased without the need to rub incessantly. Everybody wins.

Of course, where would I be without my kneaded eraser, also? This magical item (the one pictured is hardly the one I'm using currently... you'll notice how clean, intact and, frankly, hairless it is) can be molded to be as big or as small as you need, and can be smushed clean. Kneaded erasers are strong enough to remove charcoal, as well. And if you're bored, you can roll them up into balls and bounce them off your walls.

The tan one is a gum eraser. Good eraser to go after a big area, and not leave a mess. The white one is a plastic eraser. This thing will erase the paint off your car if you press hard enough.

If you're going to do comics, you're going to want decent art boards. I have always gone with Blue Line Pro and have forever been happy with their wares. I like both their Premiere and Pro line of comic art boards, but find their Pro boards, being a little rougher, work well for pencil blending. You can get them here. I use traditional, not full trim.

Here you can see the size of an 11x17" comic board (with art for Varulv #2) in comparison to an actual comic, and the size the artwork will be when shrunk.

As far as drawing the actual book, I've snapped another picture of a page in progress for Varulv issue 2 so I can better explain the process. The bottom portion is finished, and the top is a good example of the kind of figure breakdowns I do before finalizing the pencils for each panel. I'll take a page, and working off thumbnails (which I referenced in the story crafting post) draw in the borders of the panels, then rough the breakdowns of characters, backgrounds, etc. After that, I'll put detailed pencils over the breakdowns, and kind of "tighten up" the artwork as I go. I say it all the time, but it's almost like chiseling away at a sculpture, for that reason...

Whatever you end up using for your own art, and especially your comic art, it's worth your time to try several techniques. As you go, you'll find out what works best, what is necessary and what isn't. Then, like me, you'll have your go-to art set...

And 10,000 other things you'll never use again, in your closet.