Art Resources

Resources I have found helpful in my continuing attempts to learn “Drawing, how do?”

If your favorite art resource isn’t listed here, please tell me about it! I have others that I haven’t had time to study in any detail yet (Michael Hampton, Michael D. Mattesi, the list could go on). In particular, I’ve mostly focused on books as I find videos harder to parse.

You may also find other resources and inspiration of interest.

Instructors

Instructors I’ve benefited from particularly:

  • Erika Lancaster is outstanding at teaching fundamentals and has a Patreon with a ton of great tutorials. I benefited hugely from my year of private instruction with her.
  • Patrick J. Jones runs a periodic four-week Anatomy of Style workshop on figure/anatomy, which I adored.
  • The Center for Cartoon Studies periodically runs online and in-person workshops. I haven’t been able to make it to an in-person one, but I learned a ton and enjoyed Introduction to Hand-Drawn Animation with Alec Longstreth and Graphic Novel Workshop with Paul Karasik.

Drawing Fundamentals

  • Famous Artists Course (public domain PDFs) if you need it to be free.
  • Alphonso Dunn. Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide and Pen and Ink Drawing Workbook.

Perspective

  • Ernest R. Norling’s Perspective Made Easy, which is in the public domain; the Internet Archive has it. It’s a lovely gentle starting point.
  • Scott Robertson with Thomas Bertling, How to Draw. (If you need a gentler introduction to perspective first, try Norling’s Perspective Made Easy, above.)
  • Jason Cheeseman-Meyer. Vanishing Point: Perspective for Comics from the Ground Up. This discusses 1-, 2-, 3-, 5-, and 4-point perspectives, a brief discussion of placing figures at odd angles and doing curves, using floor plans, debugging, cheats and tricks. It’s comparatively short and doesn’t have exercises, but I really like the attention it gives to “weird comic character angles” plus 5- and 4-point (not so much that I’m likely to use them but because I was really curious!).

Figure and Anatomy

  • Andrew Loomis’s books are in the public domain: Fun with a Pencil, Drawing the Head and Hands, Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth, Creative Illustration, and a couple others, in approximately that order going from easiest to hardest. A construction rather than a gesture approach; if you don’t vibe with this, try a gesture-based approach and see if that works better for you. (The Internet Archive has them in various formats.)
  • Rockhe Kim’s Anatomy Drawing Class goes through multiple approaches and, for bonus, discusses superhero-type poses too. Apparently he has a YouTube channel discussing anatomy in Korean. My Korean is not great but I may give that a try. 😀
  • Jack Hamm’s Drawing the Head and Figure is a slim volume but has some great tips on different ways to stylize features. Note that the approach to figure/fashion is somewhat dated (this is from 1963).
  • Jack Faragasso’s Mastering Drawing the Human Figure uses the Reilly method. What I like about this book is that it starts at absolutely zero on drawing, so it walks you through the basics of mark-making and charcoal/pencil use that other texts tend to assume you have already figured out.
  • Patrick J. Jones’ The Anatomy of Style is an advanced text, but absolutely sumptuous. Available for purchase as a PDF; check out his video lessons for purchase too. I benefited tremendously from his Anatomy of Style workshop, which runs periodically.
  • Miyuli’s Art Tips Collection and Art Tips Collection 2 (available here in the US; also available in print from Europe, as well as PDF download options) are great references. I found they worked better for me as references/review after I’d done some anatomy from a more traditional approach (literally the first thing she hits you with in the first book is THIS STERNOCLEIDOMASTOID IS WRONG!!! and I’m all, Eep, I don’t know what that is yet…), rather than to learn from as a beginner.
  • Helen Birch’s Drawn from Life is lovely for inspiration.
  • Noah Bradley’s Paint Figures Better isn’t a figure drawing instruction text per se; it’s a series of inspirational tips and examples on the topic.
  • Line of Action has resources for gesture/figure drawing practice (free with paid option). Includes a gesture drawing tutorial.
  • Quickposes for drilling gesture (free).

Color and Light

Including color psychology.

  • Patti Bellantoni’s If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die is an excellent overview of color psychology in cinematography.
  • Leatrice Eiseman’s The Complete Color Harmony, Pantone Edition approaches color theory, color combinations, and color psychology from a design/fashion standpoint, mostly Western in focus although nods are made to color interpretations in various cultures around the world. This is pretty similar content-wise to the Kobayashi books (below), but it’s in print and draws on more recent research. Like the Kobayashi books, it emphasizes “nice” color combos rather than UGH DECAY; the Kobayashi books also offer more moods for their palettes if that’s a consideration, but once you have the general idea you can probably roll your own.
  • Shigenobu Kobayashi’s Color Image Scale, The Colorist, A Book of Colors are out of print but have useful color combinations/color psychology from a design/fashion standpoint, with the caveat (as Kobayashi notes) that he was drawing on research on Japanese consumers; he notes some areas where ~Western and Japanese interpretations differ. The ~difficulty for e.g. character design purposes is that fashion designers usually don’t want color combinations of UGH DECAY. 😉
  • Of course, one can learn a ton from Disney: 15 color schemes from Disney heroes and villains and What Disney villains can tell us about color psychology [Venngage].

Visual Storytelling and Composition

  • Molly Bang’s Picture This: How Pictures Work is genius on composition, shape, line, color, fundamentals.
  • Marcos Mateu-Mestre. Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers.

Character Design

  • 21 Draw’s Character Design, available both in hardcopy and ebook formats.
  • 3dtotal’s Creating Characters for the Entertainment Industry by Kenneth Anderson, Devon Cady-Lee, Cécile Carre, and Hollie Mengert. This is a great practical, hands-on view into the process, but assumes you already have a working knowledge of character design principles (shape language, palettes, stylization, etc.). For a more beginner-friendly book, 21 Draw’s Character Design is a better starting point.
  • D’Artiste’s Character Design assumes a strong knowledge of drawing/painting and is spendy, but have some beautiful general examples (digital painting). One would presumably be simplifying their examples for most comic/animation purposes.

Costume/Fashion

  • Fashionpedia is a fun print reference! Focuses on modern Western wear.
  • D’Artiste’s Fashion Design.

Comics: General

  • Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. Drawing Words and Writing Pictures.
  • Comfort Love and Adam Withers. The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing Comics. Some of this material is dated regarding website/self-publishing options.
  • Shawn Martinbrough. How to Draw Noir Comics: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling.
  • Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics; Making Comics; Reinventing Comics. If you read nothing else in this section, read Understanding Comics.
  • Carl Potts. The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics.
  • Etherington Brothers. How to Think When You Draw series. Lots of great tips on how to approach everything from composition to different kinds of monsters! The print books are only available via Kickstarter and I always snap up the latest. I love that each tip is a couple pages so it’s less intimidating to dive in and try something new to me.

Comics: Inking

  • John Paul Lowe. Foundations in Comic Book Art.
  • Gary Martin with Steve Rude. The Art of Comic Book Inking. Thanks to Gavin Michelli for the rec.

Comics: Lettering, Hand Lettering, Typography

  • Nate Piekos. The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering. Terrific all-in-one resource. When this does discuss software-specific processes, it focuses on Adobe products. I use Clip Studio EX for lettering, but the general principles hold.
  • Cristina Vanko. Hand-Lettering for Everyone: A Creative Workbook.
  • Robert Bringhurst. The Elements of Typographic Style.

Comics: Software

  • Inko Ai Takita and Liz Staley. Learn Clip Studio Paint, Third Edition. This is the reference I turn to when I can’t figure out how to do !@#$ in Clip Studio Paint EX.

Comics: Writing

  • Brian Michael Bendis. Words for Pictures: The Art and Business of Writing Comics and Graphic Novels.
  • Mark Kneece. The Art of Comic Book Writing.
  • Andy Schmidt. Comics Experience Guide to Writing Comics.

Cinematography

Look, I watch one movie/year if you round up, so I need remedial help. I like movies and TV! Also, I get migraines.

  • Joseph V. Mascelli’s The Five C’s of Cinematography is dated but has great material on composition and visual storytelling for film/TV/moving pictures.

Storyboarding

Graphic Design

  • David Airey. Logo Design Love, second edition.
  • Counter-Print. Logos from Japan.

Animation: Books

  • Richard Williams. The Animation Survival Kit. If you only get one book, this is the one. The iBooks ebook edition is particularly nice in that it includes the rendered animations, accessible with a simple tap.
  • Preston Blair. Cartoon Animation. Also Advanced Animation if you can find a copy.
  • Tony White. How to Make an Animated Film and others. Dated re: computer animation software/tech, but great re: planning and fundamentals.
  • Eric Goldberg. Character Animation Crash Course!
  • Ed Hooks. Acting for Animation, 4th ed.

Animation: Videos

  • Howard Wimshurst’s Getting Started in 2D Animation is fantastic and absolutely worth it. If you can swing it, I’d recommend this as a starting point.
  • Aaron Blaise offers a number of animation/related video courses and runs frequent sales.

Motivation and Organization

Guess who struggles with both!

  • Rich Armstrong. The Perfect 100 Day Project. Granted, this comic is going…into…the 200s but what are numbers. 🙂 I ignored all the stuff shilling their paid website stuff, but the book itself is fun if you like this kind of thing.
  • Dani Donovan’s The Anti-Planner. This is targeted toward folks with ADHD or executive dysfunction, but may be useful to others. Basically it’s indexed by the type of “stuckness” you have and then offers you menu options for strategies to address the stuckness.
  • Andy J. Miller. Creative Pep Talk.
  • Twyla Tharp. The Creative Habit. Life-changingly good.

Apps

  • Affinity Designer 2 for vector illustration and design.
  • Affinity Photo 2 and Pixelmator Pro for photo processing or raster stuff.
  • Clip Studio EX for lettering and panels.
  • MagicaVoxel is a free lightweight voxel editor (app) for concepts. There’s a compiled Windows version; I’ll report back on compiling for macOS.
  • RoughAnimator is a great, affordable app (macOS/Windows/Android/iPadOS) for exploration of animation while having a robust set of features (onion skinning, cycles, layers, etc.).
  • TVPaint for animation explorations. There are a lot of great user-created brushes if you register for the forum for access.