How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way Book Review

Drawing comic books the Marvel way has always been an interesting book and one that has been around for years. Heralded as the top book on comic book drawing for it's simple but powerful information supplied with John Buscmemas fantastic comic book art showing you the steps to draw figures and how to create the form through stick figures and sketch sculpting.

One of the most amazing things after recently finding this book again after 12 years is that it still is a good book on the basics of drawing the Marvel way in comic books and the art has that classic 70's style that I remember as a kid buying up all the back issues I could of The Fantastic Four, X-men and Spiderman to name a few.

The special thing about this book is the way it is simply explained by Stan Lee, a one time Editor of Marvel and writer too who does a lot of camoe appearances in many Marvel movies now and the way he describes things makes the book enjoyable to read as you know and understand and nothing is too complicated, except the chapter about Perspective, I guess that is a bit too hard to explain to anybody who hasn't tries to draw things in different persepctives, but Stan gave it a good go.

At around 155 pages which has tutorials and actual pages and sketches alongside the finished panels of artwork you can fill in the gaps too about drawing and finding your own style and way of working when drawing comic books.

There is a DVD available to which might benefit your drawing ability too as it goes through some top quality stuff on drawing the Marvel way, so that you can try your hand at drawing a powerfully drawn comic book step by step based on the sections and video tutorials you learn in the DVD.

When I was a kid, we used to divide ourselves into 2 groups of comic fans, Marvel or DC and for me it was Marvel all the way as I can remember more memorable artists and comic book characters from that universe. But what you learn either in this book or DVD is invaluable and explained much better than any other book I've come across and I own a lot of art books.

Here's the DVD for How to draw marvel comics - How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way

Art Drawing Book Reviews: How To Draw And Paint Dragons

How to draw and paint dragons is a fairly detailed book on the art of creating dragons and painting them too, I bought this book a couple of months ago now and have been meaning to review it as it is a good book in it's own way with the subject of dragons being explored over 5 main chapters, the first chapter deals with Dragon Anatomy, which is fairly useful in that you learn how to draw all the elements such as the eyes and the dragon head structure as well as the all important wings, neck and tail with arms and legs.

The most fascinating part of the head and face study is that some of the dragons that the artist shows as an example are fantastically realised and slightly different to the way you'd imagine them as, and as usual throughout the book the artists take their inspiration from lizards and other real life creatures.

The next chapter examines the different dragon types that there are and how you can meld them together to make some quite fantastic dragons such as dragon serpents and wyrm like dragons which not many artists do, but I'm getting into drawing more stuff like that and will do on this blog.

Also other dragons may not have wings and some may be more traditional than others, so it is wise to have a look at various dragon types to see how you can approach with your own.

Equally important is the chapter on bringing your dragons to life, this chapter goes through the importance of drawing movement in your dragon drawings and how to visualize the compositions of a fantastic dragon artwork, the most inspiring part of this book is seeing where your own imagination takes you to create some superbly realised fantasy dragon art.

Light colour and texture is the 4th chapter which takes a look at all these 3 important areas and also examines using digital colouring to get the best results from using light and shadow and textures, also with a quick introduction into the basic artists tools that you could use in creating your art, towards the end of the chapter there is a section on painting a dragon in oil paints which gives an amazingly detailed look at the steps involved in creating a successful oil painting.

The last chapter is a gallery which gives you some more inspirational dragon paintings to look at and take what you can learn from them and it basically shows you that most great dragon fantasy paintings do tell a story and have dramatic scenes within them.

Lastly you get some dragon templates that you can trace and scan into your computer to play around with and I found these useful to draw from and come up with some original dragon drawings for my own tattoo work and dragon fantasy art.

This is a good book, although there are loads of similar books available out there, this is one you should take a look at, just click on the photo above to find out more! or see how to draw dragons here

Also see recommended artists drawing books

Art Book Review: Drawing And Painting The Undead By Keith Thompson

Drawing the undead and painting them seems a rather brilliant statement to undertake and with the above named book I have been having some fun with the many undead creatures in this book (Drawing them that is!) there are a couple of classics, but there are some undead nasties that I must admit I've never heard of, but they do look like fun to draw.

The book itself is filled with fantastic illustrations of such undead classics as Wraiths, Vampires and undead corpses or zombies, in fact the book gives a rough outline of how the drawings are created from scratch with small sketches that form the basis of an idea and then you can see the progression of the drawing to it's finished form, but this is done in such a way that it inspires you to come up with drawing your own creature of the undead.

The cover of the book, just drew me in when I was going to buy it and who can resist drawing the undead? I certainly couldn't and plus I read some of the reviews on Amazon before I purchased it and some people said it was a good book and I agree, with over 145 pages, each page has a drawing or painted piece of artwork to draw inspiration from.

From the start of the book you are introduced to sources of finding inspiration from outside sources such as movies, comics and books and then with quick overviews in working with digital art and the importance of keeping a sketchbook, then really short, quick overviews of the building blocks such as basic anatomy and then it's straight into drawing a few examples or draw your own and that's what I like about this book is that it doesn't say draw this and that, it just lays it all out for you to absorb what you will and go off and sketch some stuff.

Keith Thompsons art is excellent and you can visit his website here - Keith Thompson, although he does occasionally have help from other artists in the book, but you can see that this guy is a fantastic fantasy artist who likes to draw some horror elements in his work, although I never heard of Keiths fantasy work before and his work I most certainly do now.

Drawing and painting the undead is available to buy on Amazon and I do recommend it if you like to draw all that horror fantasy stuff like me. Check the book out below!

Art Drawing Book Reviews

There are two art drawing books I've read recently and they have some really good information in them when you apply them to your fantasy work, the first review I did was this one Drawing Still Life By Barrington Barber and in the book he explains the best expert techniques to draw still life and how important it is for artists to observe and sketch interesting objects aswell as visually appealing subjects.

And the second book Draw Like Da Vinci is a sort of case study of the sketches and art of Leonardo Da Vinci and in this book the author Susan White attempts to guide you through the drawing processes as Da Vinci would have done and how he would have approached his compositions and drawings in a way only he could.

I hope you like the reviews of the two books, because they are two that really stuck in my mind and I have started drawing from both of them and continue to be inspired by other artists work quite frequently these days.

I will try to review more art and useful drawing books as time goes on, as it could prove quite good for any artist who needs to learn a bit more and decide what book would be great for their art to improve.