Comic Fury Webcomic Hosting - The Art Books That Have Helped Me The Most In Sequential Art

I've been drawing sequential art since 1994, and on my way to improving my skills in so many different areas, I've found two books really helped me get over the hump in two areas that were proving exceptionally difficult for me, those being drawing depth such as the inside of rooms, pan shots of cityscapes and showing human emotion. I'd like to share them with you.

The first is Perspective! For Comic Book Artists published in 1997 by David Chelsea. I found this a superb book on teaching the basics of perspective. Let's face it, almost everybody likes to draw characters a lot more than background and I'm no exception. The majority of panels on so many professional and independent comics tend to be close-up shots of characters or objects. But sooner or later, I found I had to show a world that went beyond a crowded gathering. David Chelsea shows everything from one, two, and three-point perspective to depth cues such as overlap, atmospheric hazing, foreshortening...the list goes on and on. It even covers circles in perspective And it's not super-techinical like some architect's layout guide, it's designed for the average reader. You can get as technical or as general as you want from the information provided in this book to help add a sense of depth and distance to almost any kind of layout you design.

The second is Facial Expressions published in 1990 by Gary Faigin. Almost every kind of comic tries to express human emotion regardless of the characters being human or not. I figure it would be extremely difficult to write a story of any kind that did not either express some sort of human emotion or tried to invoke it in the reader. A saying in comics is "If your characters feel nothing, neither will the audience".

Arguably the best vehicle for expressing human emotion is the face. This book will give a very in-depth explaination of the facial expressions such as sadness, anger, fear, joy, surprise, disgust as well as diagrams and composition of the human head and how they relate to expressions. It's a bit wordy, but there is an excellent index in the back of detailed renderings of each emotion if you just want to see how they are composed. I use this as a reference book almost every time I draw anything with a face.

I believe these books can be of significant help to just about anybody who wants to improve their sequential art style.

Funnily enough, I was planning on making a thread much like this once I finished collecting everything. I'll see if I can finish it up, now that someone's beaten me to the punch on making something like this. :P

I have a ton of books on drawing (and some on writing), but I have to say, what helped me more than anything is just actually doing them and forcing yourself to evaluate your own comics and make yourself even better by the next chapter. I spent my Freshmen/Sophomore years cranking out 25-30 pages in a month just for kicks. Additionally, there is nothing quite like getting a grip on perspective than drawing/painting a bunch of backgrounds for about a year.

With that said, here are the books that helped me the most, Sequential Art-wise.

Understanding Comics and Making Comics by Scott McCloud. There is no better book out there that analyzes and dissects sequential artwork than these fine books by Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics is the meat and bones of all things comics, a sort of in-depth essay in comic-format that explains how comics work and what makes them so unique compared to other storytelling mediums. Making Comics is practically an entire crash course on how to tell stories through comics effectively. They are also entirely entertaining.

Story by Robert McKee. Primarily a screenwriter's book, but I've learned a lot of lessons for visual storytelling from there. McKee gets on your case a lot about story structure, but he doesn't present formulas. He presents examples, and why they work, and then presents examples that contradict, and why those work as well. If you're interested in making effective stories, this is certainly the book you need to read.

Drawn to Life by Walt Stanchfield. A collection of "handouts" by Mr. Stanchfield for the weekly figure drawing workshops that the Disney animators attended. You might think this is for animators (and some of the handouts are clearly animator-directed), but there's a lot of advice in there that all kinds of artists -- graphic designers, painters, sculptors, comic artists, etc. -- that could also use this information. He has a lot of "student work" littered throughout the book, which he then corrects and shows how these simple fixes could make a good drawing even better. He talks a lot about getting inside the characters' head, and how to make drawings that tell stories just from the gesture.

I have both these books and they're both useful, although I suspect I'd find them more useful if I .. um... used them more often. I am so damn lazy when it comes to doing perspective graphs though. I really need to work on that.

Also, Chelsea has a second book on perspective out. I think it's called Extreme Perspective for Comic Artists, but I could be completely wrong about that.

Love the McCloud books. I'm a bit disappointed with myself that I didn't get a chance to see McCloud this weekend at Denver Comic Con, because I can only imagine that his panel would have been an educational tool. Alas, my decision to attend the con came too late.

I have tried to read STORY two or three times, and it's just too plodding for me. If you like books on how to write screenplays, I would suggest "How NOT To Write a Screenplay" which is excellent.

Damn, this is a pretty all-encompassing topic however:

Comics & Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative, both by the late, great Will Eisner.

Artists on Comic Art and Writers on Comic Scriptwriting (vol 1 & 2)by Mark Salisbury.

The Art of George Perez (IDW publishing)

The Art of Brian Bolland

The Modern Masters series (TwoMorrows Publishing) - each volume interviews specific comic artists, and usually has a good, in-depth look at how these arts go about their own process.

Story is one of those books that can make you feel really, really terrible about your work if you stick by it for too long. Luckily, I had a sort of discussion group about it and I learned from a combination of that book and from my peers. However, his insight is unmistakable, there's a reason why a ton of award-winning/blockbuster movie writers and directors swear by that book. It's also one of those books that you rarely read front-to-back, just pick it up, flip to a page, and read out of it.

I just wished I had the time/money to attend his seminars. I heard they're amazing.

I'll check out How NOT to Write a Screenplay, thanks. :D

Props to Understanding Comics and Making Comics. I used them both as sources in a paper I wrote for AP English, where I drew a comic adaptation of a scene from Hamlet and analyzed how the switch between formats affected the atmosphere, symbolism, and implications of the dialogue. I wish I could find that comic now...

Also gonna check out those two books about writing screenplays!

There's a free Kindle book called Meet a Jerk, Get to Work: How to Write Villains and the Occasional Hero which is a fun, though short, read.