This probably is already obvious to anyone not me, but: I was browsing the internet archive for books, and found that they archived some vintage mail order catalogs, which have lots of pictures and illustrations and thus are great for easy to find period references for anything from clothes to carriages, farm equipment and kitchen stuff. Not to ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed Drawing and Painting Fantasy Beasts by Kevin Walker from my library (or rather the German edition of this), and I found it quite useful and interesting overall. Basically it's just a bunch fantasy creatures drawn as examples, but each creature comes with about four pages of step by step process description of the ( Read more... )

So I got The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards out of the library, because of my vague intention to draw more this year, and look for exercise ideas. Well, actually I got the German translation which doesn't have anything about brain sides in the title (and I wouldn't have borrowed it if it had, frankly ( Read more... )

I've posted new prompts at
( Read more... )

I liked Scott McCloud's Making Comics a lot better than the previous Reinventing Comics. I didn't find it as cool as I did Understanding Comics way back in the mid-90s, though that's probably also because I hadn't read a lot of other comic meta yet, and also the format was really unusual then ( Read more... )

...i.e. reading Frank Cho's chapter on how to draw effective covers from Wizard's "How To Draw: Advanced Techniques". To quote one of the many great pearls of wisdom (emphasis not mine, btw):
"VIVE LA DIFFERENCE ( Read more... )

brown_betty asked for examples "to illustrate the exactly how and why female comic characters are illustrated differently than the male." And I thought, really, what's better to illustrate these things than the books teaching the style in the first place?

A while ago I posted some scans from Wizard How To Draw series on drawing female superheroes ( here and ( Read more... )

A while back I posted about women characters in the Wizard How To Draw: Character Creation, however what I didn't really notice at the time (and that says a lot about my own blind spots), but which leapt out to me today when I happened to leaf through it, is that once again there are no non-white characters in the whole thing. Okay, that is not ( Read more... )

This is a scan from Wizard How To Draw: Character Creation, from the chapter Super Women

( one scan, about 85k )

Since there seemed to be interest, I scanned a few more pages, i.e. the sections on dramatic tension, on emotional impact and on tension & pacing.

( there are ten fairly large page scans behind the cut )