Learning Curbed
It was a few year ago now that I decided to give up on trying to find some naive rube to do all my comic book artwork for free, and make an effort to get better at drawing so I could do it myself. I got a really excellent book (Drawing the Head and Hands by Henry Loomis) and worked through more than half of the exercises in it! I also bought the course material for a couple of distance learning modules from the Kubert School.
They were really good and helped me learn a lot about character design and page layout. I might never have bothered trying to draw a cowboy otherwise.
Both of the modules had 5 exercises. (which I did most of) One of them had the brief:
“Draw a cover for a comic book. It should have
A cave man flying on a pterodactyl
A cave woman falling from the pterodactyl
Dinosaurs in the background
Leave room for a title at the top and credits at the bottom”
As it happened, I was sharing a flat with my friend Murray while I was working on these exercises and it totally unrelated conversations he’d told me about how his wife liked to read short stories on her kindle. There were a lot you could get for free, you just have to avoid the dino porn. Which there’s a lot of. For some reason.
Anyway, I was inspired. And now, more than 3 years later, just to give me something to write about this week, (not that I’m starting to resent it or anything) I decided to put some colour to the original, in favour of doing something genuinely productive. (so you better appreciate it)