THE ARTIST'S JOURNEY - LESSON FOUR: THE BASIC THREE ELEMENTS YOU NEED TO TAME

While learning how to draw, the two main disciplines you need to understand and master involves producing a piece of art and telling a simple story. These two disciplines should harmoniously work together on every comic book page you create, with the art of drawing by itself being a skill that requires a lot of time, effort, and education.





But to master the art of drawing you will need to first understand how to create a well structured figure or scene, and for that we need to learn how to create basic geometric forms in the right proportion and perspective. Before we begin, though, I want you to know that we are going to cover the very basics here, only the tip of the iceberg, mainly due to the obvious time and space constraints available. So, let’s start:

Structure: The four general forms every artist works with are: the circle, the triangle, the square, and the rectangle. Most objects can be reduced to these simple geometric shapes, and they can allow you to draw almost anything you require (all you need to do is to merge them into something that you want to produce). Drawing is about understanding what you see and learning how to transform shapes into forms. These basic shapes, forms, and objects, aid the artist in understanding what they need to know to create a new world, a new structure, and a new brand of being. But for them to do that they also need credibility!! And that’s why we need to get to the next topic!!

Perspective: Perspective is a technique used to represent three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional picture plane. There are many different types of perspective, such as overlap, atmospheric, linear, curvilinear, cylindrical, fisheye, isometric, etc, and once you master these perspective techniques you’ll be able to create complex scenes with the illusion of distance and depth.

Proportion: This is all about place and dimension, and I say this because the proportion of one element is relative to where in space it’s located and what size / scale it has in relation to everything else in the scene. Imagine the nose of a character in relation to it's place and size on the face. If it’s in the wrong place it won’t give enough credibility to the drawing, and the same can also be said for it's size too. A nose that is too big can give a picture a comical feeling and this is a choice you have to make in order to create the right emotional experience for the reader.

There are many other elements you also have to consider, like the composition of a figure and trying your best to master that. But, like I said, this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’ll be talking more about composition, perspective, and figure drawings with lots of tools for you to download later on down the line! So in the meantime, stay tuned, and keep those pencils at the ready!!

NEXT: 6 Basic Lessons About Anatomy.

This article was brought to you by Brazilian born, Rod Rodollfo from Alpha Brain Art Studio. Please feel free to download the Master Page Template used by Rod on many Published Comic Books by clicking here! And while you're at it, don't forget to follow him on his website, twitter, and facebook pages.