Art Tutorial - Page 2 of 'A supervillain in the woods'

I've been enjoying this.

So, just for a reminder of what this is:

We set ourselves a little project, which was to do a page of comic art from the same idea. The kids chose what it would be:

-Who? A villain;

-Were? In the woods;

-Doing what? Finding a cave.

As I've already shared, I came up with this insect-woman, Entomon, as my villain, and her giant Firefly assistant, Cole. I had a lot of fun doing it, and the children were interested in seeing more (I think they were slightly disappointed I returned to Acquisition, rather than doing more of this), so here is Page 2.

For this to be a tutorial, I thought I should do at least a couple of things differently, so one of the things  I did differently was to sketch out the page in advance, and worked out roughly what the dialogue would be, and how I'd lay out the characters and speech bubbles. If you can make out my writing, you can see that most of the dialogue stays the same, but I made some changes. Also, in doing the sketches, I realised I really needed to research the new bugs I was adding.

When I started my actual drawing, another change was to try something that I read as advice a while back: Don't put the panel borders in straight away. It seemed to work for me, and I think kept me a bit freer working as I developed the further stages. Still, what we have is the basic stick-figures that are showing what is happening, which I still insist is a stage anybody can do. Again, I've used a coloured pencil, so that it will get in the way less when I'm working on later stages.

Then it develops to the more detailed roughs, still using the coloured pencil, so that I can quickly change and adjust anything that needs it, and I've given myself a clear basis for the detailed pencils to follow. Also, I put in the panel borders at the end of this work.

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Next, the detailed pencilling. I've put this in two stages, how it looked with the orange pencils underneath, and a version with the orange removed to show what I actually drew.

After that, I added the first layer of inks. It clears up the lines, but still lacks a bit of definition, with the bottom left panel being a bit unclear still.

 

Using a thicker ink pen, I think I've succeeded in making the figures stand out better from each other, and generally add definition.

From there, I added shading, which was very important for this page, as it is set inside a dark cave, and some of the details in the art don't make as much sense without that necessary darkness.

After that, I just had to add the dialogue, with a couple of minor changes (the third panel was so big, it was just asking for at least one more speech bubble than I'd originally planned). I also changed the positioning of some bubbles from the sketch, so as to not hide any important areas of art.

©2014 James Mathurin

Art Tutorial - A supervillain in the woods

So, following on from this post, where I showed Entomon, a supervillain I'd created as part of a task I'd done with the children in my comics / cartooning group.

We set ourselves a little project, which was to do a page of comic art from the same idea. The kids chose what it would be:

-Who? A villain;

-Were? In the woods;

-Doing what? Finding a cave.

Some of the children have come up with some great ideas, which I'm looking forward to seeing, but here is mine:

Here are the stages I went through to reach it. First I sketched out the frames , figures and where the speech bubbles will go, with a soft, coloured pencil:

Next I added some details to the figures and scenery, and make changes where necessary (like moving Entomon from the centre to the right of the 3rd frame, to allow the cave to be viewed better, and to leave room for speech bubbles:

Then I switched to a drawing pencil to do detailed and shaded art:

After pencils, I switch to ink to define the lines better:

Then ink outlines with a thicker pen, to make the objects stand out from each other better:

The next stage, I did on Photoshop, but can be done by hand, or by other means, but it was me colouring (or, working in grayscale, shading):

Finally, as I showed above, I added the text and speech bubbles:

©2014 James Mathurin

Art tutorial - faces

Following on from the figures tutorial I did for my comics / cartooning group on figures, I thought I'd do another one, this time focusing on faces. Again, I was using a character that I've been sketching for Vic at Hazardous productions.

The first stage was to just get the shape of the head. Some people's heads are rounder, some are squarer, some longer, etc. Using a soft, coloured pencil, also add guidelines - halfway down for the eyes, halfway down from there for the nose, and halfway from there for the mouth.

Next I added more basic details - the neck, the hairline, the mouth and nose (with an indication of the shape - narrow, broad, pointy, etc.), the eyes and the shape of the jawline.

After that, more details. First of all eyebrows! Eyebrows are surprisingly important for showing emotion (test this: draw a smiling face a few times, and add different eyebrows. You'll get at least one delighted person, one crafty person, and one who looks like they're going to mug you). Also, the shape of the mouth, and hairstyle. If the distinctive hairstyle didn't cover the ears, I'd have drawn them, level with the eyes.

Now, switching to a harder drawing pencil, I do more detailed lines, making the features clearer, and adding shading.

Then, using an ink pen, I go over the lines to give them clearer definition.

©2014 James Mathurin

Art tutorial - figures

Another series of pictures that I used in my comics group. Before we started working on our supervillain idea, I was using these sketches that I did for Vic at Hazardous Publications.

The point of these was to illustrate a principle I had talked about with my group: If you can do stick-people, you can do a comic. I'm not the first to realise this; Randall Munroe has been putting that lesson to good use for years now. Basically, I say stickmen can make a comic, and any of the later stages you can get with practice.

• So, the first step is the one I think anyone can do - stick-people laying out the poses. This is the stage where it's easiest to fix anything you're not happy with. Check the poses, etc. At this stage I was using a blue colouring pencil, as it is easier to ignore and delete these lines once proper pencils and inks are used later.

• This stage is still a basic one - make all the sticks into solid body-parts, put in the rough lines for the face, and add in the rough details of things like fingers.

• Next, you add the rough surface details- hair, clothes, distinctive skin marks (hair, tattoos, etc). This stage is probably the last one where you can make big changes. You can see I've done that with the figure far left, whose pose wasn't working for me, and who would have been too difficult to change after the clothing and other details had been added.

• Next, I went to a 2B drawing pencil, which allowed me to draw more detailed pencil art over the rougher blue lines. This lets me add a bit of texture, detail and shade, and just generally be a bit more precise.

• Next, I switched to a thin black ink pen to reinforce the pencils, and make the lines clearer.

• Finally, I used a thicker pen to go around the edges of objects, which helped to differentiate lines that show texture and shade, and lines that show shape.

©2014 James Mathurin

Supervillain tutorial

I've recently started a comics / cartooning group at the Primary School I work at during the week, and once a week we meet, and I show them stuff I've been working on, and they show me stuff they've been working on. It's a lot of fun, and if any of them are reading this, hello.

We set ourselves a little project, which was to do a page of comic art from the same idea. The kids chose what it would be:

-Who? A villain;

-Were? In the woods;

-Doing what? Finding a cave.

The kids had noticed I draw a lot of robots, so I thought I'd go with a different influence, and try an insect-based character. Here are the first few sketches of Entomon, and her Firefly lackey, Cole. As you can also see, I thought it was a good idea to sketch out a couple of caves for her to find, too.

I tried a couple of designs for her head, but I liked the long head (which I thought was a good place for whatever organ allows her to control insects. For Cole, I realised I really needed to look at some firefly photos, and they're pretty cool.

©2014 James Mathurin

More Sports Day banners

So, here are some more of the banners I did for my school - so you have Picasso, (Bridget) Riley, Dali and Lowry.

©2013 James Mathurin

It's Sports Day!

Well, not yet, but at the school I work at, I've been recruited to do various stages of design on different classes' banners for the upcoming Sports Day.

So, here's my designs for 6 Escher (the classes are named after artists). The fishes are tessellating patterns, based on much simplified versions of some of Escher prints, which allowed the children in the class to do their own motif to the Mobius strip I designed as the central piece, again, based on another of Escher's prints.

I'll stick a few more up (I've now done 5 different banners), as I get pictures of them.

©2013 James Mathurin

Social Education material and illustrations

A lot of the work I've been doing has actually been in my day job, supporting SEN children in a Primary school, so I thought it would be good to share some of that here.

SO here are some pieces I drew which accompany a free social story from a great site called Commtap.

These go with a story called Robert's Friend, and is part of a programme of playing with one friend, then playing with another, which is aimed at primary ages (5-11). I used the images by laminating them and using them to act out the story, and then getting the children in my group to use them to act out better ways of dealing with the problems.

Umm...I did get one of the boys' names wrong, so here is an edited version of the story, all credit to Commtap, and the original can be found at the link I've given above:

One day there was a boy called Robert. He was starting at a new school. On his first day, he met lots of children in his class. At playtime, he went outside with everyone else. Some children played football. Some children played hopscotch. Some children ran around and played tag. Robert wished he could play. He didn’t know anybody yet.
The next day, one of the boys in his class helped Robert find a ruler to use. The boy was called Thomas. Thomas and Robert were on the same table, and they helped each other with their work. At playtime, Thomas said, ‘come and play tag with us.’ Robert was so pleased to have a friend. He played tag with Thomas and the other boys, and they all had lots of fun. 
The next day, Robert wanted to play with Thomas again. He made sure he sat next to him on the carpet, and lined up behind him at assembly time. At playtime, Robert went outside with Thomas. They played tag again, and whenever Robert was ‘it’ he would tag Thomas. Whenever Thomas was ‘it’ Robert tried to get Thomas to tag him. He didn’t want other boys to play with Thomas. When they were tired of tag, Robert took Thomas to play football. He wanted to show him how far he could kick he ball.
On the fourth, day Robert did the same thing. He was so happy to have Thomas to play with, that he played with him all the time. But Thomas wanted to play on the climbing frame with James and Freddie. He was tired of running around, and he wanted to play with other people as well as Robert. Robert didn’t like this. He tried to pull Thomas over to play football with him. Thomas got cross, ‘Stop it!’ he said. ‘I don’t want to play with you. I’m going to climb on the climbing frame with James and Freddie.’ Thomas ran off. Robert was sad. Who would he play with now?

©2013 James Mathurin

Childcare logos

Again, while I was on my tonsillectomy break, I also worked on a logo for my cousin, Jane, who provides childcare (something there's a shameful lack of, certainly in the affordable sense), and she also graciously said I could share them here, so here they are (click on them for larger versions):

©2012 James Mathurin

Rocket-Powered Tortoise

Self-explanatory, really. This is one of the fun sides of working with kids.

©2011 James Mathurin

Today in Year 5's Art Corner...

Just another quick post of some art I did at my day job in Primary school.


 

©2011 James Mathurin