Where's the Level 1 Draw Fu Lessons?

This is the question I get asked the most. I thought I'd write up a useful update. One that would be helpful and will update you on where I'm at with the next few lessons.

The information in this post was originally written in two of my previous Draw Fu Newsletters.  This is the kind of tips I give out once a week when you sign up to receive them.

I've linked to the two newsletters before in the comments sections at this site, but I thought I'd combine them, clean them up and make a blog post out of them. That way, I didn't have to keep linking to them when I got asked again.

So here we go:

Who Are You Drawing For?

Who are you drawing for? The answer makes all the difference.

The answer can be as simple as, "myself," or as complicated as "50 year old single, male, home owners, with pet cats."  Whether you're drawing for your mom or a client, it makes a difference.

When drawing, you should always keep who you're drawing for in the back of your mind. It makes subtle and not so subtle differences to what you do and how you draw it.

Case in point...

I am currently designing the look of the characters for the Level 1 Lessons.

Both Brush Lee and Pen Grier needed to be redesigned.  I also need to design secondary characters.

Why the redesign of the protagonists?

Because the target audience for the Level 1 Lessons are elementary school kids. As cartoony as my characters already are, I thought they needed to be even MORE cartoony.  They needed to be even simpler looking.

This decision was based off of what I liked when I was in elementary school.  The more cartoony something was, the more I liked it.  The more "real" or "serious" it looked, the less likely I was to pick it up.  I'm basically writing these lessons for the kid I was when I was in elementary school.

I know that not all elementary school kids think this way, but by doing this, I know exactly who my target audience is and therefore it makes it easier for me to make design decisions. It also helps that  my kids have similar tastes as me when I was their age.

Sneak Peek at the Designs

I thought I'd give you a sneak peek at the work I've put in so far into the designs.

The Level 1 Lessons will be done in the form a of a comic and it takes place in a world where drawing is a highly praised skill.  The story will also take the form a Kung Fu movie only instead of Kung Fu, people will battle with "Draw Fu".  Everything the characters learn in the story will be real world, pragmatic drawing lessons.  They will be even easier to learn because they will be taught in the form a story.

Here are the designs I've got so far. I'm showing you the whole process so you can see that I really worked to find a look that satisfied me.  Especially for Brush Lee.  He was giving me a lot of trouble:

Designing "Ren Punks"

Now a sneak peek at the antagonists.

One male, two females.  They are meant to be Latinos, but also "punks" or hoodlums.  What I'm going for here is three characters that have a threatening look, but that also come across as "ethnic."

I'm a Latino, and as such, I know that there isn't a "Latino look." We come in ALL shapes and colors.  Blue eyed, light skinned blondes, Blacks, Asians, mocha skinned Mayans and everything else.  And it's not as simple as putting a sombrero on a character because not all Latinos are Mexican.

Still, I had to start somewhere. At first I decided to just draw a tough guy (AXEL) but that didn't go anywhere.  He didn't look ethnic enough. And if anything. the character looked Asian.

Below, you can see me just throwing ideas out.  While working on this page I was constantly looking at reference or other artists to see if anything would trigger a direction I could take:

I finally found a direction I wanted to take the guy and started playing around with some variations:

Below you see what I decided his final look would be.  I then started working on designing his girlfriend (VALENTINA).  The Valentina's hair was really the big challenge:

I thought I had gotten the hair the way I wanted and then started designing her body.  She was much too thin and generic so I thought I give her some heavy curves.  I also started playing more with her costume.  Once I had what I thought was good, I moved on to the Axel's sister (ARIANA).

For Ariana, I decided to make her look the opposite of Valentina so I decided to make her tall and skinny:

I decided I was not satisfied with the Valentina. She and Ariana still had too similar a look, so I played some more with her body shapes.

I even did a line up of the character shapes and worked on the Valentina's costume a bit more.
I also started designing props and backgrounds. I had a ton of photos I'd taken when I visited Italy years ago. They came in handy.  I plan on developing the backgrounds more in the comic itself but I needed a direction to go in:

Still not satisfied with the Valentina's hair and face, I gave it another shot.
I actually looked at a video that showed me how a woman could wear her hair like this so I would know how it "worked."  Then I exaggerated it:

Now that I've got what I think I want, it's time to write out the script so I can start thumbnailing the comic.

Almost all the reference material I used to inspire the drawings above I put on my Draw Fu Pinterest board. I used the photos as jumping off points when it comes to costumes, characters faces, environments and archetypes. Go have a look.

I hope this was insightful.

A Comic Versus Prose

It takes MUCH longer to create a comic than it does to write prose.  Sorry it's taking so long.

As of the time of this writing, I'm much further along in the process than what I showed above.  Still, I have a along way to go.

I'll see what I can do about speeding things up. Thanks for understanding.

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