How I improved my Drawing of my Book Characters

In addition to my regular practice of writing, one of my favourite hobbies is also sketching and drawing, most of all my characters and the world of my books and stories. The two have a synergistic relationship, complimenting each other. As such, when I first developed the idea of my fantasy novel, it inspired to want to lay my main character in visual form. It then in turn spurred me to re-ignite my childhood love of drawing, long since put to the wayside.

Naturally, as my writing improved, so too did my drawing.

I’ve talked more than enough about my learning process of writing, so now I’ll share with you some of the practices that helped me improve my drawing to what it is now.

-          Breathing on the Sketchpad

There are my sketchbooks where I put down full, complete and polished drawings that I show to others and enjoy in future, and there are sketchpads and sketchbooks with no intention except practice and exercise. I used to draw in the former and do a complete drawing each time. But by also doing the latter, you give yourself a playground, a training room without expectation or pressure to strive towards. Sketchbooks where you simply allow yourself to breathe and relax, are crucial as any artist. For inhaling is as much needed as exhaling. In these practice sketchbooks, I may scribble whatever I wish loosely or focus on practicing one things and doing it many times over. One day I may wish to improve how I draw hands, and so I may just draw terrible to great hands all over one page and observe what I could fix or improve. This brings me to my next point.

-          Back to Basics (shapes, lines)

To play guitar even half as good as Slash or Buckethead, you must begin by playing all the basic chords and getting accustomed to them as if they are your friends. To get better at any type of drawings, figures, landscapes or otherwise, you start with the simplest drawings of all. Practicing shapes including squares, triangles and circles, are the start before transitioning to ellipses, rectangles etc. Then, practice shifting them into 3-Dimensional space by drawing cubes, pyramids, cylinders, discs, and perfect spheres.

Understanding that many things in this world, including humans and animals, are often comprised loosely of these shapes on a visual basis, can help you visualise better the proper form, structure and relation to each other that’s needed to draw them. Placing these shapes in a variety of different angles of perspective will achieve the same results when drawing figures, animals, buildings etc. in the right perspective too. This is especially true for high and low-angle as well as foreshortening.

Focus on this practice just enough to where you can see these patterns and when seeing them and drawing them come naturally.

Attach cylinders end to end by spheres and you have the basis of most limbs like our arms and legs. Squares, cubes, eggs and ovals are used interchangeably depending on an artist’s preference when drawing torsos. And spheres are crucial if you want to get the head right!

-          Studying Anatomy.

This is closer to figure and character drawing, and I’m not saying you need to read and study medical books and name every bone and muscle in the human body per se.

But this ties back into shapes and forms in 3-Dimensional space, even a basic understanding of muscles, muscles groups and bone structure can help massively in your figure drawing, most especially for realism, but also for stylized characters.

And in media like cartoons, comics, graphic novels, manga, anime, even video games, most characters have visual styles and forms that break these rules of real-life anatomy for the sake of the fictional and the imaginative. It’s only by understanding and practicing the drawing of real-life anatomy and how it all fits and stretches and twists and curves in relation to itself, can you then alter these aspects to create your own style of character and figure drawing.

Like any art or hobby, getting better takes time, and if you’re doing it right, the journey to improve day by day will (and should) be fun. How has your art improved from when you started until now? What did you learn first and what advice opened your third eye and raised your art to the next level?

Thank you for reading and have a beautiful day!

• Daniel

  (Below: My first ever drawing of my MC Marcus, and one of his newest drawings by comparison!)