How to Draw - Planning

Planning

Now that you understand your subject, time to start your drawing. It's always good to have an idea in your head of what you want, that's always how I start off. However, you need to plan your drawing on paper, or everything can come out wrong. Here are some things to take into account:

Scale- If you're drawing more than one character, or a character in a background, imagine the comparative size of your subject to the other elements in your drawing. Are you drawing a scene from far away, or close up? How do different subjects differ in size? Take a look at the drawing above. In planning it out, I took into account the heights of each character, and drew lines on the page to mark where the tops of their heads should be. Because some of the characters are in the foreground and background, the scale alters slightly.

Positioning- Also important to consider when there is more than one subject in the picture. Will one subject be so big that there won't be enough room for the other one? This may lead to a change of scale. Again, look at the above picture. Seige is a big guy, I had problems fitting him in. As a result, Zelda nearly gets pushed off of my sketchpad!

Situation- Are you drawing an action scene? A still life? What's going on in the background that your subject may be interacting with or responding to? Action scenes are tough to draw. A common trick of cartoonists is to draw 'blur lines', small swoosh marks that indicate motion in a certain direction. Look at your favorite comics, you'll see them everywhere!

Special environment- If your character is floating in space, underwater, in freefall, etc., different thoughts about the above subjects may apply.

Now that you've planned things out, time to start putting the pencil to the paper!