1© 2003 Conrad Taylor: conradtaylorbcs@googlemail.com

“But I can’t draw!”

EVERY YOUNG CHILD draws pictures,and is encouraged to draw and paint

at primary school. But few adults havedeveloped this into a mature skill.

Our education system is at fault here.It is skewed towards a belief that artisticability is an inborn ‘talent’ that can’t betaught or learned – reinforced by a valuesystem which prizes literacy and numer-acy, but not visual thinking.

I think this is a shame. Drawing is anexcellent discipline for encouraging usto pay attention to the world around us,to see it afresh and to know it in a moredirect and intimate way. Drawing alsohelps us to develop our visual, spatialreasoning skills – such a useful ‘mentaltoolkit’ to add to the more linear styleof thinking which language encourages.

And of course, in the practical matterbefore us in these training sessions, wehave a very good reason for wanting todraw better. To devise a more engaging

and memorable educational experiencefor children, it would be so helpful if wehad the confidence to draw (and to helpchildren to draw) tableaux and scenes,wall-friezes, maps, and illustrated book-lets and posters.

Tips and directionsIn these pages of notes, my aim is to giveyou practical tips on how to approachdrawing projects, so you will be happierwith the results. Many of these tips areabout using reference images to copyfrom. This might feel like ‘cheating’, butdon’t worry – artists often cheat in justthe same way!

Beyond that, I also hope to give yousome insight into how to learn to bebetter at drawing. To be really good takesa lot of observation and a lot of practice,but I am convinced that everyone canlearn to be a better artist. And it’s such afun thing to be able to do!

‘Iconic’ representation, and beyond to reality

WHEN CHILDREN START TO DRAW, they don’t observe thesubject – they compile the drawing using a ‘kit’ of iconic

components. Consider the child-like drawing here of the teacher.The body is an oval shape with bits stuck on. The arms don’thave elbows. The eyes are ovals with circles in the middle, andlines sticking out to represent the eyelashes. The hair is made ofsquiggles and the mouth is a curved line.

The other thing to note is that the body parts are shown side-on, because it is so much easier to draw them that way. So, the

feet stick out to either side, at 180˚ to each other, though weknow that nobody can stand like that.

The brain in charge, not the eye?Art educator Betty Edwards in her remarkable bookDrawing on The Right Side of the Brain suggests thatin this rather primitive iconic method of drawing,the young artist thinks: ‘I need to put an eye there.I’ll draw this symbol for an eye.’ Of course, thereis always a greater or lesser degree of observation –the careful child makes sure there are five fingerson each hand, not twenty, and maybe the thumbis drawn shorter than the fingers.

Not actually a child’sdrawing, I did it

– but it illustratesthe principlewell enough

2© 2003 Conrad Taylor

YOU COULD SAY that in the child’sstyle of drawing, it is the linguistic,

symbolic aspects of the mind that takescharge of the drawing process. On thebasis of experimental work done by herneurophysiology colleages at CalTechwhere she teaches art, Betty Edwardsidentifies these mental processes withthe left hemisphere of the brain.

Betty’s teaching methods are designedto say ‘hands off!’ to this bit of the brain,so we can learn to look with fresh eyesat the world, and draw what we actuallysee in front of us.

Looking, seeing, knowingI agree with Betty Edwards that if wewant to make more realistic representa-tions of people, animals and things, weneed to observe more carefully; and herexercise methods, which teach a non-drawer how to draw realistic portraitsin a part-time ten-week course, are quiteimpressive. But we are not learning tobecome cameras!

To draw better, it also helps to learnhow people, animals and things arestructured, how they are put together.We analyse proportions, learn principlesof basic anatomy – and this means thatif we need to draw a picture of someonedefending himself from a dragon, wedon’t have to go and roam the streetsuntil we find a warrior and dragon andask them to pose obligingly for us…we can use what we know to constructthem on paper right out of our heads.

This almost photo-realistic pencil drawing ofa typesetting worker was the result of carefulobservation, particularly of the way thelight illuminates Black skin. But thiswas not observed from life, butdrawn using a photograph asreference. And I modified theoriginal image, because whenI’d photographed her, Theresawas sitting in front of a verydifferent piece of equipment.

So, this example shows howyou can ‘cheat’ by using aphotograph as reference,but still create an imagethat did not exist before.

eyebrow

nose

eyeline

You can think of the human face, seen from the front, as acircle (the skull) with an oval (the face) attached. The bottomof the eyes are close to half way from top to bottom. Thirdslines help you to place the eyebrows, nose and ears.

3© 2003 Conrad Taylor

Generic animal (above) shows the skeletalstructure of many animals, though actualproportions vary – in a horse, for example,the bones which in a human make upthe hand and foot are fused and greatlyextended. By playing about with thisgeneric structure you can invent someconvincing fabulous beasts, such asthis Great Northern Spotted Dragon(Draco hyperborealis ).

HOW THE THINGS OF THIS WORLDare put together is a fascinating

study, and the discipline of drawingencourages us to pay greater attentionto the world. The idea that ‘two cultures’of art and science are in conflict may betrue for those who work with words…but representational drawing can bringa child closer to appreciating the detailsand workings of nature and technology.

I remember the day – I must have beennine or ten – when I showed my mothera picture of a cowboy on a horse. Ratherthan the typical motherly that’s nice dear,I got a critique of how I’d got the hipsof the rider wrong, and so had made himlook impossibly flat. Though it was a bit

deflating at the time, her criticismdid spur me to a more energeticstudy of human anatomy.

This tale also illustrates the encourage-ment that a child artist gets from livingin a home environment where drawingis a natural form of expression; my bed-room was decorated with my mother’samateur illustrations. Now that she hasretired from teaching, she amuses herselfin quite a serious way with painting anddrawing. My father, who I think hadn’tdrawn anything since he was a youngdraughtsman, has also taken up art inretirement. It’s never too late to learn.

Getting things in perspective

THE ANCIENT WORLD felt no need touse perspective in art. If you look at

Persian or Indian mediæval paintings,you’ll see that figures meant to be in thedistance are shown further up the page.The size at which people were depictedcould indicate their relative importance:the Pharaoh was drawn larger than theservants and soldiers.

In Europe, a concern with perspectivein drawing was one of the new themesof art in the Renaissance. We see this notonly in architectural paintings, but alsoin how the human form is portrayed.As the clay tablet shown right illustrates,

This artist from Nippur was no fool. He drew the kingand officials larger than the working class, and dreweveryone side-on to avoid problems of ‘foreshortening’.

The science of art?

4© 2003 Conrad Taylor

in much ancient art the forms of peopleand animals were always drawn fromthe side, because that way artists couldwork with the known proportions oflimbs. As soon as you try to draw a horsehead-on, or show a person with an armraised towards the viewer, you hit the‘foreshortening’ problem, which is theneed to modify the proportions of bodyparts according to laws of perspective.

How did artists like Holbein, Vermeeror Michaelangelo solve the problem offoreshortening? Partly by applied geo-metry, partly through a new interestin painting ‘from life’, and partly bycheating with various optical gadgets.

Boxing with superheroesHere’s how the geometric method works.If you construct your drawing as a roughsketch, you can imagine each sectionof each limb – upper arm, lower arm,each joint of the finger – encased in abox or a cylinder. When drawing thatcontainer lightly in pencil, you slope itssides according to rules of perspective,and this will guide you as you draw thelimb inside the box, suitably foreshort-ened and in perspective.

This method is still in vogue andmuch used by illustrators. An influentialmodern exponent is Burne Hogarth, theauthor and illustrator of Dynamic FigureDrawing: A new approach to drawing themoving figure in deep space and foreshort-ening. This ‘box’ approach is used a lotby the illustrators of comic-books suchas Spiderman and Supermanand Conan the Barbarian,because these artists valuethe ability to draw theirsuperhuman actors inaction poses and fromunusual angles of view.

The sketch on the left ismodelled on an illustrationin ‘How to Draw Comics theMarvel Way’ by Stan Lee andJohn Buscema. At MarvelComics, John was the drawingtalent behind Spiderman andConan the Barbarian.

Drawing from Life(and artificial life)

LIFE CLASS is a very tough discipline. The model takes up a pose, and you

have to try to transfer that onto paper.Life drawing is an essential part of an artschool education, and of course you canask your model to strike exactly the poseyou need for your great work of art.

But when it comes to real-life drawing,you’re going to have difficulty findingsomeone willing to be your model. Thatis when you would be greatly helped byhaving some sort of printed visual refer-ence – a photograph, another drawingperhaps – to copy from.

Yes, I said copy! It may be a dirty wordin school education, but artists down theages have always managed to turn theirwork in on time by copying. Nor is copy-ing contrary to the aim of learning howto draw, so long as you copy ‘mindfully’– by which I mean that you pay attentionto what you can learn by observing thedetails of what you are copying. It’s akind of meta-consciousness…

In a sense, life drawing is just a classykind of copying activity – a very difficultone, with unaided eye and hand. So, inthe 16th and 17th centuries, artists triedto make their work easier – by ‘cheating’.

5© 2003 Conrad Taylor

How to be a clever copy-cat

Illustration from Robert Hooke’s paper deliveredto the Royal Society on 19 December 1694, inwhich he described An instrument of use to takethe draught or picture of any thing. It doesn’t lookparticularly comfortable!

ARTIFICIAL AIDS for the artist have taken many forms. Perhaps you

have seen Peter Greenaway’s film TheDraughtsman’s Contract, in which theartist played by Anthony Higgins sightsthough a metal frame with a wire grid

to help him to transfer his view of thelandscape accurately to a sheet of paperon which he had already drawn a lightlypencilled grid.

Some artists also experimented withthe use of a lens to project an image –perhaps of an artist’s model – onto asheet of paper mounted on the wall ofa small, dark room. The Latin name fora small room is ‘camera’ and we are stillusing the word today. It is thought thatVermeer painted his extraordinarily life-like interior scenes with the aid of justsuch a camera lucida.

The 17th-century English scientistRobert Hooke devised a portable camera(see above right). He thought it could beuseful on voyages of exploration, to helpexplorers draw a pictorial record of thecoastal features they were passing.

Good old-fashioned tracingIf you want to copy a map or drawingand you don’t need to change the sizewhile doing so, a straightforward way ofdoing so without using any fancy equip-ment is to trace it. Any thin paper thatyou can see through adequately will do.

A drawing aidas featured inthe film TheDraughtsman’sContract.

‘Typo’ paper is not as translucent as truetracing paper but has a better surface fortaking pencil or ink. To trace, just followthe contours of the original outlines onthe upper surface of the tracing sheet.

The trouble with tracing is that youend up with a copy on a paper surfacethat’s not good for illustration work, sothe next step is to transfer your tracingonto a sheet of suitable material.

First turn the trace-sheet over and usea very soft, rather blunt pencil (like a 4B)to rub a dark coating of graphite on theback of all the trace lines. Then turn thetrace sheet right way up, place it on yourgood paper and hold it down with clipsor tape so it won’t slip. Go over the linesone final time, pushing hard enough toget graphite to come off the lower sideand transfer the lines onto the paper.

This is a time-consuming process butyou can cut out the stage of blacking theback of the sheet if you have a carbontransfer sheet to slide between tracingand good paper before going over thelines to transfer them. I make my ownby sprinkling pencil powder from a lead-sharpener (I use clutch pencils) onto asheet of tracing paper, then smear it all

6© 2003 Conrad Taylor

over the tracing paper with a cotton paddampened with lighter-fuel.

Tracing with a light-boxA less laborious way of tracing an imageis to illuminate it from behind. Thenyou can trace the image directly ontoany paper good enough for continuingthe project.

However, this method is no help toyou if the original can’t have light shonethrough it, perhaps because it is on thickcard or bound into a book. It’s also hardto use the lighbox method if there isprinting on the back of the original. Butif you can get a photocopy made fromthe difficult original, you could then usea lightbox to trace it.

You can buy a commercial lightbox atthe better photographic and graphic-artsstores, or you could improvise your own.Don’t use thin window-glass, though, oryou will be creating an accident waitingto happen when somebody presses onthe glass too hard.

At a pinch, you can tape your originalto a window and tape the copy sheet ontop, and so make use of a window as amakeshift lightbox (but not at night,of course).

Copying and enlarging with a gridA photocopier can also be used to makea copy that is larger or smaller than theoriginal. But what if no photocopier isavailable – or if the size of the requiredcopy is much, much bigger than a copiercan make? This is where the old reliablegrid method comes in handy.

First take the original image, and drawa grid of lines across it to divide the areainto squares. If the image is too preciousto mark in this way, you can draw lineson an acetate overlay instead, or make aphotocopy and mark that instead.

Suppose, for example, you want tomake a huge copy of a map to for thewall. Mark the wall or some poster-papermounted on it with a similar but largerpattern of squares. Then all you need toconcentrate on is drawing in the lines ofthe coast, rivers etc. so they cross thesesquares just as on the original, focussingon one square at a time.

I first used this method as a teenager,to make myself a 10× large scale copy ofan Ordnance Survey map of a favouritewalking area around Glen Trool in theSouthern Uplands of Scotland. It helpedthat OS maps already have a grid!

A

A B C D E F G H I J

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

The source map has been covered with agrid of regular squares. The surface ontowhich the map is to be copied & enlargedis also marked out with squares. It is thensurprisingly easy to estimate the placeswhere the key outlines cross the gridlinesto transfer the design from the originalto the copy.

7© 2003 Conrad Taylor

Projection tracing

IF YOU HAVE a collection of images on 35mm slides, and access to a slide projector, you can

project the image onto a sheet of paper tapedto the wall and draw around the outline. It’s amethod used by some of the Asian artists whoproduce one-off movie billboards, and whenthe Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell wasassassinated in Cambodia I used this methodto prepare a large airbrush portrait of him forthe memorial meeting held by his friends andcolleagues back in London. More happily, here’s asketch of an Indonesian friend which I producedthis way at about the same time (see right).

Similar to the slide projector, but harder to find,is a projector for opaque prints and objects calledan epidiascope. Perhaps the hi-tech equivalent ofprojection tracing would employ a data projectorlinked to a computer, projecting onto the drawingsurface either a scanned image, or one capturedwith a digital camera!

Finding ready-made images for reference or re-use

THE ULTIMATE CHEAT, of course, isto find a picture from a magazine or

book and use that. You could photocopyor scan it and use it as it is, or use it as aform of reference for your own drawing,in which case you are not cheating butworking in an honourable tradition…

There is a special category of artworkcalled clip art or sometimes copyright-free art. In fact such collections are notfree of all copyright protection, but thepublisher grants a special ‘waiver’ to thepurchaser of the book, allowing you touse illustrations quite legally (as theyare, or modified) in your own projects.

Before you get too excited at this pros-pect of free art, I should warn you thatmost clip-art collections are aimed at thebusiness communication market. You’llfind many images of smart white peoplein suits at meetings, but not many thatrepresent life in the community. Thereare some rare exceptions such as thedrawings of Petra Röhr-Rouendaal (left).

From Where there is no artist – development drawings and how to use them by Petra Röhr-Rouendaal.

8© 2003 Conrad Taylor

The potential of clip-art on diskIncreasingly, people prepare visual aidsfor teaching using a computer, either tomake printed materials or presentationslide-shows. You also get electronic clip-art installed with Microsoft Office, CorelDraw and other programs.

In my opinion, these collections oftenuse an over-glamourised and Americanstyle of illustration technique, and aswith many printed art collections theydon’t represent life in the communityin all its diversity of ages, races, culturesand life-styles.

CD-ROM is now an inexpensive wayto distribute large amounts of electronicart and photography, and most computersnow have a CD drive built in, so CD isa useful potential way to distribute clipart. Barriers to doing this are more aboutproblems of finding out the user’s needs,the subject research and the artist’s timeand remuneration than any technicaldifficulties!

Other visual referencePerhaps it helps if I give some idea ofthe kind of reference books I keep on myshelves to help with drawing projects:

■ Figure Reference Manual – packedwith reference photos of poses bothclothed and otherwise. Some of theposes have been shot simultaneouslywith 24 cameras ranged around thesubject: 8 angles × 3 heights.

■ Anatomy books – I have several ofthese. My favourites are by medicalillustrator Louise Gordon.

■ Animal and bird books – becauseI’ve always been interested in nature.The illustrated encyclopædia of animalshelped me in several recent projectsrequiring a lion and a red fox.

■ Atlases – because I do a lot of mapart, I have many atlases includinghistorical ones, plus one made upof satellite images from space.

■ Objects, buildings and technology –I don’t have enough of these. Whileworking recently on artwork on themediæval Islamic world I’ve referredto the Taschen series of architecturalguides, and poked around the 2nd-hand bookshops in Greenwich to tryto find clues to what the ships of theperiod looked like.

■ The Internet – not on my bookshelfof course, but I thought I should addthis… The Google search engine hashelped me to find reconstructions ofthe Yossi Ada shipwreck, pyramids atMeroë and various other subjects.

Partly informed by watching foxes play in thesnow by moonlight, this drawing was also aidedby reference to The Illustrated Encyclopædia ofAnimals. I drew this by hand but added shadingusing the computer.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to get evidence of whatthe mediæval Arab trading ship in the EasternMediterranean would have looked like, but whatevidence I could find went into this drawing.

9© 2003 Conrad Taylor

A step-by-step guide to preparing drawings for reproduction

I STARTED DRAWING in black and white media as a child – with plain

pencils and pens – mostly because theywere cheaper. Later I learned that high-contrast black and white artwork donewith pen and ink made better originalsfor posters, leaflets & magazines printedon a litho press or a stencil duplicator,or copied on a photocopier.

So now, when I draw for reproduction,I generally create an image that reliesheavily on expressive outlines. These canbe shaded or coloured as a later stage ifthe method of reproduction allows.

Prepare with pencilYou have to be extraordinarily skilledand confident to draw with pen or brushwithout preparation. Usually I lay downa pencil sketch first, using light strokesof a soft pencil. I may do several roughsketches in series, copying each one bytracing over a light-box, improving theimage at each step. But your final pencilversion should be on a good surface suchas cartridge paper or Bristol board thatwill hold a sharp ink line.

One of the lovely things about pencilis that if you’re not sure of where a lineshould go you can make several roughattempts using almost no pressure at all,and then mark a firmer line along theone which seems best.

A first-class eraser is one of your bestfriends in this process. Don’t use rubberones; white plastic erasers such as thosefrom Mars or Staedtler are much cleaner.I slice mine in half diagonally to give asharp detailed erasing edge.

Inking the linesWhen I was younger and had a steadierhand, my favourite inking tool would bea N°. 5 or N°. 7 Kolinsky sable brush – inthe making of which a Siberian mammalhas to be sacrificed in the name of art,I’m afraid. You use it with ‘Indian’ ink(or encre de Chine, as the French moreaccurately call it).

This springy brush in the right handscan make a transition from a stroke 2–3millimetres wide to a line as fine as anindividual hair (quite literally), givinga lively and expressive quality to lines.But it is a skill acquired only after muchpractice, and takes time and care to do.

These days I am more than happy toexperiment with fibre-tipped and roller-ball pens, pigment pens and other new-fangled devices. Fibre and nylon pointsgive a slightly more expressive line thanmetal or ceramic roller-balls can. You’llalso want to evaluate the various inksused in disposable pens – some can takeseveral minutes to dry properly, whichincreases the risk of smudging.

My usual practice is to ink lightly overthe pencilled lines, let the ink dry andthe use a plastic eraser to clear all of thepencilling out of the way before goingon. The outermost lines are often builtup by going over them several times,as I like to use strong outlines of varyingwidth to give a sense of volume to themajor masses of the figure.

Two stages ofpencil sketchingto prepare animage of anarcher.

10© 2003 Conrad Taylor

Adding shade and colour, by hand or by computer

FINISHED OUTLINE ARTWORK like the completed archer below may

also have some internal lines added toshow texture (his hair, stockings), thelines of drapery (folds in his shirt andturban), and even a little shading.

In the past, I often went much further,adding shading marks with a fine pen –by hatching (diagonal lines) or stippling(small dots). Or I would apply adhesive-backed shading films such as Letratone,which was pre-printed with tint patternsof small dots ideal for printed reproduct-ion and copying.

But these days, I’m more likely to stopworking on my drawing when it reachesits simple outline form, and any further

shading or colouring work, if required,will be done in the computer.

The computer also helps in other wayswhen I work with drawings. For exampleI don’t worry as much about stray linesand mistakes any more: they are easy toedit out. By the way, I should have saidthat it’s a good idea to draw larger thanthe final reproduction size of your imageif you can, because as it is reduced forprinting your mistakes will get smallertoo! (Cartoonists often work at twice thefinal size they images will be printed.)

As for the actual magic tricks that I useto edit, shade and colourise my drawingsin the computer, space doesn’t permitme go into them in detail here. I’ll justtell you that Adobe Photoshop is thesoftware I use, and I usually apply theshading or colouring on a second ‘layer’,almost like an acetate overlay, with theblending options of the colourisationlayer set to ‘multiply’ so it behaves as iftransparent.

Finally, I flatten the image to a singlelayer, and save a copy in an appropriatefile format such as TIFF ready to put intomy publishing project. (Again, I have tospare you the technical details of this.)

Other ways the computer can helpI deliberately wrote this paper not mak-ing the assumption that the reader hasaccess to a computer, so I’ve told youabout a number of handicraft tricks fortracing and copying images. But if youdo have a computer and a scanner, youcan use it to enlarge and reduce imagesand to cut them out from a documentfor use elsewhere.

Another thing you could try, whichcould save you a lot of work trackingdown reference images, is to get friendsor classroom students to ‘strike a pose’and take a photo with a digital camera ifyou have one. This can then be printedout and traced over as the basis for adrawing, or projected onto a wall fortracing if you have a data projector.

The finished archer project,inked in with Kolinsky sablebrush and ink, plus variousfineliner pens…

…and given colour and shading using the computer.

11© 2003 Conrad Taylor

The computer as a drawing tool in its own right

FOR THE MOST PART this paper has been about images drawn with hand-

held media such as pens and pencils,though they may be produced or finish-ed in a ‘computer-assisted’ fashion. But Ishould mention that software also existsfor creating drawings made up not ofpixels sampled from a scanned original,but as lines and curves and geometricshapes – what is known as ‘vector art’.

Early drawing software was somewhatclunky, but modern versions of AdobeIllustrator or Corel Draw are excellenttools in skilled hands. A great advantageof vector art is that it has no particularresolution, so can be printed very largeindeed without becoming all pixellated.Another advantage is that these picturesare made up of ‘objects’ which can havetheir colour attributes edited at any time.I have exploited both of these features ofvector art in various mapping projects.

During 2002, I undertook a project to create aseries of country maps for the PTEP project of theInstitute of Ismaili Studies, for use in a PowerPointpresentation. To make the project ‘future-proof’and re-usable, I started by creating a resolution-independent vector art map of the world, usingAdobe Illustrator (see above). You’ll note thatvarious layers of the map can be switched on oroff, and that each country is an object (note howselecting Denmark also picks up the Faroe Islands).

Right, a small regional map generated in less than25 minutes from the data in the main source map.

Vector drawing software is excellentfor producing flowcharts, diagrams, andvarious kinds of icon, logo or symbol. Ifan organisation asks a designer to makea logo for them, it will usually be donein this sort of software.

Another intriguing possibility is tomake simple outline symbols availableas characters in a font for the computer.They can be drawn in vector illustrationsoftware to start with, then copied into afont-editing program to make PostScriptor TrueType fonts for installation in thecomputer. Then you can use them in anyprogram in the computer, such as Wordor PowerPoint.

Here are some examples of symbolsfrom the fonts Webdings and Carta:

������ i � �

12© 2003 Conrad Taylor

Why do you thinkConrad has drawn uswith these silly round

eyes and stylisedmouths, Sharon?

Dunno – either hisobservational skills

are poor or he thinkshe’s a cartoonist!

Some suggested books*

Betty Edwards — The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. (Revised 20thanniversary edition of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.) HarperCollins 2001;ISBN: 0007116454.

Louise Gordon — Anatomy and Figure Drawing. B.T. Batsford, 1988.ISBN: 0-7134-58771

Louise Gordon — Drawing the Human Head. B.T. Batsford, 1977.ISBN: 0-7134-02377

Nicola Harford and Nicola Baird — How to Make and Use Visual Aids. VSO Books.Published by Heinemann Educational Publishers 1997. ISBN 0-435-92317-X.

Petra Rörh-Rouendaal — Where there is no artist – Developmentdrawings and how to use them. Intermediate Technology Publi-cations, 1997. ISBN 1-85339-391-6.

Burne Hogarth — Dynamic Figure Drawing: A New Approachto Drawing the Moving Figure in Deep Space and Foreshortening.Paperback edition Watson-Guptill Publications, September1996 – ISBN: 0823015777

Stan Lee and John Buscema — How to Draw Comics the MarvelWay. A Fireside Book, published by Simon & Schuster,

New York 1978. ISBN 0-671-53077-1.

‘Maddocks’ (Peter Maddocks) — How to DrawCartoons – a book for the budding cartoonist bya cartoonist. Michael O’Mara Books Limited,London, 1991. ISBN 1-85479-078-1

* Note, I didn’t call this page‘some suggested reading’…because the pictures are moreimportant than the text – right?

This paper is illustrated with Conrad’s pictures exceptPetra’s drawing on page 7 and the Mesopotamianimage from 1500 BCE on page 3. The drawings werescanned and processed in Adobe Photoshop, and thepaper was pulled together in Adobe PageMaker, onan Apple Macintosh PowerPC G4 computer. Print-outswere made on a Tektronix 740P PostScript laser printer.

PDFs of this document can be found here:http://www.conradiator.com/downloads