Friday, April 18, 2008

My "How To Draw Comics" Plan...

Since 1999 I've been trying to teach myself how to draw comics. In the years since then, I've built up enough knowledge of one thing, the human figure (specifically female), that I realized I should offer a Web course on how to draw comics. I can do this. In the spirit of "If you can, do; if you can't, teach", I realized that the best way for me to learn how to draw, and keep it learned, is to draw everything I need to create such a course. And so, after several years, I've decided to actually do it. My goal is to put it online by the end of May.

I'll have to make an admission: my own self-instruction has been sporadic. 9 years, and I still haven't completely learned how to draw the human figure, or even the head. I realized that this is what I need to spur me to actually draw, and pretty intensively, so that I can prepare for NaNoMangO, which comes up next in June. This will also spur me to return to writing the script to Spanner, which I've been neglecting this week.

Earlier this week I drew the first set of illustrations for my comics tutorial site, then created the table of contents page. Since I've planned a complete website for all my projects and essays as long as I have the tutorial, I finally decided to organize the complete site hierarchy as well as the tutorial, and edit the site using the best website editor I had in Linux, which turned out to be Quanta Plus. (I also have Dreamweaver MX in Windows, but I'm told it's fairly hard and confusing to use...) When I'm ready to put the site up, I'll have not only the tutorial ready, but the project pages for each of my comics and novel projects: Spanner, The Jennifer Theory, and the Dictel trilogy (Bad Company, Black Science, and this year's NaNoWriMo entry, Points of Authority), plus the first complete essays written.

That's the website plan I've had for almost a decade, though I've never yet acted on it. (I had my own Tripod homepage back in 2000 or so, but I never put anything on it and allowed it to die...) It starts with the comics tutorial.

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