How To Draw Comics: Draw A Comic Page Part 1

Okay, so the first stage of drawing your comic page is to do the initial penciling. I start with doing the outside perimeter boarder, which will be the outline of all your panels. Then I do rough sketches for each panel.

To make your page interesting, try and add some variety when you draw your comic panels. Change angles around, do a shot from above or below, do close-ups and very long shots. If all your comic panels are eye-level medium shots, the page can get a bit boring -particularly if it is a superhero comic.

At this stage, I also scribble in the dialogue so I know how much space will be taken up with speech balloons. You don't have to be exact here -it's still rough, but get a close idea of the dialogue. You should now have a rough idea of what your comic page will look like.

The next step, is to rule lines where the letters are going to go. Make sure your lines are even (some of mine aren't!) and that they give you enough space to write your dialogue into the place where the speech balloons will go.

Then take your ink pen and letter your comic page. This will be the finished result so take your time and try and make all your letters consistent. Practice writing in capitals, slowly and consistently.

There are programs you can use for this part, but I won't cover those here. Everything here is just manual and do it all yourself. Believe me it's good practice.

Now you can ink in the actual speech bubbles. This is not the easiest thing to do manually, but that's life. You can also ink in the borders of the comic panels at this stage.

The reason that these are done first is because, when you ink your comic drawings, you will be working in and around the border lines and the speech bubble lines. So therefore, you can do them first to get them out of the way.

In part 2, I'll go over inking the rest of the page. Have fun.