How to Draw & Make Your Own Comics

Learn the basic steps of drawing the frames for a comic book.

Tell stories through a series of drawings by creating your own comic book or comic strips. Making your own comics takes imagination and creativity, but you also need to follow a specific procedure if you want them to look like the comic books you like to read. It takes time to find your style, but if you practice drawing and coloring, you will be able to create the pages of frames that will make up the characters' stories.

Things You'll Need

• Paper
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Colored pencils
• Ink pen

Instructions

1. Design the main characters for your comic. Compose your characters of three-dimensional shapes, like spheres to make them look more life-like. Give them distinguishing features that you know you will be able to easily replicate for each frame. Draw your characters from several different angles. Create some written notes about your characters as well, describing their personality and any quirks they have.

2. Write the storyline for the comic book or make a few story notes on each separate comic strip you want to make. Roughly sketch the story board to plan out how each page of frames will look, and what will happen to tell your story. Look at comic books to get ideas for the frame layouts for your comic.

3. Trace the shapes for the frames on the first page based on the story board sketch. Use a ruler to make straight lines and space the frames evenly apart. Start with light pencil lines for the outlines of the frames.

4. Draw the characters within each frame along with the speech bubbles and sound effects. Add the background scene around them. Color each section of the frame lightly with a base color; use colored pencils if you are a beginner. Go over the base color with shading in darker shades of that color. Shade to add contours to the characters and objects by thinking about where the light source is in the scene. Place the shaded areas opposite the light source on whatever object you are shading.

5. Write the lettering in pencil for the speech bubbles and sound effects. Use all capital letters, which makes the text look more neat and tidy. Go over all lines with a black ink pen to make everything stand out. Trace over the outlines of the frames, the characters and the outlines of the speech bubbles as well as the text. Do not outline all the lines of the background, since you don't want them to seem as if they are on the same plane as the characters and foreground objects. Complete each page using this procedure.

Tips & Warnings

• Include villains who will cause trouble for your main characters, if you're making a hero comic.

References

• My Cartoon Drawing Guide: How to Draw Cartoon Characters
• Draw Furry: How to Draw Comics