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[Music] hey how you doing it's clayton here from howtodrawcomics.net and welcome to today's comic art demonstration in this video we are going to be taking a look at the process behind a cover commission i did for a title called the embrace joining me today in the studio we've got corey barton the other half of button brush studio how you doing today corey yeah dude i'm doing great man i'm uh definitely happy to be here on another video with you and you know i'm pretty excited to see how you actually done this piece because i ended up doing the colors for it so i'm quite interested to see a process man thank you yeah this was an interesting work to create because it was during a time that was somewhat unprecedented for me when i really started to speed up my workflow for comic book illustration and that was really important to me because up until recently it had taken me an extremely long amount of time to finish a single piece of work which was just downright discouraging unproductive and really didn't give me the freedom to take on a huge workload so i was having to knock back lots of requests for commissions i was only able to push out one or two pages per week on our comic book project kosovo descent into madness which by the way if you're listening you can check out via the link in the description below it's a comic book project that both corey and i are working on a true button bros collaboration and if you like dark fantasy franchises such as berserk the witcher dark souls it's going to be right up your alley the intense artwork of corey highly detailed highly intricate combine that with the workovers i've done over the top and then the remastered colors what you get is one of the best presentations that you could possibly hope for for a comic book anyway back to what we're looking at here what exactly is this phase of the cover illustration process yeah man it's quite different to uh the end result so you yeah what are you thinking about here it's very different what i'll often do for my clients just so that i have some ideas to the direction they would like me to go in because in the beginning anything goes a lot of the time the client knows what they don't want but they don't necessarily know what they want and so it's my job as the illustrator to kind of figure that out to help guide them through the various possibilities that we could ultimately solidify and turn into the finished cover and so what you just saw me doing was a variety of different thumbnail sketches now these are very small rough drafts that really aren't refined or polished in any capacity but serve to promote a concept or an idea that we might possibly able to invest more energy into later on down the track and see as the ultimate comer yeah absolutely and so in the end michael oden who was the man who commissioned me to do this cover he decided for the close-up portrait shot of the embrace which i personally felt was the idea which worked best as well because it just had so much impact it was really in your face you could you could just imagine that if it was sitting on the shelf in a comic book store it would capture your attention straight away you'd see it at the corner of your eye and you'd just be compelled to pick it up open that cover and see what was awaiting for you inside and that was the real aim that i was striving for here as i was creating this piece yeah absolutely i wanted to make sure that it was captivating which any good cover should be when it comes to creating a either a commission for somebody else or doing your own comic book cover it's there to sell the product it's really a promotional advertisement and you got to make sure that you're doing everything within your power to get people excited get them anticipating what's going to be involved with the story when they decide to open it up and begin reading because you know if you're going to sell them with that cover you've got to make sure that the story is great but it doesn't matter how great that story is if you're not able to sell them on the cover in the first place yeah absolutely they're just not going to be bothered to open it up especially in this day and age when you've got so many things begging for your attention video games netflix yeah man um well yeah so i am wondering like what was the type of like description odin actually gave you did he give you any information at all or did you just say you won the character drawing he did give me some information he gave me an overall general plot for what the book was about and it involved a father whose son had died and kind of i guess somehow rose from the dead in some spiritual celestial form yeah and merged with the dad forming this superhero symbiote suit of some kind not unlike spawn not unlike haunt and i guess that's that's where the story begins he starts to endeavor out on a quest to try and figure out who who it was that murdered his son why his son died at least look that's me uh sub quoting what was told off of the top of my head yeah absolutely yeah and uh just about like these lines man i've noticed you're really great at doing nicely shaped simple lines like how do you get that sort of like a triangular almost shape while keeping it very neat yeah i hear what you're saying it's it's all to do with pen pressure so whether or not i'm pulling a line away from me or i'm pulling it toward me it's going to start thick or thin at one end and end up in the opposite state by the time i reach the end of that line okay so if i'm going from thick i'm going to thin if i'm going from thin i'm going to thick and what that does is it creates this variation within the thickness of the lines trajectory and this is something you want because it just tends to make the line appear more alive it's got a certain amount of dynamicness applied to it now which is just more interesting to look at more lively than if you had a contour that was a consistent thickness all the way through yeah absolutely and if dude i've even noticed your brush size is like 500 right now which is pretty crazy i i usually keep to like 15 yeah now here's the thing that i will say on that your brush size it's going to depend on one how big the canvas is that you're working on top of and this is actually a very very big canvas i think it's you know over 10 000 pixels yeah either lengthwise or wide either way it is a very large canvas so you know odin could take this beautiful illustration that i've done for him this cover and he could actually make it into a poster which was of a significant size if he was so inclined but besides that again your canvas is going to cause you to shift your brush size up and down so i wouldn't be using a brush size of 500 300 if i was working on a canvas that had a level resolution for example same with the zoom right i found that my zoom is going to be completely shifted and changed up in terms of the percent to which i'm i'm working in terms of distance and it's dependent once more on the canvas size on the resolution of the image that i'm working in and so those things should be considered and it makes it difficult for me to say oh you should be using this particular brush size or you should be using this particular level of zoom because again it's all dependent on the size of the canvas that you're working on so it's something to keep in mind i couldn't tell you the exact dimensions it's it's in the range oh actually it's got it right here up at the top here um so it looks like it's it's 10 by 15 inches 600 dpi there you go so that is the brush size i would use and the amount of zoom i'm at at that particular resolution absolutely and this is one thing i worry about all the time are my lines too small for print how do you get past that because i mean if you're using different shapes brushes it's like you want that sort of consistency especially throughout a comic and you've got to think about how it's going to print so what's your sort of ideas on that yeah that's a really good question and it's something i contemplate myself a lot because you don't want to be sitting there for hours and hours on end throwing down hatch after hatch detail after detail only for it to be printed and to have all that detail bleed together into one blurry mess that's definitely something that you want to avoid so the way in which i attempt to avoid it as much as possible is i'll hold up an actual comic book to my screen and i'll zoom in to that amount to make it so that i'm working at a distance which is showing the canvas to be just a little bit larger than the actual size of that comic book that i'm holding up to the screen as a comparison yeah and that works fairly well for me but also i'll look at other comic book covers that some of my favorite artists have done we know who they are mark silvestri todd mcfarlane michael turner etc and i'll try to observe in comparison to this size of that cover how large is their line work how much detail have they incorporated into the piece and you'll be surprised at the level of intricacy sometimes that they can fit in there and still have it print fairly clearly so it's not something to necessarily be over concerned with it is something to be conscious of while you're working however and yeah absolutely you know the other thing is how thin or thick do you want your lines to be what's going to show up in print the best what's going to look good you always want to be considering that stuff and i think that once more what i've found you can have thinner lines than you might initially assume yes you can have very very thin elegant subtle line work and one of the places that i found that in was in the spawn comic books especially when greg capullo was working on those titles just such tiny little details even around the outer contours of the characters you know that may the main outline of the elements within those panels he would use a very thin contour that that was subtly very subtly waited yeah absolutely man i've definitely seen a lot of that in the old image comics yeah and hey i think looking at work like that studying it analyzing it trying to ask yourself questions such as why have they taken this particular approach what's making it work and the way in which it's working can really help you out with your own artwork it can give you insight into the tricks of the trade you know what are these pros doing that make their art look so good so appealing and what can you take from it in order to gain the same effect within your own yeah absolutely man i've just noticed you've had you know sort of a fair bit of trouble with the rendering on this guy's face yeah what do you think the main issue was so sometimes i'm just searching and i think it's only because i work digitally that i'm afforded the luxury of being able to do that i'm not always going to make the first decision or rather i'm not going to make the best decision the first time around usually i've got to see how things look on the canvas first to figure out whether or not i'm going to keep it or whether or not i'm going to toss it out and it just so happens that with the character's face here he's wearing this mask over the top of it and it's a very thin layer of material because of that some of the features at least the primary forms of those features are still visible through the surface of the material and you do want to suggest them you want to suggest those forms as the material stretches over the top of it to indicate that they are indeed there to make it look as though there's a face underneath the mask you could just leave it blank but that wouldn't work and if you don't shade those underlying forms accurately in a cool and interesting way because i've i haven't just suggested that they're there oh yeah i've depicted them in a cool looking way you know i've gone for this almost skeletal appearance as i shade in the hatches around the cheek bones and really give them some depth yeah absolutely so i do know this is a bit of more of like a new technique to what you usually do and this is sort of some of the stuff you've been trying out on the new codes or pages or remasters so i'm guessing at this time you're probably getting used to the new technique or why this rendering style over the old one well this one's much faster i find that there's a certain amount of freedom that i'm able to work within when i'm just throwing down these hatches i'm not think it it seems like i'm overthinking it because i'm constantly pulling out that eraser and having another crack at it and it seems like i'm doing that a lot but actually that's a very fast process i know this is sped up a little bit but even real time it was quite quick for me to throw this piece together throwing it together probably isn't the right terminology because i did put a lot of love and and effort absolutely and energy into making sure this piece was as good as it could possibly look and i think that it was only able to arrive at that place the epitome of what it could be because i was a little bit more freer working on it if i'm overthinking things if i'm being a perfectionist that's when i find that my artwork just loses the the life force from it yeah absolutely and so when i'm working quickly there's a certain amount of energy behind the lines that i'm throwing down of improvisation that i'm doing while i work and that is very engaging for me as the artist because it means that you know some things are just going to be unplanned i don't know what i'm going to get it's a box of chocolates right and so it's a surprise not just for the client not just for the audience that's ultimately going to experience the front of this book but also for me it turns out oftentimes better than i could have ever imagined and it's a little bit scary along the way no i'm going into uncharted territory a lot of the time maybe this will work maybe it won't but i don't worry about that i don't worry if it's going to work or not because i know that i'm going to make it great like by the time all is said and done i would have made the right decisions i needed to make in order to get it to the place that it needs to be at and so it really doesn't matter what obstacles or stumbling blocks challenges i'll face along the way i know that in the end i can get it to the place that it needs to be at and so you have a certain amount of faith within yourself i think when you get to a certain level and you look at the past works that you've created and you see what you're capable of yeah absolutely man i i can see almost it's like you developed that just by cross hatching it and it looks so much more greater and you know man the immense like motivation you would have had to keep going with this like it's pretty crazy yeah like how do you fight through that do you find trying the new stuff actually kept you motivated yeah it's it's like a puzzle it's almost as if the more i failed the more determined i became to solve the problem yeah absolutely kind of like when you're playing a video game you're trying to pass that level of mario but you keep on falling down the hole or this plant keeps popping up and eating you and it just makes you more determined to pass that level like you go away from it for a while frustrated you're like damn it and and the longer you're away from it the more you want to go back and and kick that level's ass that's how i feel about my work when i'm facing these issues within it is that you know i can't leave it until that particular portion is solved i don't get unmotivated i get even more motivated to solve it and it reminds me of the experience i was having last night on a new commission that i'm doing for for a gentleman to team up cover and the main character was in the front had to be it just had to be redone the pose was off the proportions weren't quite the way i wanted them to be and because this character was sitting front and center i had to make sure that it was 100 good to go before i went any further into the inks and so i spent you know an hour or two redrawing up that character making sure the anatomy checked out placing in the design elements of the costume over the top of that and it was something that i had to do what was like when you get to that point to where like you realize you have to do his pose all over again what is sort of like the language or the thoughts that go through your head that helped keep you motivated because i know sometimes when i have to do something like that i can be pretty negative and i would have i'll probably have to go away and take a break yeah but how did you get past that that's a really good question i feel like a lot of people probably experience that very same thing for me i can tell you what was going through my mind i said this character is going to be a prominent focal point which means i have to go back and redo it yes and when i do go back and redo it it's going to look awesome this cover's going to look sick in the end and i think that when you have those positive reinforcing assurances in your mind such as hey by the time all of this is done that end result is going to look absolutely amazing it pushes you forward so that even if you have to go back and redo something spend that extra time that if you just got it right in the first place you wouldn't have to spend i feel like that's what is going to move you forward get you back at the drawing board and doing what it is you have to do to make sure that problem is resolved once and for all because you're still positive you still know that it's going to be all good yeah you just got to get past this little this little obstacle that's found itself before you absolutely man and also i go hey you know what this is a lesson for me i can learn something from this so that the next time i face a similar problem well there's even less of a chance of it popping up in the first place but when it does i'll be able to resolve it quicker i'll be able to see it faster and i was also thinking about this if i one of my favorite parts about comic book illustration is all the little challenges that pop up oh yeah that's actually what keeps it fun this this is still the phase of the drawing which keeps me hooked and you can see that there's still things that i'm adjusting here things that i'm re-jigging again i can't believe that i got this done in the amount of time that i got it done in considering the amount of tweaking and rehashing that i did with these hatches i have no idea but i managed to do it somehow but i'll tell you what my favorite part of the whole process is it's the beginning stage when i am laying down the figure and i'm trying to get their position just right and it's rough and i'm erasing i'm i'm redoing i'm erasing again redoing and i'm just trying to get it 100 right i'm totally in my element because it's still a challenge and if i was just able to lay it down and that was it i would honestly get bored because i don't know i don't have that much patience for the mundane anymore you know i'm a little bit older now and so things have to be not impossible to overcome at this point but they still have to be somewhat of a challenge in order to keep me hooked in absolutely man and just to talk a bit more about motivation yeah um say you're like a beginning artist and you know you've just got a commission that isn't like the best pay rate but you want to do it good still how do you keep that motivation if you're really struggling for it yeah so you have to like go back on a piece like this otherwise it won't look good but you know the amount of money you're making isn't really worth it all you have really is the fact that you want to make it good personally absolutely absolutely man look i think that there's so many different ways you can answer that question and i'm definitely not about to say hey if a client asks you to completely redo the cover because they've changed their mind and they're not willing to pay you i'm not saying that you should accept that yeah absolutely you should definitely say hey look i've sent you a number of works in progress you saw how this cover was coming along now you're changing your mind once it's almost done you're gonna need to pay me some extra compensation how do you negotiate something like that professionally though you would just say that straight out you would just say listen that's gonna cost you a little bit more because i've already put in this amount of time it's going to take this many more hours to redo that amount of work so if you're okay with that i'm okay to go ahead and redo something if it's a small change okay if it's something which is actually changeable at the point at which you you've arrived within the progression of the commission okay fair enough you know you want to make sure that your client is satisfied that you've got a happy customer there because once this piece is complete michael oden is going to go around he's going to be sharing this cover yeah he's going to be promoting his book with it other people are going to see it so i want to do a good job for that reason also he may very well recommend me to other people okay so i'm putting myself out there on stage when i do this piece it's not like it's just for him it's going to hang on his wall in his private art gallery no this is going to be out in the public on the front of a book that's printed that's published so that's that's reason enough for me to go ahead and do the best job that i possibly can the thing is about money is it's not as motivating as you think yes definitely after a while the novelty of money wears off and it wears it actually wears off fairly quickly not even after a while it wears off quickly within a matter of days if not hours you know you get that commission the payment gets sent through and then you know oh man i actually have to do the work now and this is something that there's something for artists especially that money alone does not fulfill what fulfills you as an artist is doing a good job being proud of the work that you've done knowing that the piece you just did is a little bit better than the piece you did previously and that the work you do tomorrow is going to be an on another level again because if you're able to keep on stepping it up in that way you know that you're going to be in this constant evolution yeah absolutely so i see every piece i work on as a lesson i see it as an opportunity to push myself that little bit harder to make it better than the previous work i've done i know that it's going to be out there in front of everybody else it's going to be sitting center stage very likely either within the interior of a book or on the front of a book which is even more important yeah and and i know that it's going to if i do a good job it's going to increase my reputation so there's many motivating factors for me to make sure i do a great job other than just the money and if the client tries to shorthand me or pull the wool over my eyes in some way i'll probably still hand them the work i just won't work for them again yeah dude that's a great point man yeah um and say reputation right how do you know when you get to a point to when you can charge more or when you're un like say maybe when you're going too cheap like how do you really get in that headspace because you know sometimes i want a commission and i don't want to lose the commission because i'm charging too much but i don't want to take on the commission because it's just i'm doing it for really cheap or something yeah it's tough man there's a lot to unpack there because when it comes to deciding on how much you're going to be paid as an artist whether it's as a colorist as an inker as a pencil or whatever facet of comic book illustration you're being paid to execute it comes down to two things it comes down to three things actually how much you want to be paid what level you're actually at and how much budget the creator is willing to set aside for the job that they want you to do yeah absolutely and this all takes experimentation okay and the way in which you experiment is you put yourself out there for an amount of money that is maybe even less than what you should be paid at the skill level you're at and you know that at least if you can get a client willing enough to pay you that amount of money that you can maybe step it up a little bit the next time around and so what i did is you know let's say for example you're doing a a cover commission for 100 usd yes and you know that you can get a hundred dollars usd you've maybe had one or two clients pay you that amount of money and this is just an example by the way everybody's level of skill set is going to be different and every client is different every artist is different but let's just say this as an example you know that if you can get a hundred dollars usd the next time somebody else asks you to do a commission you can say hey i'm happy to do you this cover for 120 usd see if you can get that just as an experiment and if the client isn't really willing to pay you that much say listen i really like the idea i really like the project if you need the work yeah then tell them you can do it for 100 usd and maybe they're going to be a little bit more susceptible but at least you know then that oh hey i've settled on the correct price here i am worth 100 usd at this point because that's what people are willing to pay me based on the quality that they're seeing in my work yeah absolutely now if you keep on being paid what you're asked for every time you raise the price then you can keep that going you can keep that train chuffing until you get to a place where you start being denied now the best position to be in the only position you should ever be in is a place of abundance and by that i mean it is the best place of negotiation that you could possibly be coming at a decision from right yeah when it comes to working with clients so if you're sitting in the boardroom and you know that you're you're in a needy position like you need the work you'll be willing like that just that just steams off of you like a stench and it's funny because not only will they not really want to work with you because of the neediness because you'll be pushing for it but they'll pay you a pittance because they know you're needy also yeah absolutely so they'll pay you nothing they won't really want to work with you right you will repulse them because neediness is a very how would you unattractive characteristic sorry how would you get out of something like that if you are in a struggling needing space yeah i mean you need the money it's very dangerous to go into any negotiation being in that kind of state all right so what would you recommend do you recommend they perhaps skill up before they start negotiating if you really need the money then you're just going to have to take on that work and you're gonna have to take on whatever it is they're willing to pay you you have no room to negotiate right now let's take a look at if you're coming from a place of abundance let's say that you've got a number of money sources that you're making a living from and that if you took any one of those money sources away it wouldn't really matter because the rest would keep taking care of you maybe you've got some other job that pays enough and you're in a place where you don't really need to take on commissions yeah but you you can if you want to if the project is interesting enough if the characters are compelling and you're somewhat driven to draw them like the last commission i did you know i was illustrating two characters by the name of perfect 10 and american bliss two characters that i actually wanted to illustrate i had seen them before they were kick-ass characters that had a great design and i knew that i would have a great time just working on them and so it was an absolute pleasure for me to snap up that commission awesome great absolutely sexy lady characters what's not to love especially when they've got a fantastic design so if you're in a place where you don't need to take on commissions but you can if you want to then you can throw out a price and it really doesn't matter what what is said what the person asking you to to work for them has to say if they say no it doesn't matter you win anyway because you'll just keep doing what you're doing you'll work on your stuff like for me i'm working on clothes or whether or not i take on more commissions or not right absolutely so if someone says no great i get to work on more cozo if somebody says yes awesome i also get to do these cool commissions and work on kozo that's a great point man so so when you're in a negotiation where you win either way man you're you've got a whole other persona that you're giving off yeah absolutely in the language you use the things you say the way you think it's all completely different it's very stark contrast to how you come across when you're needy yeah absolutely so definitely try to get yourself in that place if you can if you actually need the work if you actually are like you can't pay the bills you're struggling to eat i would probably get into some of the career path other than comic book artist if you're in that in that position in life you know there's there's easier ways to make money than than being a comic book artist but look here's the other thing man when you get your skill set to a certain place people will just start hitting you up yeah man i mean that's great and i have seen that happen another question i'm curious to ask is what about when you get paid like a bucket load of money for say one piece how do you like say keeping a headspace where you keep it really quality and how do you know like when it's like really worth it because i know if i got paid to say half a grand on colors i would be like i wouldn't know what to think dude half a grand on colors is like really crazy i don't even know easy money who you would be working for but i mean that much just as an example as an example yeah look i think man the rule of thumb should be you should already be in that mindset already regardless of whether you're paying paid 50 usd per page for colors or 200 usd per page for colors you should be doing your very best work either way because why it serves you as the artist first and foremost yes you're going to be producing a great product but at the end of the day if you start doing crappy work which is completely dependent on the amount you're being paid you know your quality of work equals the amount of you're being paid then all of a sudden you have no agency out of the level of quality that you can do it's all dependent on the pay so yeah and you know as i said before let's say that you jump on board a project where you're being underpaid but that project it has your work within it it's published it's out there it's in front of people you want to make sure that your your best work is being displayed in that product even if you are underpaid to do it just because you never know who's going to see it we're judged based upon our worst work yeah it's not our best work man that's where they say only put your best work in a portfolio because the crappiest piece of art you have in that portfolio is going to be the the peace that either gets you the job or doesn't get you the job right yeah because they're going to measure you against that so always keep it in mind and this goes out to anybody who is listening right now make sure that every piece whether you're doing it for free whether you're doing it for a high amount of money or a low amount of money for yourself or for other people do your very best work because that trains your brain to make sure that you're producing nothing less than the full potential to which you are capable of when it comes to your art absolutely and i mean probably to free frame that question the last one a bit more what if it's like you're working for someone you know that's really big like say it's a really big famous project like how do you keep yourself from perhaps freaking out almost you know you say it's like a big sort of a thing like that that's sort of what i meant by like making big bucks hey yeah you man i think you know you've got to understand that if you're being asked to work on that project whoever has brought you on board realizes that you're at the level you need to be at and that you are ready to work on that project which should serve as a bit of a confidence boost for you they've seen what you can do you're capable of doing that understand resonate with the fact that you are capable of doing and executing at the standard that they believe you're capable of for that project yeah absolutely so so as long as you know that and look sometimes you have to lie to yourself man this is one of the reasons as to why people end up getting success barriers and why they actually hold themselves back it's not the man holding you down it's not anyone out there that's already succeeding holding you back a lot of the time it's us because of the success barriers we built put in place and the reason that we put them in place is because we're afraid of the consequences of that higher level of success okay so let's say that you're working on some dream project like for me that would be the darkness from top cow yeah right what would that mean it would mean holy i would actually have to get this work done to a deadline that's one i would have to make sure that it's the best work that i've ever done that's two i would have to impress you know uh mark silvestri or whoever it was that was asking me to work well that's the other thing like how do you know if you'd be over overthinking work like that like yeah because that would be some i definitely feel like i get sucked in that's the thing why do we overthink we overthink out of insecurity so what is the opposite that we have to be in order to not overthink well we have to be confident we have to really know and understand that we've we've got the skill set needed in order to do what it is we're being hired to do and you don't want to be over confident well it depends man sometimes you have to be overconfident in order to jump into the pool you you're about to go into because if you're always sitting on the sidelines because you're not confident enough that's way worse than being overconfident at least when you're overconfident you're willing to do crazy yeah absolutely and you know let the chips fall where they may after that right so being overconfident was what got me into a classroom teaching in front of a full classroom full of students yeah it's a great point man yeah so be a little bit overconfident lie to yourself if you need to lie to yourself if you're feeling unconfident and you need to be in a confident place to get the job done then you better sit in front of the mirror for a while and tell yourself over and over again how much of a kick-ass artist you are how much your rocks right have you ever gotten because this is probably one thing i fear the most is you get into a situation where the client isn't happy and you really like up the job and they probably don't want to work with you again has that ever happened to you or is that just like a crazy fear dream or something no man that's never happened because i always make the fixes that the client asks of me yeah again there's certain certain motivating factors beyond just the money that pushed me to do that so i usually always have a satisfied customer by the end i want them to be satisfied the worst feeling in the world for me is is knowing that the client isn't happy with what they've purchased that's that's horrible like that i would rather give it to them for free and and give their money back if if they're unsatisfied with what i've given them yeah so but the the only real problems that i've i i don't ever think i've had i had a problem with a client to be honest with you i've had people who have requested work from me that were psychopaths and i didn't end up working with them thankfully yeah but they they when i say psychopath they were actually crazy so i mean uh you know you've you've you've got explain you couldn't trust them to work with well they were just they were just nuts like there was this one guy back when i was working in the video game industry very notorious here in melbourne australia who had this you know very shonky game studio and basically what he would do is he would reach out to students who had just graduated from their games course and he would offer them a job but what he would do is request a test piece of art first and give you a brief and if you he if you were able to fulfill that brief he promised that you would get a position at his company and so what would end up happening is the test pieces would be done but once they were handed in he'd never get back to them so he would just get free work all the time and he had a reputation for doing this everybody knew about the guy and so when he approached yeah and so when he approached me i was at the time willing to work for pretty much anybody but i knew what this dude was like and so when he asked me to do a test piece i said look you have seen my portfolio you know the level of work that i can do so if you actually want to work with me and we're going to make this happen this is how much i charge and you know let me know yeah absolutely anyway i get a phone call from this guy and he's going off his nut jeez man yeah he's been he's completely unstable and it it just so happens that uh my phone ends up cutting out because the place in which i'm living at the time has very bad reception so you know it kind of is drawn back to that whole thing we were talking about with negotiation big boss absolutely except my phone allowed me to do that for me and so then i got an email from him and it said something along the lines of if i see you down the street i'm gonna beat your head in yeah that's that level of graceful that's not an image you want to put out into the world oh and i know it's hard to imagine but i actually got an email like that from a person who who thankfully i didn't end up working with but you know it just goes to show that you'll get all different kinds of individuals out there and i think that once more coming from a non-needy place allows you to be able to discern whether or not you want the job for the amount of pay that's being offered and also whether or not you actually want to work with the client because it's not just them choosing you you've also got to choose them if you've got absolutely if you've got a troublesome client that you don't get along with that doesn't know how to communicate with you that's just going to be way more trouble than it's worth no matter what amount of money you're being paid yeah absolutely man i i totally agree with that um and you know because i know you often have lots of people emailing you how do you get to that point where people are just wanting to offer you jobs man that's crazy yeah it's it's really a fortunate place that i'm in i think that you've got to develop a style within your art that is marketable within comic books that yeah people recognize as a high standard of comic book art and there's a lot of different artistic styles you could go with out there there's some very eccentric ones that you see in comic books these days and they may work for certain titles certain one-off issues but ultimately it's the style that you might see within jim lee's work or mark silvestri's work that very standard comic book style that people just love like that they're drawn to and when i say people i'm talking about readers people who actually buy the book the end product that's what clients are after man they want to get eyes on their product they want people to jump on to it and they they want them to invest their money into what it is they're creating and so it's your art that that helps them to be able to do that which means if you're going to be effective in doing so you've got to develop your style in such a way that it has mass appeal so for me it just so happened that a lot of my influences fell within that realm and because of that my style leaned toward that direction yeah and the rest is just honestly really a really hard work and dedication i think that right now i'm still very focused on rendering making sure that my forms read correctly that they're coming across in the right way the right level of depth the right level of height the right shape yeah absolutely and the right material on top of them and before that if you're just starting out you want to spend a good solid few years working on your foundations making sure your proportions your character movement and your anatomy is all on point if you're going to be working on your own books it wouldn't hurt you to study up on character design a little bit line quality execution all of that stuff comes into play and at some point once you've assimilated it into your experience on a high enough level on a certain amount of regularity then you will find that people you start putting out work people start coming to you and one of the best ways i got this question the other day how do you get people jumping on board and following on you on social media yeah absolutely how do you get your work out there in front of people and i asked this question to a guy that some might know called logic code is his name and he said to me that it all just comes down to fan work fan art man like fan art is just at in reality more searchable than original characters absolutely would you recommend doing fan art for a project that you wanted to work on or do you think that would maybe put the client off no for sure i've worked on a number of phantom comic book covers and the only way in which i got that commission was because i put it out of fan art of the phantom oh that's great yeah they came across that on google they emailed me they hit me up they said hey we really like this piece would you be able to do us up some covers yeah absolutely and so that's a brilliant a perfect example as to why the reasoning behind why you might want to do fan art and how it could be valuable to you but other than that how many times a day do people google search superman or batman or spawn spawn movie is a very popular search term right now you know it's in the news a lot uh yeah you could add tags to your spider-man piece like spider-man movie marvel disney whatever again all searchable terms add that to the little description you place underneath the artwork in your blog post and people are going to come searching for you they would they will just accidentally see your stuff and how cool is that yeah man that's great that's great advice yeah and they're going to give you feedback comments if you join a community like the how to draw comics community on facebook which is an offshoot from our main site how to draw comics.net no that's community is specifically designed for you to be able to post your work and get feedback by a large amount of individuals who are going to tell you their thoughts especially when you ask for that feedback it's a very large group now yeah it's a dude it's an extraordinary group i think it's one of the top ones on facebook so i definitely recommend being part of it hell yeah hell yeah yeah man and dude this piece here is turning out so well like you can see that you going back and forth on that rendering really it did just work out in the end yeah um how did you know when you had gotten to that point where you're happy with the rendering yeah and you move on to another bit yeah that's a another great question i think there's a certain amount that can be said for technique and execution and all that other stuff but what you also have to develop as an artist is your eye you've got to be able to discern what looks good and what doesn't look good absolutely and i think that that's how i decided upon the rendering that i had eventually established on the face to describe the features underneath the mask i also went back and redid the hair a little bit re-rendered that out here and there just to make sure the overall form the overall style of it was coming across correctly and so i wouldn't be able to do that if i was an artist of less experience so i really think the only way to develop your eye is to work long and hard enough to be able to train it and the way in which you train it is you read other comic books you look at your influences you really ask yourself what makes their artwork so good what makes it so appealing as i've already mentioned absolutely and by analyzing their work you in your mind catalog and store away those attributes that make it look good yeah like uh i mean people often mention like a visual library yeah that you keep and you know i've even noticed that in my own work where it's like i've asked myself why am i cross-hatching this way and it's just because i've built it that way you know totally man well also you want to be contrasting and comparing your work to those of your influences and looking at the differences between the two going hey what does theirs have that mind doesn't have yeah absolutely what why does theirs look good and why does mine not look good what could i take from theirs add into mine that would level it up it's all it's all about stealing man you don't want to steal it at face value you don't want to create a carbon copy of what they've already created but you certainly want to learn as much as you can from them their technique isn't copyrighted no one has copyrighted cross hatching yes absolutely so many artists that cross hatch exactly like david finch crosshatches well sometimes like i've seen people look down upon that were you they'll look down upon you for looking too much like david finch per se what do you think about that what's your opinion yeah i think that those those people are definitely entitled to their opinions in the end what that opinion is worth to some other individual artist is up for question we've all got different opinions when it comes to art because art is very subjective and because of that very reason there's no right or wrong way of approaching it you know some people say oh you should never have to erase our irs all the time i've erased it a billion times throughout this demonstration as you've seen and the good people watching have also witnessed so in the end what's your philosophy as an artist what do you believe in i believe it doesn't matter how i get there as long as i end up with an awesome looking product by the time i'm done yep so i'll do what's necessary i'll sacrifice myself if i need to erase if i need to redo large portions of it to get to that point i will but i won't hold myself to some strange way of working some weird belief system that forces me to keep what i've got there on the page as an example and never erase never tweak it never try to make it as good as it can be yeah absolutely and just speaking on that philosophy point how do you develop something like that like your own philosophy and you know sort of just not feel like you're full of in a way yeah i know right not delusional or anything you know when you read self-help books or watch self-help seminars they'll get you to write down okay what are your core beliefs and it's like i don't know like i believe in goodness and doing right by others like i i mean i guess like the confidence uh you know sort of teach other people how to draw and feel like you know which style is best yeah i would say it's it's less a belief and more of an interest like what am i interested in i'm interested in creating kick-ass artwork i'm interested in teaching other people because i feel like you know there's there's never anything that we do that doesn't have some sort of payoff at least something that we do repeatedly and for me the reason i teach the reason why i've got a website like how to draw comics.net which is 90 free yeah is because every time i do a tutorial every time i do a video like this and i analyze it with you like we're doing here i learned something about myself yeah absolutely i solidify the way in which i work by going back and re-watching it and asking myself these critical questions so you know i think that if somebody has that belief as an example once more that you know they should never erase maybe their motivation for that is because they want to get to a place where they just make the right decision each time every time without ever needing to erase and maybe that's they believe that they're training themselves up to be able to accomplish that by not erasing now yeah absolutely so it's great points so i i think that that's how you structure a a belief system but you know my fundamental belief system is i just want to create something that looks kick-ass i want to create the same kind of work that i see those i look up to and admire creating me and you both man i i totally agree with that and i know it might be ending up soon but another quick question was how do you specifically take in information like say when you watching a tutorial and you've got to like break down like what's the information you want to take in and what's the information that's not as beneficial hmm yeah because you don't want to watch someone and then take in the wrong information and end up worse for sure yeah and that's that's even harder to answer because we don't always click with every instructor sometimes with your work learning from us or whether you're learning from proco or robert marzullo or whoever right they might say something in just a slightly different way that really clicks with the individual yeah absolutely and vice versa you know maybe it's just my particular way of putting things that cause some students to really comprehend what it is i'm telling them as opposed to other teachers so that's one thing and there's no there's no wrong way of working i think that you can learn bad habits as an artist that cause you to have a more difficult time making progress than needed but i i honestly believe that if you go for those proven instructional books or instructional courses that have great reviews that are that are notorious for helping other people then you're going to be good to go so as an example everybody knows who andrew loomis is oh yeah he's famous his books make sense it's usually the number one recommendation i get exactly search for stuff like that and and what other recommendations do you get how to draw comics the marvel way uh bern hogarth um and what's the other dude that david finch is always always referencing uh george bridgeman right absolutely so all of these books come highly recommended you can look at the reviews people rave on about them so you probably know that they're good now yes there's tons and tons of tourist courses out there on udemy on how to draw comics.net which actually works through gumroad so there's reviews left on there as well which you can check out yeah you look at those reviews you look at what other people are saying how the students are affected you know on skillshare what's really cool is on my how to design a character course the making of e a lot of the students are starting projects where they post up the characters they've made from watching that course so not only do other students who are thinking about taking the course get to see their reviews they actually get to see the finished result the benefit of having done it yeah absolutely before they ever jump into it so i think that can be really valuable so the other way in which i judge whether or not i'm going to enroll in a course or learn a particular habit from a certain instructor is if i look at their work and i like the kind of work that they do and i would like to be able to do similar work hell yeah bring it on i want that instructor to teach me how they do what it is they do when i first discovered that um there was a course out there which allowed me i believe it was by brian haylen to be able to color the spawn way yeah no hesitation i bought that course baby because i want to know how to color the spawn way i don't care what i have to go through what the technique is if it's teaching me wrong as long as it leads me to a point where i'm able to colour the spawn way i don't care yeah absolutely man so it's a great point i would choose your instructors in in that manner yeah and just another quick note say you're looking at speed paintings and things like that are those worth it to learn from to perhaps copy or check the technique like how do you learn perhaps from a video like this if you're watching it from without sound if if i was oh you mean like a speed drawing like this yeah like a speed drawing like how would you analyze it and try to learn from it in your own head yeah like a time-lapsed art demo such as this one what you get to see is the process unfolding before your eyes yeah that's the value you get out of it you get to see how a piece is done from start to finish yes it's sped up but you can see that the individual steps that i'm taking here in order to complete this piece there's only a few of them when i lay down a hatch i lay down a hatch in very much the same way i laid down the previous hatch so all of those hatches there you've seen them probably laid down onto the page hundreds of times by the time this piece is done as sped up as it is and they're laid down in the exact same way so you're observing that yes you're not necessarily you're not necessarily seeing them laid down real time but you still have a very solid idea as to how it's done yeah and just for my like the practical side like say i want lines exactly like the way you're doing them right now would you recommend this someone like you know open up a clip studio paint file and just render out their own like hair shape or something and just look closely at what you are doing and try to emulate that yeah for sure and we didn't really get into hair here but i sort of explained it in the previous demonstration video that we put up yeah last week you know you'd i'd say things like you you break up the hair first you divide it up in this case i actually dropped in the shadows in order to get the main values of the overall form reading correctly yeah then i started adding in the details so when you're explaining what's happening within the process again it doesn't matter so much if it's sped up and in fact i learned everything i know from from david fincher's uh tutorial videos on the num1 workshop and they were sped up and and i still got it i remember at the time it didn't even occur to me that this wasn't real time it didn't matter that that really is quite meaningless what matters is the explanation what matters is being able to clearly see the process unfold and i think that that's why you can't underestimate the value of a time-lapse demonstration such as this yes it's free but don't let that stop you from really sitting here analyzing and and taking in what's being shown try to redo this piece in your own time lay it down one hatch after the other and try to get something similar to what you see here you'll learn so much from doing that yeah do you think people could actually get to a point where you can emulate how you're placing in those cross hatches just by looking at this yeah for sure people have done it on my drawing demonstrations before one of the earliest videos i uploaded here to the how to draw comics channel was the harley quinn series and yeah there was a particular individual who had sent me some of the work that they did from watching that video and it was a carbon copy sure but because i went into so much depth on exactly how every single step was was executed they they were able to successfully recreate that image using the same techniques and once you've done that you can take those techniques now that you've taken them for a test drive and you can go anywhere you want you don't have to stick to the course anymore you can go way out into the wild take them wherever you want apply them to them to any idea your own ideas yeah and so that pretty much brings us to the end of today's comic art demonstration i hope that everyone out there listening got a ton of value out of what you've seen today well i've gotten a ton of value for myself yes just asking questions i mean i really like these videos and i hope we keep on doing more of them we should do more of them right yeah absolutely well let's see what the viewers think please everybody watching leave your comments in the description below let us know whether or not you would like to see more of these comic art demonstrations i think we make a good team we bounce a lot off of one another and i love the questions you ask these are questions that i don't think of myself you know property to your viewers next time if they do leave questions in their comments like i'd be happy to take some of them and ask them to you for those commenters yeah for sure that'd be great that sounds awesome and i think that's a wonderful idea remember that if you like to see more videos just like this one subscribe to the channel ring the bell for notifications and if you'd like more common card tips tricks and tutorials i'd also highly suggest checking out the how to draw comics.net site we've got a link to that down in the description below but what you'll find there is a bunch of written tutorials we've just uploaded a brand new tutorial that focuses on drawing the back of the human torso by the exceptionally talented and very informative joe we've also got a number of video tutorials which are very similar to the ones you see here on the channel we've got a podcast where we interview a bunch of different artists from the field of comic book illustration and from other fields too video games and you know we interviewed mark brunet one time one of the best interviews i ever had uh x art head at blizzard entertainment creator of cuberush amazing dudes amazing man yeah really really cool and we've also got our premium section the how to draw comics course store where when you're ready to take your comic art skill set to the next level there's a bunch of instructors who i've personally reached out to ask them to put their courses on the site and i'm talking about the likes of david finch trent kanuga robert marzullo oh dude speaking on that like i know someone personally who done david finch's new courses and i i gotta say it looks almost better than his work sometimes so if it was me i'm even thinking about right now probably subscribe to that david finch course if you want to be really good well hell yeah and it's not even a subscription man it's a one-off payment so you can pay for it outright you'll get all the pearls of wisdom david with all of his years of experience in the mainstream industry has to give you so definitely worth the buy again i learned so much from him and it's an absolute pleasure honor to be able to showcase his courses on the how to draw a comic store i've also got a number of courses the one i would recommend actually the two i would recommend that i have put up there that are the most valuable are by far the proportions course a big hit with everybody and also the how to draw how to create a super heroines course because man that just that whole thing was scripted word for word i put a lot of time a lot of thought into exactly how i was going to explain everything that's demonstrated and that's a great course i mean i've got a copy of it i regularly actually just use the templates as that you do for reference nice man you know it's great value in that course so i definitely recommend it as well hell yeah man it's it's one of my favorites and and one that i'm still so proud of till this day no regrets sometimes i look back at a course i'm like man i hate it i've been done so much better but that one no way it was the best yeah uh you know again browse through the store there's lots and lots of great courses there i could give you tons of recommendations but every course that's there if it's there you're gonna get something out of it other than that check out our website buttonbrosstudios.com for our comic book news and and comic book updates usually i'm posting artworks such as the one you just saw demonstrated in this video commissions that the barton bros dude together uh we've got our comic book cozil featured on there which mentioning that once more check out the link in the description below because or descent into madness it'll take you directly to the indiegogo campaign where you can back the book and if you're unsure look through the preview pages we've uploaded because it'll give you a very small but potent taste as to what you can expect within the full book we're taking our time with this we're going through each and every page that corey has done and i'm remastering it in some cases i'm redrawing entire panels inking them up rendering them to the hilt yeah man you're doing great work on it like i'm so excited to get my own copy of the book thanks bro i appreciate that i'm glad that you like the work that i'm doing and corey is adding in brand new pages in fact the latest page that he's just done up for this book blew my mind i can hardly believe that this is actually going to be the calibre of art we'll be holding in our hands once it goes to print so very exciting times make sure that you're part of it we want you to have this book in your hands so back it today on indiegogo until next time keep on creating keep on drawing and we'll see you in the next comic art tutorial bye for now see you later [Music] you