Sites such as Deviant Art and Art Station serve as platforms for budding artists to showcase renditions of their beloved fictional icons. What’s impressive is how this hobby allowed these artists to embellish their illustration skills. Art Place recently challenged would-be artists to do a two-minute sketch. Today, the challenge is to draw one of your favorite characters.
Concept Art Empire points out that drawing your favorite character can be a gateway to discovering specific illustrating fundamentals. Try to draw your favorite superhero, like Batman for instance. You need to figure out how to draw the basic anatomy before anything else because you have to portray the character’s physical prowess, the look of his costume, and his flair for drama. He is someone dressed up as a huge bat and in lesser hands, he could look rather cartoonish. Artists who love the character will want to make sure that they do him justice.
Each character comes with their own unique set of challenges. With Spider-Man, these are the incredible details of his costume and drawing his signature poses. For Wonder Woman, it’s about learning how to illustrate the female anatomy and illustrating her sword and shield.
As you improve through drawing more characters, Fan/Fic Magazine gave a few tips to help bring your fan art style to a new level at the same time:
• Keep it simple – Develop your line art and focus on black and white. Shading and coloring will have to wait until there’s a marked improvement.
• References – Get photo references from the internet.
• Tracing – Tracing comic book characters allows you to get a better understanding of illustrating them.
• Study your favorite artist’s work – You can download their work and open it on Photoshop. Take notes on how they tackle lighting perspectives.
Once you get the hang of all these tips, you can proceed to the next step – designing your own character. The likelihood is that you’re going to be influenced by the ones you like best, and that’s perfectly fine. The bigger challenge though, is in choosing where to begin since there are countless fictional characters to consider.
It might be best to start with a specific niche, such as superheroes. Superhero characters are prominent right now and the genre is creating a new generation of artists, inspired by what they see on the silver screen. Wonder Woman is among the most popular, so it’s not surprising at all that she is now seen through a variety of adaptations. The Amazon Queen game on FoxyCasino takes elements of the iconic Wonder Woman to create a truly unique character that resonates with her fanbase. The aforementioned character is seen as a fiercless warrior who leads a tribe of female Amazonians not too dissimilar to Wonder Woman. The same trend is also apparent in social media as well. An article on the Huffington Post featured Luca, a girl who created a scissor-wielding superhero named Janet. The art was posted on social media and went viral. Her work got retweeted 11,000 times and favorited 42,000 times! What’s interesting about Luca’s character is that she has her own personality.
As you can see, your fan art can actually lead somewhere. Give yourself lots of time to get better. Drawing can be tough but with all these tools at your disposal, you could be the next big-name artist, you just have to hone your craft over many years.
Patience is a virtue.