By CB Cebulski
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| BREAKING INTO COMICS THE MARVEL WAY #1 |
Last year, in 2009, we hired 81 new pencilers or penciler/inkers! That's one or two new artists who have come to work for Marvel every week! I challenge you to find any other company giving that many new artists a chance to get paid and published. There's no slowing down in 2010 either, as the Marvel minions travel from city-to-city, country-to-country, con-to-con, looking for the best new artists the world has to offer.
On my travels, I end up meeting and talking with all kinds of artists, and I often find myself giving a lot of the same advice, no matter where I am or who it is I'm talking to. So collected here, for the first time, are some of the most common tips, and tweets, I've doled out this year...
Pulled from CB Cebulski' Twitter feed (@CBCebulski) and organized by topic, these tips, tweets and missives may help YOU get into the comic book biz at the San Diego Comic-Con 2010 or beyond!
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| Hulk by Tomasso Bennato |
Today's Tips: Advice for Artists, part 1
Too many new artists still sending over only designs & sketches for us to look at. We NEED to see sequential pages you're wasting our time.
ALWAYS include a 3 to 4 page sequential sequence in your portfolio. Minimally! We're most concerned with storytelling.
Put some time and research into who you are submitting to and tailor your samples and the text of your e-mail to that editor.
Sometimes overdrawing your backgrounds, adding in too much detail, can be just as distracting. You can lose the characters in the panels.
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| New Avengers by Christian Nauck |
Backgrounds are not just window dressing. They help give characters, and thereby the reader, a sense of place in the scene and on the page.
Widescreen panels are a very cool tool for pencilers to have in their artistic arsenal... when used properly.
Embrace any and every characters' design, costume & powers. Use their given visual attributes to better tell your story in interesting ways!
Don't crop out a character's defining visual traits: Wolverine's claws, Daredevil's horns/billy club, Spidey's hands/webs, Cap's shield..
You need to find a balance by separating the foreground & background elements to place your characters clearly and naturally in each panel.
Editors and readers alike are not stupid. We can all notice the difference between "artistic choices" and "cheating". Please don't be lazy.
The only thing any artist should be comparing is the page they just finished to the one they penciled before it.
Come back to Marvel.com tomorrow for part 2!
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i think this is really helpful stuff. i feel kind of bad cause im going to marvel's competitor one day XP
What about writers?