David Finch: Drawing a Page

David Finch is an accomplished comic book artist who’s worked on a ton of comics for Marvel, Image etc. He also has a YouTube channel on which he does livestreams and videos about drawing.

Now, I should admit I’m usually not a fan of art styles descended from what we might call the 90s Image style, but Finch is obviously very technically accomplished, and thoughtful about his compositions and his characters.

He also makes very good videos – he’s got a winning, warm personality, and listening to him talk is like listening to your favourite teacher. He’s got a great grasp of what he does, and he’s very good at explaining it. So I’m a fan of his channel.

He just posted one of my favourites series he’s ever done – drawing a page from Terminal, which is his new Skybound book with Robert Kirkman, Joe Casey, Art Adams, Andy Kubert etc.

Each video captures one step of the creative process (I’m both linking and embedding videos here, in case one of them stops working eventually), from thumbnails to finished art that’ll be sent off for inking.

First is layouts:

Next is two panels of pencils. It’s very interesting here to see how he builds a fake environment from real references.

Third is building an interesting figure when you’re drawing a character-forward panel:

Fourth is lighting and rendering a figure. I particularly loved how he used an old Kevin Nowlan comic to look specifically how an inker/finisher would create lighting in art that didn’t have lighting when it came to him:

And finally, he finishes the page by drawing backgrounds in the last page. I also really loved this one, because you can really see how he elevates his art from functional to dynamic by adding little lighting and rendering details that aren’t necessarily difficult, but which really make the difference between art that looks amateurish vs. professional.

It is very, very good stuff, and if you are learning how to draw comics (or do something else in comics that’s not drawing), this might make you start respecting everything an artist is doing – all the stuff that makes a comic-book artist a co-author and not just someone illustrating the writer’s work.