Hacker News Books

40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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chevillonJune 16, 2021

There's tons of free ones on youtube so there's no need to spend a bunch of money. Proko has some good stuff on his channel. He does a lot of comic book stuff but he's a classically trained artist. Pretty sure he's got a beginner's section. He also has some videos giving advice on learning resources. There are lots of others that are really good too.

Drawabox.com has some good free stuff too.

If you'd prefer books I think Andrew Loomis books might be public domain. Fun with a Pencil is a good one. If they aren't public domain you can get them for $10-15 on Amazon because they started reprinting them.

How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is also a really good introduction to drawing. Don't let the title fool you though because its one of the best beginner's drawing books regardless of the genre.

Those are just examples though, there's tons and tons of great resources and everyone has their favorites.

tjakabonMar 5, 2021

It's been decades since I used it in a practical way, but "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" - https://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Comics-Marvel-Way/dp/0671530... is a surprisingly great tutorial for learning. You can ignore the bits on dynamic drawing that are more geared for comics, but it will give you a lot of foundational knowledge of composition and observing. The chapter on perspective is still one of the best writings on the subject I've ever seen. Pair it with a good life drawing book.

musicaleonMar 6, 2021

As an alternate "analytical/drafting" approach, I found "Drawing in the Digital Age," by Wei Xu to be pretty interesting. He uses triangles to divide up space and to build up basic shapes, and focuses on position, orientation, and proportion/scale. These seem like things that beginners can understand.

For constructing energetic characters, I like the Marvel/stick figure approach of "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way," by Stan Lee and John Buscema (also John Romita's book "Draw the Marvel Comics Super Heroes", which is sadly out of print but not hard to track down.)

Note that these books concentrate mainly on line drawing. Shading (or inking and coloring on the comic side) is of primary importance for turning line art into three dimensional art, and I don't have a great reference off the top of my head.

I think drawing programs with perspective grids can help as well. And lots of people use 3D software as a composition aid or to actually draw on top of. Some consider it "cheating" but remember that the old masters used optical devices like the camera obscura and wire grids (known in antiquity) as well as Renaissance optics like lenses and mirrors. I believe David Hockney tried to replicate some of these techniques with much success.

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