Interview: Ryan Stegman on I DRAW COMICS

Live on Kickstarter now, you can support I Draw Comics, a new project from designer Matt Marracco and comic book artist, and self-proclaimed Sexy Bad Boy of Comics, Ryan Stegman (Fantastic Four, Scarlet Spider). Marracco formerly produced a book called I Draw Cars, about the design and illustration of cars, and they’ve decided to take the idea a step further.

Instead of me telling you about it, let’s talk to Ryan and Matt. You can also learn more at IDrawComics.net.

iFanboy: What is I Draw Comics?

Matt Marracco: I DRAW COMICS is the ultimate tool for practicing the basics of Comic Book illustration, page design and the art of storytelling. We’ve designed the ultimate Comic Book field guide by pairing commonly used industry reference materials with a ubiquitous and iconic moleskine sketchbook form.

Ryan Stegman: I like to think of I DRAW COMICS as the book that I wish I had as a kid. I used to devour any book on drawing when I was younger. Remember those old Lee J. Ames books that taught you how to draw everything step by step? I was in love with those. Turns out they didn’t actually teach me much. But I DRAW COMICS is a book that gives you a framework for HOW to draw comics, and then gives you the templates necessary to TEACH you to draw comics. It gives you a very definite goal… Tasks to complete. Essentially it’s a “making comics workbook”.

iF: How did you two hook up with each other?

MM: We’ve been friends since the tender age of 12 when we met in middle school. More specifically, for this project Ryan was a clear choice when I began looking for information on doing a book on comic instruction just due to his mad skills and light hearted demeanor. Plus he’s hot as hell.

RS: Yeah, Matt and I met in middle school. He and I were the guys that liked to draw. We hit it off instantly. Matt became one of my best friends and he even went on family vacations with my family. We discovered Steven Wright together, went through a dreaded Korn phase together, and even had aspirations to be a penciler/inker team with our desks facing each other like in “Chasing Amy”. That obviously didn’t happen, but at least we ARE working together.

iF: Matt, what did you learn from I Draw Cars that you were able to apply to I Draw Comics?

MM: A LOT. Even aside from actually designing the book, just things like customer service, fulfillment, brand strategy, marketing and social efforts were all new to me. I learned as I went, made some mistakes and kept improving. Building something from the ground up requires many different skill sets, so to be able to hone them with the first book and then be able to apply them to the new book has been incredibly helpful. There’s a groundwork laid for almost everything we do now so inevitably there are less mistakes, but things find a way of popping up that we’ve never dealt with, so it stays interesting.

iF: What do you consider to be the most difficult thing about drawing comics for beginners to master?

MM: I would say perspective. Starting out, perspective took a lot of practice to understand – it seemed so complicated. Now it’s second nature – again, from practicing. More specific to comics, however, I would say it has always been the face. I can scribble out a body to show scale or to add context, but the face has so much personality, so much soul. There’s a lot of features at work simultaneously that make a face believable, interesting, whatever – they all have to jive for the face to look right.

RS: Matt kind of hit it on the head. Perspective and understanding 3d space are very difficult for a lot of people to master. But we hopefully give you the tools here by teaching perspective and how to effectively compose shots using overlapping etc. We also give you instruction on proportion, which was something that plagued me for a long time. And in drawing the proportion guides, I actually feel like I got better at understanding proportion. Haha. Maybe I should have done this a long time ago.

iF: Is the book done and ready to go?

MM: I would put the finish of the book at around 90%. The layout, sections and content are all in place and ready to go to print, but there is a bit of tweaking to be done to bring it from a great book to an industry-leading instruction guide. This tweaking is partly on our end, but also in working with our manufacturer to make sure color and material is 100% what we want. By the time the Kickstarter is over, we’ll be 100% ready to pull the trigger on mass-production, no doubt.

RS: Yeah, and I have to do two more drawings for it that are hammering me in the back of the head right now! But we’ve printed the prototypes. Showed it around a bit at Wizard World Chicago and everyone that looked through it got really excited about it. So, like Matt said, it’s DONE, just needs a couple tweaks. For example, the cover doesn’t say, “Ryan ‘The Sexy Bad Boy of Comics’ Stegman’s I Draw Comics“. It just says “I Draw Comics“. So I’m getting my lawyers on that one.