Ryan: Hi, I'm Ryan Benjamin. I'm a professional
comic book artist. I work for Marvel and DC Comics and pretty much anyone on the
planet that's willing to hire me. So, I'll demonstrate how I piece all this
together. I'll demonstrate ahead. So, I'm gonna use my red pencil. Now, the
red pencil is my thinking. This is where I'm gonna think. Some people don't like
to use a red pencil. The reason why again, why I use a red pencil is that I don't have to
erase, I don't have to do any back tracing. It's literally from here, moving forward
and when I'm drawing comics, I need to be able to produce a certain amount of
pages per day. I wanna move as fast as possible. So, I stick with my red pencils. Red pencils
allows me or gives me the opportunity to quickly layout the character, the position,
where the eyes are gonna land, eye socket, mouth, nose, hairline, I can quickly
scribble the shape of the head, jawline, temples, and then if the
character has hair, I can quickly scribble. Okay, where's his hair? Now, I have
a better sense of where am I going... And this point I don't have to erase it and
when we actually go to inks, you can erase the red marks when you're done when, you
scan this in, you can actually take out the red line using Photoshop or anything like
that and no one will ever see the red - the red lines and another cool thing about it too is
that when you're completely done with this piece and you actually sell it or someone
sees it, they actually see the process. The process is still there. So you're not erasing
anything. You're not seeing just the final stages. You're seeing the beginning, the middle, and then
the end stages at the same time. So this is why I like to use the red pencils. It just helps
with demonstrating that, okay? Now, from here, I know, I'm gonna draw the eyes first. I always draw the eyes first. The eyes are the windows to
the soul. This is how you communicate with people. So, once you nail down the eyes, everything will
surround it is pretty much easy. It's just - you can mess up on the nose, you can mess up on the
hair, you can mess up on the head structure but if the eyes are correct, everything else works. You
know, it literally just turns into like a style versus "Oh you got - the ears are too small.
You know, the nose are too big". You know, it just helps to balance things
out. So, nail down the eyes first. Once you have that, everything else works. The expression, the intensity, pretty much
everything with just the eyes. Now, I have the eyes down. From here, I'll immediately go
to the eyebrows the eyebrows. The eyebrows, it's just a frame. It's just another framework
but it's laying down the tracks right now, okay? So, you remember in the past how everyone
used to - when we were kids, we would have a dot here, dot here, dot here, and then you
just connect the dots - these are my dots. Instead of making dots, I'm making just uh,
geometric shapes and just connecting them basically. So from here, I'm gonna go down
and quickly draw the base of the nose, quickly draw where the mouth is going to land, quickly draw the bottom of the jaw and now
I have my triangle here and then from that I immediately go straight in. I'm not worried
about the contours or anything or trying to make all the line work and then going to render.
I'm immediately going straight to rendering. Again, the Reason why it's for, it's for
the sake of time. This is a shortcut. This is a way of quickly knocking out this
page within 25 minutes or this headshot in like twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, ten
minutes. You know, and then once you have it, it's done and then you can move on to the
next panel or the next frame or the next page. So, let's say I'm drawing a character. This
is just a regular random character. Now, I'm gonna go back to those techniques
that I was showing you guys before. - How many hours do you draw per day? - All day long. I literally don't stop. I draw
from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep. The only time I stop is to either hang
with the wife or hang with the kids or maybe you know, run an errand or two.
Other than that, I'm on the clock. - Where do you think the love for it comes from? - My love for drawing, oh man.
That probably comes from um my youth when I was a kid
just drawing all the time, you know? My sister was my first instructor. She
showed me what to do, what not to do. She showed me how to draw portraits. Then eventually, I
remember drawing uh, my first Hulk comic book. This is years ago, I was probably eight, maybe
younger than that. I drew my very first Hulk comic book and the story was the Hulk or David
Banner, you know, he was in this lab and he was mixing chemicals together, you know, and as
he's mixing these chemicals, he took it and - he turned into the Hulk and then the Hulk shrunk
into this little tiny little Hulk [Laughter]. And then he was running around, little tiny
Hulk was running around like [Oh-oh-oh] and then eventually, the little tiny
Hulk had to make new chemicals to fix himself and he dragged that and then
he turned back into the Big Hulk and that was my little story when I was
like 8 years old or something like that. I've heard many artists give
this advice.... Draw every day. It's mandatory. There's no way
around it. You can't just draw every 3 months and expect something to come out of
this and you can't draw every, you know, once in a while when you feel like it. You need to draw when
you feel like it, when you don't feel like it, when you're going to sleep, as soon as you wake
up in the morning, while you're eating lunch, wherever it is, make sure you have your sketch
pad on you and you're constantly drawing. This style of drawing here and when you're
drawing comics, it's an abbreviated form of art, really. It's the middle
point of taking that idea and presenting it to an audience and this style
here is really quick that you can actually use it to uh, you can repeat it, you can use it for
print. You can use it for pretty much anything. This is why I typically stick with this style. The
cool thing about just drawing comics in general is that it's a really cheap way of um, taking
your idea and testing it with an audience. I will always recommend, you know, this style of
art or just going in this direction since it's a very easy way of transitioning your idea into,
you know, reality, bringing you ideas to reality. Even the storytelling part of it
is abbreviating because if you're taking a full paragraph and you're
condensing it into like one image, you know, it's - and even the storytelling
part of it is - Now, I'm gonna show you some of the techniques that I was doing before
when you join here, okay? So, watch this. I'll I'm gonna do is just scribble. Now, you have a base from this
base I'm gonna quickly isolate areas and I'm not afraid to draw right on top of
the line. So, don't be afraid to do that because your anchor will see that and read it and they
will be able to interpret this. They'll they will be able to see these extra lines and ink
right - ink those lines, ink them in white. Another cool thing about
it is it creates dynamics. There's a lot of energy going on
right here, just by doing this. If you have a round object and the round object
has the dark area and then the bright areas, all you're doing is just drawing that
round object or trying to capture that round object in like different uh, at different
angles multiple times. So, that's all it is. So, I'm just drawing it here, drawing it here,
drawing it here, drawing it here, drawing it here, and in combination, it starts to create this
shape. Okay. Now, as you can see, as I'm drawing, my line work it's like that,
I'm moving pretty fast. That speed or that motion creates energy, okay?
So, that energy helps to bring life to the hair. If I wasn't drawing like this and moving my lines
like that, this hair - this hair would come out looking a lot more stiff. It looks - This
looks like you have something to work with. That's another cool thing to do. You can take your
eraser and just kinda add to it so you can go back through it like this and add some bright areas,
add some extra pieces that's in there like that. So, I'm gonna show you how I would do his
beard. I'm giving a full, a full beard. Again, you know, my process, it's ready, set, go. So
if I'm constantly looking for something new or moving this or that or trying to change
my direction, things slow me down. So, I just pretty much stick with my pencil. The only
pause I really have is when I need to sharpen. So, all these hash marks that I'm making, it just needs the hair. So, I'm moving - As
I'm drawing this , I have this object, I'm rendering in this direction like that,
that's what I'm thinking cuz I'm rendering towards the light at something else that I try
to teach people - When you're rendering stuff, you always wanna render - your first lines, you
wanna render towards the light. This is gonna be the hot source. If you have a - if you have uh,
like a round object here, right? And you have you have a shadow here. So, this is
your absolute black. Your gray area is gonna land somewhere around here
in this region which is gonna have all your line work going towards
this hot spot just right here. So, this process is what I'm using to create the
beard but I'm doing - I'm doing it with flavor. I'm doing it with some style. And again, I'm
going for speed. This is all strictly for speed. Now, this process I'm using here, from here, you
can go in, you can add whatever you're doing, have a jacket, give him a short hair in the back. Give him some straight hair but it
kind of pulling in the bottom part. I haven't even drawn his actual ear yet. Getting a little bit more beef back here. There's a good friend of mine, um, Sean Galloway,
he and I used to go to figure drawing classes and we would just sit there and just draw
a lot of models and we would hang out on a Saturday morning and just draw. Now, from here,
it's pretty much ready to be inked right now. - Is there anything you have trouble drawing? - It's not like I - it's not that I have
trouble drawing is that I just hate drawing [Laughter]. I hate drawing robots. Oh, man. They
just - There's something about drawing robots that just throws me off. I can draw it, I just
don't like doing it. If I'm gonna draw a robot, it needs to look, you know, I need to do something
pretty cool, you know. Technical pencils is great, you don't have to sharpen ever but
this just feels a little bit more raw. When I have a pencil like this and you can
get a nice little - like a nice line work from this and it's still - it's still nice and
dark at the same time, you know, it's still has like an organic feel to it but I'm gonna try
to draw some kind of like all these pistons and gadgets and gears and everything. So, to make this look a little bit
more robotic, what I'll probably do is Just like kinda add like little holes
like this. Maybe add a couple of them here and just repeat certain patterns like uh,
maybe something like this. At least, you know, now it has like somewhat of an organic type of
feel to it. It's just so technical and so linear. And now it's more like a just a cool-looking
robot who's coming to destroy all humanity. A little bit of Ultron. - "I am Ultron". - See, now, I'm having fun
when I'm drawing a robot cuz it's not so - it's not so stiff, you know. Another
thing too that I really like is to flip my art which is great 'cuz I have a camera - I have a
shot of it here, it's flipping it for me. So, it's perfect. That way I can see all
my mistakes and I can correct it. When I was younger, my, like I said, my major
influence came from studying the old artist and then when I decided okay, I really wanna
study, I really wanna focus on the human anatomy. I studied Burne Hogarth. I went out
and bought his book and I would literally trace his work. I would trace it and I was
like "Oh man, this guy's amazing". And I would just try to capture his
muscle structures and his forms. I took some of his poses in his figures and I
converted it into the ThunderCats character. So, I would - you would have, you know,
the Burne Hogarth character doing this but now it's Lionel doing this, you
know? So, I would use that technique and that helped me understand, okay, I
have this muscle structure and then, I'm gonna skin it with a specific character
and that helped me, you know, I'll just forge my brain in that direction like I'm
gonna draw comics, I'm gonna draw comics. Yeah, at that time, I didn't even know I
was gonna draw comics but I was thinking, I need to go in that direction. How I
got into comics was um, I was sitting in art class. I went to a college, a small art
college called International Fine Arts College. It was in Miami and I was in
class with uh, two guys who end up working in any industry at Image Comics
with me. Uh, Sean Ruffner and Brett Booth. So, we're sitting in class together and then
Brett came up to me. He was like - well, he came up to all of us. We're in a group and he was
like, "You guys got to see this guy". He pull out Jim Lee's X-Men and he showed it to me and
I was sitting here like, "Wow, who is this guy? This guy is amazing" and I'm looking at
Jim Lee's X-Men and I'm like, "Whoa, I think I wanna draw comics" and then he was like, "Yeah,
this guy just came out with a new company with a whole bunch of guys and it's called Image Comics"
and that's when he showed me the Wildcats #1 and I'm sitting there looking at Wildcats #1 and
I'm like, "Okay, I know what I wanna do now". I feel like I've been practicing this whole time,
it's getting good, getting good, getting good. At a certain point, I didn't know what
I wanted to do in life. All I knew was that I can draw and then once I saw those two
comics, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to draw comic books. In my head, I was
still thinking, oh, but how am I gonna do this? How am I gonna do this? And then Brett told
us, he was like, "Yeah, Jim Lee just hired me. I'm gonna be working at Image Comics" and I'm
sitting here in class, I'm like, "Brett's gonna be working at Image Comics" and here I am sitting
like I don't know what I still - I don't know what I wanna do and so in my head I'm like "I'm gonna
follow Brett, I wanna do this, I wanna do this". So, Brett flew out, he came to California
and he started working at Image and I stayed in contact with him and while I was talking
to him - remember this was before Email, so everything was through phone or handwritten
letters, you know? We still were using snail mail and I told Brett, okay, I wanna send you some
um, some samples and can you show this to Jim Lee? So, I did an airbrushed piece of
Maul. The response that came back was, "This is great. Let me see more". I was like,
done, this is exactly what I'm gonna do" and at that time, remember, I didn't
know what I wanted to do in school. So, I decided hmm, I was gonna go back to school.
So, when I was back in college, I had already graduated and I was - when I went back to
school, I was only back in school for about like maybe 2 months and then that's when I was
like, "Okay, I'm done, I'm not going back ever". I called my dad and I was like, "Dad, I'm
quitting. I need you - I already have a degree but I'm gonna quit what I'm taking right now
and I'm gonna sit at home and practice cuz I wanna draw comics. But I need you to pay
my rent for me". My dad was like, "Okay". So he would send me money just so I
can pay my rent and eat and survive and literally all I did was draw,
sleep, draw, sleep, draw, sleep. I was that determined to get this job and I did
that for six months. I would do one submission each month. So, I was sending a piece. The Maul
was the first month. Second month, I did another piece. Third month, I did a couple pieces and each
time I would send it in, the response I would get back, "This is great. Let me see more. This is
great, let me see more" and then I start thinking, I know they like Star Trek. I know they like,
you know, the whole, you know, science fiction type of thing, type of feel. So, I sort
of think okay, what is it - what is it gonna take for me to wow Jim Lee and make him
say, "Okay, I want you to come work with me". Like I'm gonna draw the X-Men versus
Wildcats in a bar and I try to create this like science type of - or this
Star Trek type of feel around it. So, that's what I did. I did six pages of that and
one of the pages, I copied Jim Lee's page that he did before. So, I just took the same layout
but I changed the characters to the Wildcats versus X-Men um, characters that's in there and
I sent that off to him and then I'm sitting at home and while, I'm sitting there so I get a
phone call and it's Jim Lee on the other end and I'm just like, this is not Jim Lee. Really?
"This is Jim Lee?" He's like, "Yeah, this is Jim. I really like your work. I want you to
come work for me. We're gonna send you out and try you out" and I say, "Okay, cool". Hang
up the phone and immediately ran to my local comic workshop where I would hang out. It was
called Common Quest at the time and I went there. My friend Joe Mod, he was the owner and um, I
was sit there. I actually burst it through a door and I was like, "I'm gonna be working for Image
Comics!" and they all just looked at me like this, like, what? Like, yes. Jim Lee just called
me, I'm gonna be working at Image Comics cuz they already knew about Brett and so,
they were all just excited and that was like the thing for me there - right there and that was
just like amazing. I don't believe it was going to happen. The next thing you know, I'm in California
walking in the studio. That's when I met your dad. That's when I met Scott Williams, Mark Sylvestri,
Matt Broom was there, Trevor Scott, Scott Clark, they were all there and then about a week later,
Dan Norton came in, Travis Charest came in. I remember Nick Manabat was there, a whole bunch
- It was just - it was like this, like a studio with a bunch of artists just sitting here just
drawing all day long. Super amazing times, man. You can't repeat that time. That time came and
it's gone. It's in history books now. It's just, you can't repeat it, you know? Stan: Thank you, Ryan. If
you're digging Ryan's art, check out his website and Instagram in the links
below. Ryan also teaches at Comicprobootcamp.com where he and a few other legendary comic artists teach the skills needed to become a professional
comic artist. We got more lessons with Ryan coming up. So, if you're not subscribed,
hit those buttons and we'll see you in the
