Drawing Tutorial: How to Create a Superhero Comic Page

Learn the basic creation and design tips for a comic book page step by step with Salva Espín

In the world of superhero comics, character design is vital. However, it's also necessary to know how to distribute these characters on a page so that it is simple to read and effective, both narratively and aesthetically.

Illustrator and comic book artist Salva Espín (@salvaespin) shows us how to distribute our superhero story and make a initial pencil sketch. You can see the video here:

1. Starting point and materials

After deciding how to lay out our page, we can prepare the necessary materials for the first sketch.

Take an A3 page as a base, although it's worth keeping in mind that this size can change according to the editorial or market we're working in.

Before you begin, place the margins on either side, 1cm thick. Margins are vital in comic creation as they allow us to maintain the important elements in this space and avoid losing any crucial details when it comes to cutting the pages. If working for a particular editorial, you should check what margin sizes they prefer.

For the first preliminary sketch, we'll use a blue pencil as opposed to a graphite one. This will mean we don't have to erase as much due to its intensity, allowing us to preserve the paper better and avoid having to work with lines we haven't properly erased.

2. First vignettes

The shape, size, and position of your vignettes is going to affect both the drawings and the distribution of information on the page. Therefore, the first step is to draw the lines. A ruler will help achieve straight clean lines. We won't start drawing till we've found a layout we like.

3. Initial sketch and references

Once we've distributed the vignettes, we can fill them in with the drawings. Continue using the blue pencil and tools like the ruler to drawing long straight lines.

This is also the moment to look for references if we need them, especially if they're compositions with perspective. A useful method to find references is to take photos of figurines, placed on our page as though they were characters in our scene. This allows us to simplify complicated compositions and place them easily in our vignettes.

4. Clean up the lines with a normal pencil

Once you've finished the first sketch with the blue pencil, you can go over the lines cleanly in standard graphite.

This step doesn't just trace our initial sketch, but also allows us to refine the original drawing, spot errors to fix, and improve the piece in general.

While this might not be the final version, be conscious of the thickness of the line with which we trace our characters and backgrounds according to the placement of the scene. This step will give us a more definitive sketch which will help determine what we do next.

If you liked this tutorial, you can learn more from Salva Espín about the foundations of sequential narratives and the creation of your first comic on his course Pencil Drawing for Superhero Comics.

You may also like:

- Illustration for Comics: Anatomy of a Superhero, a course by Ariel Olivetti
- The Superhero Comic: Narrative and Graphic Design, a course by Carlos Pacheco