Marvel is not monitoring the discussions or any posts, including submissions made here. Do not use this page to contact or send Marvel your submissions. Be kind and respectful when posting. Don't harass, threaten, or insult anyone. It’s time for you to practice penciling!

This assignment comes to you in two parts:

Part 1: Begin by warming up in your sketchbook. Throw some warm up lines like Ryan shows in his lessons, rotating your page as needed. Get used to this feel and try to capture that when we move onto drawing characters. On that same page, practice shading, texturing, and throwing your lines. Use the side of your pencil to make an abstract shadow shape. Outline that shape, and then practice your rendering from it! Turn your page as you render so you’re using the most natural motion when you render. Shading and hatching abstract shapes will help you not get stuck on “oh that’s a face, oh that’s an ear”. You’re just practicing the technique here without all that additional baggage. 

On another page, draw each of these primitive forms: cubes, cylinders, cones, and spheres! Then, shade them using Ryan’s techniques that he showed us in his shading lesson. Choose where your lights and darks will go, shade the darks, and use hatching or cross hatching to show the forms where the shadow meets the light. Ryan showed us how he hatches with the contour, or cross-contour of the shape. Try both, or combine them! Get comfortable drawing in your sketchbook, and turning the page to get the most comfortable lines. The more comfortable you get with your tools, the more expressive you can be with your lines. These are warmups that you can do before your comic work to prep your hand for the bigger projects!

Part 2: Next, we’ll be drawing a scene from our story in the previous lesson group. These don’t have to look amazing, but do the best you can. Start with some loose thumbnails, and plan the scene before you jump in. We’re getting comfortable with our penciling techniques, not mastering anatomy, or composition at this stage. Focus on drawing convincing 3-dimensional shapes that are shaded and correctly crosshatched considering the underlying forms. Think about the textures on the objects you’re drawing. Try to get brick, metal, plants, hair, and armor textured differently in your pencils. 

For your subject, draw three scenes from your story with Spiderman and Black Panther. Cover the Introduction, the climax of the Conflict, and the Resolution. 

Draw the Introduction scene where Black Panther first contacts Spiderman for help. Peter could be swinging through the city, at his day job, or getting a call on a communicator. Make sure the background is visible for this introductory shot so we know what location Peter starts off in. If he’s in the city, get those buildings drawn in there using your simple cube shapes! Are there trees? Simple cylinders will help get them looking good.

Next, draw a scene from your Conflict with high action. Get both Spiderman and Black Panther in there facing off against the threat. They can be running, leaping, punching - or have one of them taken down while the other protects their fallen friend. The goal for this one is to get at least two characters interacting with each other with Big Marvel Action.

Finally, draw the Resolution. Make this a more relaxed scene of low action or a dialogue shot of talking heads. You can focus on the portraits of the characters to get more detail there than in previous scenes. Show the aftermath of the conflict here.

Start with your red or blue pencil, and once you’ve laid in the gesture and simple shapes for the environment and characters, go back in with your darker pencils to tighten things up. Don’t draw faster than your brain, but keep it quick and energetic. As Ryan says: Throw your lines.

You may fail. That’s ok! We’re getting used to our tools and you can always try this assignment again at the end of the course to see how you’ve progressed. But save your drawings, because our next lesson group… is inking!

You have until 09/30/2023 to submit your critiques to be in the video!