Book Review: Drawing Comics Lab: 52 Exercises on Characters, Panels, Storytelling, Publishing & Professional Practices

Robyn Chapman's Drawing Comics Lab is a primer or introduction to drawing comics. The book talks about the different aspects of drawing comics besides just drawing. Those would be stuff like creating characters, understanding panels and pacing, choosing drawing materials, etc.

Many of the lessons revolve around thinking, design and writing, rather than the actual technical part of putting pen on paper. Many have basically brain-storming exercises suggested by guest artists. Those artists' tips are quite useful at kick-starting your brain into coming up with ideas.

The book is really elementary and the 52 labs (lessons) can be brief at times. Even the author also suggested other books that you should check out if you're into those all-in-one books on drawing comics, namely, Making Comics by Scott McCloud, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel (this would get my recommendation).

Other books of note would be Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti, Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Do check out the preview pages on Amazon. That would give you a good idea if this book is for you.

I would recommend this book to beginner artists, those who are learning to draw and would like to turn their drawings into stories with sequential flow.

Drawing Comics Lab: 52 Exercises on Characters, Panels, Storytelling, Publishing & Professional Practices is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

The links below are affiliate links, which means I earn some commission from each purchase, but at no extra cost to you.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn