Marvel Super Heroes: How to Draw (Parragon/Scholastic)

Background

This "How to Draw" the Marvel Super heroes is published in the UK by Parragon and in Australia/NZ by Scholastic.

Story Details

In dimensions, this product is standard magazine size - 8.5" x 10.6". It has 48 fully-colored pages with a square-bound glossy cardboard cover.

On the front cover is glued a plastic holding case with six colored pencils (red, black, blue, yellow, green and purple) along with an eraser and a pencil sharper.

Inside is a series of eight drawing classes - Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, Wolverine, Cyclops and Storm. There's a few preamble pages up front, but they're pretty trivial. If you know how to hold a pencil and draw a circle, you'll safely be able to skip the intro.

For each character there's a series of six pages. Two pages show you how to draw the character's head, then there's three pages guiding you through a classic character-specific action pose and one blank page for your practice.

All the sections follow the same pattern. Start with a few simple shapes, add some rough outlines, and then draw a perfect picture on top of them. Easy!

General Comments

Like all "How to Draw" books, there's a "magic happens here" step at some stage in the process. I'm fine with a few outlines, but I get to a certain point and suddenly there's a massive jump to a completed picture and I am just unable to make the leap. My scraggly, incomplete and lop-sided effort is never going to transform into the elegant result that I see in the next diagram.

Mind you, I'm utterly talentless.

For anybody with an ounce of artistic capability, maybe these few pages of instruction are sufficient to lead you from blank page to finished image. Or at the very least, to bring you close enough to be inspired to undertake the practice necessary to begin the journey towards becoming an illustrator... a journey you must take without me!

Overall Rating

Despite my utter lack of talent, I do like these kinds of book. And as "How to Draw" books go, this one isn't the worst. There are better ones out there of course. Personally I would recommend Klutz: Draw The Marvel Comics Super-Heroes, or even the classic How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

Half of this book actually appeared in the earlier Marvel Super Heroes: How To Draw Set (Parragon/Scholastic), which featured a 24-page booklet with the Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Hulk and Iron Man sections.

But this later, standalone 48-page book is definitely the better value of the two. There's twice as much actual content for half the price! Yeah, you get pencils instead of felt pens, and you don't get a big fold-out case. But in terms of bang for buck, this cheaper version is still far superior.

I give it three-and-a-half webs.