Spider-Man 2 : How To Draw Spider-man
Many how-to drawing books for children are worse than no instruction at all. They don't teach drawing, but rather how to copy some (usually unknown) artist's particular style–cartoon puppies with big round eyes and floppy ears, for example.
Not this book. A joint publication of Scholastic Books and Marvel Comics, "How to Draw Spider-Man 2" combines snappy text with the same material you would encounter in Drawing 101 at any art school. Kids are shown how to make a stick drawing of Spidey's pose first, then flesh the drawing out with basic shapes–his leg is two cylinders that meet at the knee, for example. After a lot of darkening and erasing, the final step is to add the webbing and other details of Spider-Man's costume – which is exactly where a lot of untrained artists would have started.
This slim book packs in a lot of helpful advice, couched in humorous terms: "Don't hold your pencil in a death grip – you're not Doc Ock! Grip the pencil lightly, balancing it in your hand as you draw with natural strokes." My husband, an animation teacher, said if he had a dime for every time he'd told a student to loosen up, he wouldn't have to teach animation anymore.
The organization of the book worked well, too. It started off easy (how to draw the spiders on the front and back of Spider-Man's costume), then grew increasingly complex (Spidey flying through the air, the high-rises behind him in three-point perspective). But for those of us who could never manage that, it ended on a cheerfully simple note: how to draw a spider web.
