Ben Towle

Author's posts

How to get Better at Drawing Hands

On the short list of most common problems with student comics artwork is “mitten hands.” You know what I’m talking about: a drawn hand that’s just a thumb hooked to an amorphous, fingerless blob. The close cousin of the mitten hand is the “hidey-hand” in which the character’s hands are always in his/her pockets, behind …

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Richard Scarry: an Appreciation

Richard Scarry is the “Kashmir” of children’s book illustrators; he’s so ubiquitous it can be easy to let rote familiarity blind you to how good the work itself is. Like any child who grew up in the 70s, I had a Richard Scarry book or two. My recent re-exposure to his work, though, is via …

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Portrait Night 2/15 (Tom Waits)

Continuing with my music-themed Tuesday Twitter #PortraitNight, here’s Tom Waits. This turned out OK, but not great. I have a history of mediocre attempts at drawings of Tom Waits. Here’s one I did at a convention for a Waits-themed sketchbook a while back. I like the diaper/”I don’t want to grow up” bit, but the …

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My “Cover” of Machine Man #2

Well, it’s been up over at the Covered blog for three or four days, so I guess I’m safe to go ahead and re-post it… If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the Covered project, it’s pretty simple: much as a one band might cover some other band’s song, on the Covered blog cartoonists and …

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How-To: Pre-Coloring Photoshop Actions

I was talking recently on Twitter about how much I love the convenience of custom Photoshop actions for performing routine tasks and I had a request to do a quick blog post about how I use Photoshop actions to get my pages set up for coloring. In reading about how various cartoonists color their work, …

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