It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In order to make characters real - no matter what the character is doing - you have to see yourself as capable of having done that.
Even if you're drawing a cartoon and exaggerating, you want to capture something true about the person.
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.
I'm a self trained, autodidactic artist, so all I was ever trying to do was to draw as realistically as possible - but that's what comes out, because I don't really know how to draw! I think when I draw characters, I'm able to reduce them down to little marks that capture the most distinct elements of them.
When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.
I try to write characters that are as real, emotionally and psychologically, as I can make them; I feel the same way about setting. This often means that I'm drawing from my experiences and observations.
Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.
Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble.
I think you have to draw from any character and bring it to yourself as much as possible.