How to Draw (a World)

How we create whole worlds in comics, Agnes Martin, the work of Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki, hex #c1f0f6, and more.

Howdy, friend.

Here in Nebraska, we’ve had a spate of 100+ degree days and I’m over it, thanks. This means, though, I’ve been spending more time than usual indoors buried in graphic novels and memoirs and superhero comics, discovering some incredible voices and art. I’ve also been trying to get better at drawing landscapes and cityscapes, forcing myself to practice on the buildings and panoramas viewable from my apartment window.

This got me thinking about the creation of habitats and environments and what it means to worldbuild. So, this month I sat down and thought about the basics of worldbuilding—we could, of course, spend an entire book on the subject—and cobbled together three simple criteria to use in the medium of comicsmaking: COLOR, SCALE, and HABITATION. Are there so many other factors to consider? Yes, but I want to present a simple starting point and a lens through which we consider the work of others. So, in this issue of How to Draw, we’ll explore these concepts within the frame of worldbuilding as we dissect two beautiful, inspiring graphic books and what we can learn from each.

If this is your first time visiting How to Draw, a hearty welcome. You can check out our archive of posts here. And if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing so you don’t miss a thing.

Stay cool out there. ♡

– RJR

“The silence on the floor of my house
Is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in
The world
The sentimental furniture threatens the peace
The reflection of a sunset speaks loudly of days.”
—Agnes Martin

Truly, it’s so easy to get lost in a world of one’s own creation. Growing up, I was convinced that in the medium of comics, worldbuilding equals the amount of detail you draw. A constant barage of noise to ensure we know where and when our characters are at any point. Here, looking at a page from Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled (written by Frank Miller), we can see the near impossibility of what he’s managed to add to this panel in order to tell this dystopian story, a minutiae of particulars.

It was discouraging, seeing art like this knowing I’d never be able to replicate this level of art myself. If this is what it takes to make comic worlds come alive, I figured, I guess I don’t have what it takes. And for a long time, I moved past comicsmaking, assuming it wasn’t for me.

Years later, when I discovered the post-war abstract expressionists, especially the mystically-talented Agnes Martin, I was shook: whole universes found in non-representational forms, the use of colors to engage the viewer and to convey emotional anrratives as dazzling as any book I’d read. For instance, a favorite of mine, Martin’s Night Sea:

Color suddenly became a way in for me to start exploring meaning and depth and the act of creation itself. As a kid, I’d been a voracious comic book reader but read for sensationalist plots and dramatic character arcs, as kids do. I’d missed out on the form’s grander artistic merits, so post-Martin I went back, started looking at how colors were used in my favorite comics, how they were integral to telling stories in this form.

This got me thinking: Worldbuilding isn’t just what we see on the page, but it’s also a feeling, a possibility of what may be in this world. It’s how we should begin the act of creation: What is this place, where is this place, and how does this place inform the story we’re trying to tell? After all, as the saying goes: we do eat with our eyes, too.

Now, years later, I always begin a project by choosing a color palette, not only as inspiration for the project but to help guide the beginning of world creation. Here, for instance, a palette I’ve chosen to work with on a new spooky comic I’m working on:

So, let’s start with COLOR as our lead in to worldbuilding, which I believe is a great preamble to thinking about SCALE and HABITATION, studying two these two books:

• The World of Edena by Moebius

• Shuna's Journey by Hayao Miyazaki

Color Palette

Color helps visually shape the environment and the emotional tone of our stories. We can use color to craft distinct landscapes (e.g. a desert location might feature warm, earthy tones, while an underwater scene may be filled with blues and greens). Color also helps influence our emotional response—for instance, a bright color may evoke feelings of joy or excitement. (A great example of this is A. J. Dungo’s brilliant In Waves, which I dissected previously here.)

We feel colors before we understand what else might be happening on the page; they speak to us subliminally and do a lot of heavy lifting, narratively. See, there are reams of psychological research on how colors affect mood—how our brains associate reds with passion and love, blues with sadness and isolation, yellows with confidence and hope, etc. 

Ultimately, we use colors to bridge our understanding with the narrative—as alien as a sci-fi landscape may look, we still understand what a palette of bright reds is meant to invoke. We can understand traditions and cultural significance through color; times of day, and the passage of time, too. Our color usage helps readers feel like they are exploring a cohesive and fully realized setting: a black line drawing can be aesthetically pleasing, but by adding color it comes alive and asks us to envision using our senses in that place. We compare it to real-world counterparts so we can make sense of it.

The World of Edena by Moebius, the pen name of French artist Jean Giraud, is a science fiction graphic novel that follows interstellar investigators Stel and Atan as they discover the mythical paradise planet Edena, encountering ancient secrets and cosmic forces along their way. (It’s a struggle to know how to properly discuss this book, let alone how to distill it down to an elevator pitch—it gets wonderfully weird.) This is a book very much about spirituality and shifting identities over time. Moebius employs a diverse and vibrant color palette to differentiate landscapes and worlds within the story and create a sense of awe; from the lush, green landscapes of Edena to the surreal and alien realms, each environment is characterized by a unique color scheme, helping us instantly recognize and engage with different settings.

In his pages, radiant blues and purples often represent celestial forces or spiritual dimensions, while earthy tones ground the story in a sense of physical reality; the use of soft colors and gradients gives the comic a dreamlike quality, contributing to the sense of exploration and discovery within this fantastical, surreal narrative.

Miyazaki’s Shuna’s Journey is the story of a young prince’s quest to save his village by embarking on a perilous journey through a world filled with mythical creatures and strong pro-environmental themes; Shuna sets off to a mysterious western land to seek the source of a magical golden grain that may help his subjects. This is a work of naturalistic and earthy color palettes that evoke a sense of realism and help us connect to nature in the story. Here, Miyazaki wants us to feel as if this is a believable history, a story that could, just maybe, be set in our own world.

These two stories are radically different in their approach to plausibility: Moebius wants us to see his work as the fantastic, the otherwordly, the divine; Miyazaki wishes for us to see ourselves reflected in his tale. It is the colors that set these standards from the very first page.

Scale

What do I mean by scale? Again, you don’t need a great deal of detail in your linework in order to sell a setting. But you do need to understand the scope of the land, your character's location and size in relation to other characters and locations. Are there vast cities on mountain crests, or unyielding plateaus devoid of life? Are your characters tiny in a huge environment, or are they large, crowded in amongst a dense cluster of trees? Like our color palette, spatial layout and scale allow us to be immersed more deeply, to comprehend how the nuts and bolts of this place work.

In both World of Edena and Shuna’s Journey, there is a sense of grandeur in the wilds our characters find themselves in, the towns they detour through that help sell the narratives and their sense of astonishment. And yes, Color plays a vital role in thinking about Scale by shaping what we see and what the author wants us to feel as our characters set out on their quests.

Habitation

If scale represents the scope of our world, how long it may take us to walk from one corner to another, the natural landscape, Habitation represents the lived-in qualities—how we’ve tamed these places: How do people make their living in this world? What rituals do they enact? How do they dress? A bell tower atop a colossal church—how does one get to it? Whose job is it to ensure it rings?

I think about Lego when I think about Habitation: If you build a house your Lego Minifigures can inhabit, but don’t build staircases or ladders to get them to the different levels, the believability is suddenly gone—we must see our worlds as real (through whatever lens “real” is in these stories). We must get a sense our beings live there, can and do interact with it, that there are whole ecosystems at play we may not even bear witness to and yet bind the whole thing together. Again, Color can play a crucial role in how we perceive Habitation.

For instance, the stark yellow (read: inorganic) of a broken-down ship in World of Edena.

Or, in Shuna’s Journey, the wooden scaffolding and soft ornamental stonework—the suggestions of history and culture that blend into the architecture as a sign of reverence, perhaps—of a village far removed from the rest of the world.

Here’s a short comic I started in 2022 but later stalled out on. The idea was that an isolated legionnaire-like soldier witnesses an anomaly out in the deep wilds near his station, investigates it, and discovers a wormhole to some future point in time. (Apologies that my French is so very bad.)

What was important to me here was establishing a grounded reality before I started zig-zagging off into sci-fi surreality. Here’s how I thought about these three points when drafting this out:

• Color: I decided on a muted color palette of beiges and browns and khakis, reserving brighter colors for his uniform, the anomaly, and accent colors (like the gold and salmon) as needed. I wanted the landscape to feel real to us, and infinite-seeming, before we jutted off into sci-fi territory.

• Scale: I wanted his lonely tower/base to be the highest point on the horizon to emphasize how he sees the world and his position in it. This isn’t a monstrously big structure; there’s enough room for our protagonist, his horse, and whatever other accessories we could imagine fit in a place like this. Here, we are again establishing our sense of reality—this appears normative to us, so we can set our expectations as such. See how the color of this tower, everything but our character’s uniform plays into the otherwise blandness of the setting; I wanted him to stick out against literally everything else, one man against it all.

• Habitation: In these few panels, we see the walls of the tower structure crumbling and cracked in places; our protagonist must use a ladder to access his lookout on the roof; he uses some sort of black rock or a piece of charcoal to mark down his days or toward something (we don’t know), giving us a sense that this character is real, that days (and time) have passed and that he understands this concept.

Author Matt Bell on worldbuilding (bolded text by me):

In the novel I’m drafting now, one of my goals has been to make the backdrop of the story as interesting as the foreground by finding ways to suggest the other stories happening throughout the city my protagonists inhabit. I want my wholly invented world to feel lived-in, in part to make room not only for the story I’m telling but for the possibility of other stories to be told later. When I think about this, I often picture the Mos Eisley cantina in the original Star Wars, whose unremarked-upon background characters have launched so much Expanded Universe content over the decades. Imagining what else was happening in that room has long been part of the pleasure of being part of the fandom […]

This gets to the heart of this lesson, and what we should linger on: Yes, worldbuilding may feel superfluous at times, but you’re creating for potential—for all that may be.

Craft a single panel as if it were taken from a longer work, put a character in this scene, choose a palette, and offer us some background and foreground. Here, I want you to consider COLOR, SCALE, and HABITATION that allows us to see beyond what you’ve done: that there is possibility, that there are stories here we aren’t seeing. You may include text if you’d like, but the goal here is to create a character in an environment that is indicative of something larger.

I don’t usually do this, but I felt inspired by my prompt and wanted to show you what I made: this froggy character—that I’m assuming is a literature professor of some sort—mid-adventure with flashlight and phone in hand. He’s slightly on edge, and we get the sense from the old stones and moss of some larger landscape just out of view. It’s exciting to think about how our character has gotten here and what happens next; already, from this single panel, I’m wanting more.

There is no wrong way to do this, friend. This isn’t about experience or how “good” you are. Comics and drawing and sequential art is all subjective. Even with little practice or training, you can still create a fully realized and emotionally resonant piece. Not to oversimplify the process, but this really is just about adding lines and shapes on the page in a way that pleases you. That’s all this needs to be. Don’t hold yourself back dwelling on what you think you “can’t do.” This is you taking control of your own story. Delight in that.

Play and see what sticks. It’s very rarely the first version of something that hits the mark. If you like one aspect, scrap everything else and cling to the bits you’re excited about. Show it to no one or everyone. (Want to share with me? Please do! Tag me—I’m @Robhollywood on Twitter and Instagram—or email me: robertjamesrussell@gmail.com.)

What I’m reading:

• Graphic: Juliette: Or, the Ghosts Return in the Spring by Camille Jourdy

• Novel: The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan

• Graphic: Upgrade Soul by Ezra Claytan Daniels

• Graphic: Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu by Junji Ito

• Graphic: Girl Juice by Benji Nate

• Graphic: Beta Ray Bill: Argent Star by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

• Nonfiction: In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki

• Nonfiction: The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi

A perfect panel:

• Upgrade Soul by Ezra Claytan Daniels

The color I’m obsessed with right now:

hex #c1f0f6– “Humming Bird”

Beautiful things I’ve watched (and/or rewatched) recently and can’t stop thinking about:

• Ran (1985)

• Shortcomings (2023)

• Wings of Desire (1987)

• Poker Face (2023)

• Barbie (2023)

• They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

• Castle in the Sky (1986)

News:

• I’m thrilled to have a new comic called “A Splendid Failure” featured in Collected Rejections‘ “On Rejection” series. This series features writers discussing painful rejections and what they learned from them; given the direction of my work these days, I opted to turn my interview into a comic where I discuss two failed novels and how this pushed me toward graphic memoir. CHECK IT OUT HERE!

• I have a comic in Issue 14 of The New Territory all about the invention of sliced bread in a small Missouri town for the “Weird News” section of the magazine. It’s a beautiful issue—PICK UP A COPY HERE.

• I’ll be teaching a FREE ONLINE drawing/cartoon workshop with the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) on Friday, September 8 at 7:00 PM EST. We’ll discuss drawing oneself as a non-human avatar (animal, vegetable, plant, piece of furniture, you name it!), explore the reasons behind our choices, examine some examples together, and make a four-panel comic together. This workshop is open to ANYONE, regardless of their age or level of experience. Mark your calendars, hope to see you there! SIGN UP HERE!