How Not To Draw A Webcomic

(Submitted by Plotless Violence)
How not to write a How-to-Draw book.

Drawing is awesome, it's a great hobby, and many many people want to learn how to do it well. So it's monumentally dissapointing that there are virtually no good instructional books.
Say you buy a 200-page "Draw humans!" book. The first 100 pages are going to be the author's pseudointellectual highbrow dissertation on the human understanding of "forms," none of which will make anyone a lick better at drawing. Throughout those and the rest of the book will be beautiful finished masterpieces by the "writer" draped across half the pages, none of which will in general add to a reader's understanding of form, even if the reader hand traces each picture. But as far as the Artist Author is concerned, it's more important to show off what he can do after 3 decades of practice than to teach potential competitors.
The next 20 pages of the book will be this lovely little advice along the lines of "what you should do is draw every day. Practice, alot. Find other people and draw them." WOW, REALLYS!? How were we idiot novices supposed to know that drawing real human beings would teach us how to draw human beings realistically? THANKS, buddy!

Then come about 50 pages of actual instructional material, the "meat" of the book. Unfortunately, every page is a variation of,

I am so d-mn sick of reading the phrase "fill in the details." It's like the yadda yadda bit on the Seinfeld episode, or the "Step 1: Steal Underpants, Step 3: Profit!" of South Park. The details are what matter! The details are all those things WE DON'T KNOW! That YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO TEACH US!
99% of the "instructional" material is so advanced or skips so many steps that you need to already know how to draw in order to understand it, except that if you already know how to draw it you never needed the instructional book, so why bother?
I mean, I'm not ragging on practice or anything, that's important, but if I don't know how to draw, say, the Trapezius muscle from a front view, I can EITHER draw 1000 necks I see in real life observing variations for gender and muscle development over the course of 3 years, OR I can spend 30 whole seconds reading a good half-page pictoral explanation of where the muscle fibers are and how they connect to the scapula and collarbone and get the same result. So yes, you can learn how to draw by yourself, but why spend 1000 times the time?
The next big mistake is that "instructional" artists usually only show an individual muscle from one angle, which I guess works fine if you're using a webcomic format where you copy-paste the same image of the same character into each strip, but if you want action sequences or want to mix up the "camera" angle for a mood shift, you're shift out of luck.
Then they'll be a 7-page section on lighting and shadows, bearing some relative of the phrase "You should, uh, add shadows, shadowing is good! Just look at these three masterworks!" None of that will help the newbie improve. If you're going to teach lightsourcing, three dimensions or perspective, you're going to have to break the concept apart and show the same image from multiple angles, using paragraphs of step-by-step explanations and ultra-simple boxy illustrations that are designed to highlight the concept instead of just whatever art the Writer had laying around that day. What we need to see is different methods of crosshatching for halftone efffects, where all the major light-catching planes are on a human figure, and a several choice examples of how to light eliptical-shaped vs. square vs. hollow vs. towering-over-another-body-part shaped objects if the light is coming from different angles or at different intensities. If all you're going to say about shading or perspective is that artists should do it, you're just wasting paper and killing trees for fun. But it does help sell the sequel, Shading is, uh, really good, you should do more of it!

Just because I'm such a nice guy, I won't leave you hanging, but instead mention the best teach-yourself-drawing books for those of you who want to start putting pencil to paper from zero skill:

1) Figure Drawing for All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis - The ideal starting place, basic head setup, the body proportions exactly explained for different genders, and a uniquely excellent description of 2-point perspective.
2) Drawing the Human Head by Burne Hogarth - The head is the hardest and most crucial part of drawing, and this is the man to learn it from. Hogarth understands that whereas drawing is an art, learning how to draw is pure mathematical geometry, and so he builds up the head step by step with various shapes followed by numerical proportions (for example, the nose length = the distance from hairline to brow= distance from hairline to top of head = the distance from bottom of nose to chin = 1.5 eye lengths = 1/4 height of human face = 1/3 width of human face = 3/128 the height of the average male). The section on wrinkling and other aging is good, but all the tips on how the eyes and other features change as the head tilts and changes angles alone is worth the price of the book.
3) Drawing Dynamic Hands by Burne Hogarth - Hands are hard, this will solve the problem for you in pure geometrical/numerical terms, comparing lengths in internal and compared-to-arms-and-face proportions from all angles.
4) Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm - a good general art books that takes some different approaches than Loomis, particularly with regard to greater detail on some of the muscles.

If you have any other suggestions for books to learn from, please let me know. Thanks for reading.
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