A reasonable number of people who stumble across this website do so looking for actual advice on how to draw feet. So I thought I’d put together this little tutorial for them.

How To Draw Feet in 13 Easy Steps

1. Draw the rest of the character first, obviously. Head, body, arms, legs, just leave out the feet.

2. Go and make yourself a cup of coffee, you really don’t want to attempt this if you’re under-caffeinated.

3. Return to your drawing. Trace over the ankles a few times. Practice twirling your pencil. Not that I’m saying you’re a bad pencil twirler, but we could always be better, right?

4. Go through your mp3 collection for some music that’ll inspire you to draw some feet. As you do this, ask yourself this question; can you honestly tell yourself that all the id3 tags on your mp3s are correct? Is ‘genre’ filled in and everything? Now would be a really good time to get onto that.

5. You have definitely earned another coffee. Quick, go now, and double spoon this time.

6. Ok, we’re making some real progress here, what you really need at this stage is to study how your fellow comic artists have drawn feet. Go through the complete archives of xkcd, Explosm and A Softer World.

7. Another coffee.

8. OK, now comes the important step; return to your drawing. Stare at it intently. Add some extra colouring and shading to the body.

9. Look up feet on Wikipedia. Instead end up reading about the Foot Clan from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It says they’re non-fictional, can that be right? Look into that.

10. Umm, hello? Another coffee.

11. …looking-at-your-own-feet-now-and-just-how-does-it-work-that-you-can-have-feet-
but-not-be-able-to-draw-them-that-just-doesn’t-seem-to-make-sense-and-whoa!-look-
at-how-fast-your-feet-are-tapping!-I-bet-most-people-couldn’t-tap-that-fast-you’d-
probably-make-a-really-good-tapdancer-and-why’d-tapdancing-ever-go-out-of-style?-
ahh-yes-‘cause-it’s-shit-and-also-I-wonder-if…

12. OK, clearly you’ve become a little over-caffeinated. Relax. Alcohol counteracts caffeine; a few drinks will calm you down. You’ve still got that half bottle of Jim Beam from last Friday.

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I’ll be honest with you all about this one. I was originally drawn to this comic by an offer of free ad space in the print publication. Unfortunately, I was a little to slow off the mark and missed the deadline.

Dark Red is a weekly comic that would really suit a graphic novel release. To quote from the About page:

“Dark Red is a fantasy and supernatural webcomic that updates every Friday. Although it’s a little spooky and otherworldly, Dark Red has real-life stuff in it, like jokes and tears, chocolate and the occasional pint. It’s about the fight between good and evil, and about keeping your sense of humour against overwhelming odds.”

Now normally, when it comes to webcomics I have a really short attention span. If you check our links page, you’ll see that the comics on my reading list are generally gag-a-day. Even the comics that I read with an overriding storyline have a daily gag involved. When it comes to in-depth stories, I’d much rather sit down with a novel. And even then I like to read in long sessions - often more than 8 hours at a time, since I HATE putting down a book half way through.

Dark Red just might be the first step in breaking this prediliction.  Currently on hiatus, there are still 50+ pages for you to get started on and I really want to find out how this story develops. I may just wait for the completion and buy the set of publications, but if you enjoy episodic releases (or haven’t yet given them a chance) I can definately recommened that you add this strip to your RSS feed.