Draw Batman
From his premiere in Detective Comics #27, May 1939, Batman has become a superhero icon second only to Superman in longevity. Originally drawn by his creator, Bob Kane, the Dark Knight has evolved his appearance to suit each of the eras he has been published in, through the work of such DC Comics artists as Jerry Robinson, Dick Sprang, Sheldon Moldoff, Irv Novick, Dick Giordano, Neal Adams and Frank Miller. Knowing how to draw Batman well requires a knowledge of anatomy, perspective, attention to detail and a knowledge of the Caped Crusader's history, as described in the steps below.
Contents
Steps
Drawing Batman Running
- Draw Batman’s stick figure.
- Using your stick figure as your base, draw circles and pipes to represent the muscles.
- Add in the details of batman’s costume. Remember to add in two pointy horns, the mask, the bat design on the chest, his belt attached with pockets, the three blades attached in his gloves, his boots and his cape with zigzag design at the bottom.
- Draw the facial features and add details to the hands.
- Erase unnecessary lines and finish adding details.
- Color in your drawing.
Drawing Batman's Head
- Draw the outline of Batman’s head, tilted slightly sideways.
- Draw a large curve representing the shoulders, and two lines for the neck.
- Add details of his costume to your drawing.
- Draw the eyes and the mouth. Add the bat emblem (see below) to the chest area.
- Erase unnecessary lines and ink in your drawing.
- You can add in a few lines for the design on his mask and a few more lines as creases to his cape.
- Instead of coloring in the picture, you can also shade your drawing for a darker, more sinister look.
Drawing Batman's Body
- Decide which style of Batman you want to draw. Unlike Superman, whose look evolved early and has remained fairly constant throughout his appearance in the comics, Batman's look has been revised a number of times during his years of crime fighting. Both his physical appearance and his costume have changed, with the most notable changes being the addition of the yellow oval around his Bat-insignia in 1964, which has been dropped in more recent renderings of the Gotham Guardian, as well as no longer showing him wearing trunks that match his cowl and cape, coupled with a different rendering of his utility belt.
- You can find examples of your favorite Batman look online, in comics anthologies such as "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told," or in shows such as "Batman: The Animated Series" or "The Brave and the Bold."
- Pick the pose you want to draw the Dark Knight in. When not behind the wheel of the Batmobile or in the cockpit of the Batplane, Batman can often be seen swinging through downtown Gotham City on his Batline, crouching on rooftops, breaking through skylights or tumbling his way into or out of danger. These action poses require knowledge of perspective and foreshortening to render the Caped Crusader correctly. If you haven't mastered these techniques, you may instead want to draw the imposing figure Batman casts when he's standing still.
- Get the proportions right. In general, you'll want to draw Batman's body to be about 3 times as wide and 7 1/2 to 8 times the height of his head. The Dark night Detective is described as standing 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 meters) tall and weighing 185 pounds (84 kilograms). If you're showing Batman from the perspective of a terrified thug seeing the Masked Man hunter drop down on him, you'll want to lengthen the body parts nearest the viewer and shorten those furthest away.
- Draw a skeleton of the pose. Draw a circle initially to represent Batman's head, a square for his jawline and a rounded rectangle for his chest. Use sticks to represent his lower torso, arms and legs until you work of the specifics of his pose and the perspective needed.
- Because Batman's cape is so voluminous, you need to plan what parts of the Caped Crusader's body it will cover when you begin your sketch. You can start with a set of curved lines to show where the upper part of the cape will rest with respect to Batman's back.
- Flesh out the details. Start roughing in Batman's chest, arm and leg muscles. Batman should have a well-defined chest and abdominal muscles and a neck thick enough to bear the weight of his head, cowl and cape. Work the shape of his face from the original circle to be more squarish; if you're going for the look Sheldon Moldoff created in the 1950s, you want an especially square-jawed Batman.
- Although Superman is much more physically powerful, Batman's physique should be roughly the same as Superman's, as the two heroes used to trade costumes to confuse their enemies in 1950s and '60s issues of "World's Finest Comics." Other than in Frank Miller's rendering from "The Dark Knight Returns," Batman should not appear musclebound, either; his physique should most closely resemble that of a decathlete.
Drawing Batman's Costume
- Make it hug his body. Batman's costume is close-fitting, although in more recent years, it has incorporated form-fitting soft body armor to protect the Dark Knight from bullets and knives. Thus, it isn't necessary to show every detail of every muscle, although the most significant ripples should be shown.
- Put the trunks in the right place if you're showing them. Although the contrasting color trunks have been dropped in recent years, Batman is still drawn with them in many pictures. If you're including them, the lower parts should ride where his legs meet his groin, and the upper part, which reaches his waist, should be concealed by his utility belt.
- Extend the gloves and boots to the right length. The sides of Batman's boots should come up to the thickest part of his calves, with the point at the front coming to just below his knees. His gloves should reach the thickest part of his forearms, with 3 serrated projections curving backward from the outer sides of his forearms to suggest bat wings.
- The glove serrations are primarily decorative, but they served as bladed weapons in "Batman Begins."
- Give the Caped Crusader a large cape. Batman's cape is both longer and wider than Superman's. It should extend as far down as the backs of his upper ankles, ending in scalloped points to suggest bat wings and be wide enough that he can wrap it around his body the way Sherlock Holmes can his Inverness cape. In action poses, the cape should billow out behind Batman, large enough for him to use it as a parachute or parasail in an emergency.
- Bob Kane's original vision for Batman's cape was as sort of a wearable hang glider, but this created a cape that was too stiff to draw.
- Add in the utility belt. Draw a line just below the waist and another line about the width of Batman's hand above it to represent the edges of the utility belt. Create a rectangle in the center for the buckle, then either draw in a set of spaced cylinders or rectangular pouches depending on which version of the belt you're rendering.
Drawing Batman's Cowl
- Draw in reference lines for the eyebrows and nose. Batman's nose and eyebrows are concealed by his cowl, but the cowl is molded around his forehead so the lines made by his brows show. The nose itself should be rendered as 2 triangles with a common side over the septum.
- Draw in the lower edge of the cowl. Extend a diagonal line from either side of the nose to the side of the head. Draw another line from each of these lines from where the cheek would be down to the jawline and erase the lines running from the cheeks to the ears.
- Position the cowl's eyeslits. The eyeslits should be roughly almond-shaped and placed where eyes would normally be. By convention, even in facial close-ups, Batman's eyes are not drawn in, but the slits are left white, although some artists defied this convention in the 1970s. (In recent years, this has been explained with eye-covers similar to those used by Spider-Man.)
- Add the cowl's ears. Use narrow triangles to represent the bat-ears of the cowl. Bob Kane originally drew fairly long ears, which were shortened a few years into the character's run and remained short until Neal Adams extended them again in the early 1970s.
- Shade in the cowl face. A common convention in drawing Batman is to shade in the area of the cowl that covers his upper face. This is not a coloration of the actual cowl, but rather a means to suggest the facial features covered by it. The shading usually covers the forehead and upper cheeks, but not the nose or where the mask rests on Bruce Wayne's eyebrows.
Drawing Batman's Emblem
- Make an oval on Batman's chest. This will serve as the outer border of the logo if you choose to render the chest emblem with the oval and as a guide for the bat if you don't. The oval should be about as long as the distance between the ends of the Dark Knight's eyeslits.
- Draw another oval just inside the first oval. The space will form a border for the emblem. If you don't plan to include the oval in the logo, ignore this step.
- Draw a set of reference lines bisecting the oval horizontally and vertically.
- Sketch in the Bat-symbol, starting from one of the sides. Until 1969, the bat was drawn with slightly curving lines radiating from the bat's head to form the peaks of the wings, which then curved down to the outer tips. After that point, the outer edges of the wings curled to resemble the edges of a 2-headed ax. Using the reference lines, draw in one half of the Bat-symbol, then draw the other half as its mirror image.
- Remove any reference lines you drew.
Tips
- The coloring convention for Batman for many years was to make his shirt and leggings gray, his utility belt and emblem oval yellow and the cape, cowl, boots and gloves medium or dark blue, with only the bat on his chest black. (The cape, cowl, boots and gloves were often described as black, however.) More recently, the parts formerly colored in blue have been colored in black, inspired by how the costume was rendered in "Batman" and "Batman Returns."
- When drawing Batman on paper, draw the reference lines lightly so you can erase them more easily. Make the figure lines more distinct to serve as a guide to ink them in before coloring the Caped Crusader.
- If you're drawing Batman with a computer drawing program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, use separate layers for the reference lines and the final drawing. Once the figure is the way you want, delete the reference line layers. Color in the Dark Knight, then merge the layers.
