Illustrator Tim McDonagh
dishes out advice to help you
crush our next contest.
super
art tips
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HE MAY HAVE DRAWN the cover of the
magazine you hold in your hands,
but U.K. artist Tim McDonagh (right)
doesn’t think you need to be bitten by
a radioactive spider to have special
drawing powers. “I don’t really believe
in talent,” he says. “I don’t think some
people can draw and some people can’t
draw. I think the real skill is being able to
sit still in a room with yourself for hours
at a time. That’s the hard thing to do!”
Heed Tim’s three tips and you could
win glory in our Superhero Drawing
Contest (see below for details).
- Give yourself a deadline
“Sometimes it can help to be put under a bit of
pressure,” McDonagh says. “If you’re given all the
time in the world, you can spend a bit too long
thinking about what you’re going to do or might
end up doing, and procrastinating. So, if you’ve got
a bit of a deadline and a bit of pressure, you get
surprising results.” Without an end goal in mind,
it’s easy to doodle endlessly and never finish a
drawing. (The deadline for the Superhero
Drawing Contest is Feb. 16.) - down with
bowls of fruit
“Draw stuff that you really love
and find interesting,” McDonagh
says. “I think a lot of kids got
put off when they were younger
because they were made to draw
the bowl of fruit and all that stuff.
If that’s not interesting to you, just
forget it: Draw something that you
really do want to draw. Whether that’s
a dragon or a footballer or whatever. You
have to be interested in it yourself first.”
3. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect
“I think what’s really hard about being a kid and
drawing is that you haven’t quite got the skills
yet to draw the thing you’ve got in your
head,” McDonagh says. “Before you
start drawing, you’re like, I’m going
to draw this amazing castle, and it’s
gonna have all these dragons and
it’s gonna look great. And you start
doing it, and you think, Well,
that’s not how I thought it was
going to look. But to be honest,
you’ll have that feeling your whole
life. I still get like that!”
It’s O.K. if your finished drawing
isn’t the masterpiece you originally
imagined. No matter how it came out,
your drawing is better than the one in
your head, because it’s real.
SUPE
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