What I Don't Know About Composition Could Fill the Universe (And Probably Does)

Okay, Drawing Drawing Drawing. What am I learning. Heaps.

A goodish learning model is this old chestnut.

1. Unconscious Incompetence - You Don't Know What You Don't Know.

When I wrote the script for my piece I could vivadly picture in my head exactly what it would look like. Better than that, I could actually visualise it as an actual live action movie. As a partial disclaimer had I the millions of dollars necessary and the industry contacts and whatnot to actually make FOWP into a film, that's the medium I would have done, and as a firm believer that comic book adaptations are at best faithful representations of comic book nerds need for validation by the general public and at worst complete wastes of time that make it impossible to ever enjoy the comic again, I would say I would be much happier if I could do FOWP as a movie, and see it more as a B-movie adaptation into a comic than the reverse.
So the first thing I discovered when I started drawing was that I didn't know how to translate all the head images into images on the page. And a huge part of this is composition.
The big one is perspective of course. If you are looking at the top of a person wearing a shirt's head. Then how far out does the shirt protrude? Tucked or untucked? But this leads us to...

2. Conscious Incompetence - You now know what it is you don't know.

Which involves heaps and heaps of erasing. Which successfully destroys the evidence (somewhat). But basically in drawing this stage is like no other. You can look at the constantly shifting proportions of your characters, or the fact that the background is far too close to the foreground and so fourth and know that you are shit.
But then you remember some technique from year 9 graphic design and so you grab an eraser and...

3. Conscious Competence - You now know what you need to know to do it.

You start throwing down vanishing points and sketching roughly straight lines towards it then start filling in the picture for a more pleasing affect. You start thinking three or four frames ahead about which hand some item needs to be in for when two characters face off against eachother. Now the amount of ambidextrous characters in my book doesn't really make sense so I'll just claim it's supposed to be a sci-fi and that we should concieve that not only somewhere out there in space is intelligent life but also ambidextrous-intelligent life.
At anyrate I can draw the picture correctly if I think about it consciously, that is put a lot of conscious effort into it.
I imagine accomplished Comic book artists can do stuff like just animate the last image in their heads and freeze frame it at the point they wish to capture next.
I cannot however do this, and so I spend most of my life these days bouncing betwixt 2 & 3 learning stages. But for some stuff like Character expressions...

4. Unconscious Competence - You don't know what you don't know.

I find I can now draw facial expressions without thinking about it. The early pages of my book are filled with very sparsely wire framed geometric shapes. Whereas currently I just go straight ahead and draw in the characters. Hands, arms and whatnot I can posture almost without thinking. Very rarely do I have to erase the head and shoulders because the arm is too long/too short. I know their relative positions roughly. I don't have to draw lines of sight to decide where to put the pupils in and so on and so fourth.

Except almost if not every page, certainly every frame I find myself thrown back into stage 1. There will just be something I do not know how to draw. Stuff like how to portray a car smashing through a wall? How to throw a grenade into the background. How to convey sprinting off on somebody slower in just one take? How to capture the shadow from the brim of a hat? etc.

Whilst I applaud myself as a writer for being so ambitious with an untested pencil artist, I am overwhlemed by how much I don't know about drawing and composition.

But this Work In Progress thread from CGTalk gives me some idea of just what an amateur dunce I am.