Well I'm really not sure what or how to ask, but I've been trying to improve the design of the characters in my comic. I really don't know too much about anatomy, such is explained on the page. I really don't have much in regard to editing software or length of time(really started learning a little over a year ago)spent drawing.
Mostly this is in regard to my latest few pages. I mean art design with this not personality or the like.
Uhhh. please critique on character design.
Re: Uhhh. please critique on character design.
So what *have* you got access to? Have you got Photoshop or the Gimp? What are you scanning into?Dark Wyrm wrote: ...I really don't have much in regard to editing software ...
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Black Sparrow
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How do you make characters more interesting?
Learn anatomy.
After you've gotten basics down, it's much easier to stylize (muscle men and big breasts, in particular, can be issues) and it's just more realistic looking, and therefore more compelling. Seriously, just google some anatomy tutorials (DeviantArt's a good place to start), or try picking up some decent art books. (Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain comes highly recommended). Once you learn how to draw realistically, your cartoon art will pop out much more easily.
Also, something that makes characters interesting in this type of genre is detail. Experiment more with hair and clothing. Use sources to get ideas. Anime is actually a good place to look into for that stuff. And be more confident in your drawing, so the faces don't end up as penned blobs such as the guy on the left of the middle panel here.
Finally, use brightness and contrast in GIMP. The paper is white, not grey, and that makes a difference in how professional your comic looks.
I know you said you don't have time for this stuff.... but there is no quick fix for learning drawing. It takes practice, and time to develop your eye. Heck, I've been drawing constantly for eight years, and my art is still mediocre. So give it what time you can, because practice is the key to good art.
Learn anatomy.
After you've gotten basics down, it's much easier to stylize (muscle men and big breasts, in particular, can be issues) and it's just more realistic looking, and therefore more compelling. Seriously, just google some anatomy tutorials (DeviantArt's a good place to start), or try picking up some decent art books. (Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain comes highly recommended). Once you learn how to draw realistically, your cartoon art will pop out much more easily.
Also, something that makes characters interesting in this type of genre is detail. Experiment more with hair and clothing. Use sources to get ideas. Anime is actually a good place to look into for that stuff. And be more confident in your drawing, so the faces don't end up as penned blobs such as the guy on the left of the middle panel here.
Finally, use brightness and contrast in GIMP. The paper is white, not grey, and that makes a difference in how professional your comic looks.
I know you said you don't have time for this stuff.... but there is no quick fix for learning drawing. It takes practice, and time to develop your eye. Heck, I've been drawing constantly for eight years, and my art is still mediocre. So give it what time you can, because practice is the key to good art.
This is going in my notebook titled "Things I Didn't Know about Surface Dwellers."
Eh, that was actually an atempt to draw wounds, scratches and the like. along with a black eye. It really didn't work out too well.Black Sparrow wrote:How do you make characters more interesting?
And be more confident in your drawing, so the faces don't end up as penned blobs such as the guy on the left of the middle panel here.
My question is how with GIMP(downloaded last week and I'm still confused with almost all of it, it's still better than the other program for the most part though). And the grey thing is actually from my scanner, I have to darken the page to get some lines to actually show up, some worse than others. Also for advice, I neither have sharpies nor are willing to try useing them again until quite a while later(I've ruined several comics trying to shaprie the lines.)Black Sparrow wrote: Finally, use brightness and contrast in GIMP. The paper is white, not grey, and that makes a difference in how professional your comic looks.
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Black Sparrow
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Most of us have that, actually. My scanner does it too. The greyness means you have to heighten contrast to get your whites whiter. Both contrast and brightness have to be played with. (Photoshop has a handy tool that does both at the same time... It's called "Levels") 
This is going in my notebook titled "Things I Didn't Know about Surface Dwellers."
Okay, Black Sparrow beat me to a discussion of your brightness/contrast, but I also wanted to point out your presentation. While you're working on your art style, there a couple of things that help you keep readers when they aren't, say, enamored with the art yet: 1) Story and 2) Presentation overall. I'm not going to talk about your story at all, but your presentation could use some help.
As Black Sparrow told you, up your brightness and up your contrast. As you increase the brightness, progressively darker things will fade, so then you up your contrast so that the lines you have left after the grey fuzz has faded get darkened up again and now you have cleaned up lines. You can further clean these up if you go back over them on the computer. Of course, if you ink in the first place you can just scan the image as B&W mode and then convert to grey (or color) and shade or color on the computer (that's what I do).
This is your comic after only playing with the brightness and contrast. It took me about, oh... 5 seconds, but it's a marked improvement in visibility, clarity and, dun dun dun!, Presentation.
Next, I noted you did something that a lot of people starting out do: you don't make full panels. I'm guessing that folks are drawing up to the edge of the paper so when you make a panel you're just making two lines because the other corners are the page? That doesn't translate into the web and it doesn't look good. You need 4 sides to your panels. You can do panels without sides, like that one in the middle, but it may take some practice before you can do anything particularly complicated with your panels.
What I did here was grab the pen tool in Photoshop and drop some lines down for panels one, two and four. Since panel four had that curved line I went back to the pen tool icon on the tool bar (left side of Photoshop), right clicked and grabbed the Convert Point Tool. I clicked on the area I'd designated for panel four and used that tool to create the arch along the top. Then I did a right click, Stroke Path (with the brush set to 5 pixels, black ink, full opacity and flow) and voila! You have panel boxes that are smooth and beautiful in about a minute.
After that, I attacked your speech bubbles and text. Here's the thing: these are things that can look good regardless of how well you draw because you can just use tools like the Shape tool in photoshop to make an elliptical (the bubbles) and then use Stroke and Fill to make the outline and fill in the bubble with whatever colour you want (here I just filled with white).
Above that, I added text. I know you already did your text on the computer but it looks like you used Arial or something else ill-suited to comicing. It just looks a bit too blocky, so here I used Letter-O-Matic!, which is a FREE font you can get from BlamBot. Some of your panels didn't have speech/thought bubbles but... it's kind of ugly, so that's why I did bubbles for everything. I simply left off bubble-tails for what looked like thought, but you can also just add a bunch of circles to indicate thought, or use a square with faded text instead of a bubble, or other things. It's hard to make unbounded text look good on a comic though.
So now you have a somewhat cleaned up page that is B&W, has panels and has speech bubbles with comic-appropriate text. From *here* you can look at your actual art and think about how you want to improve that aspect of it.
I'd recommend some inking - I know you said you didn't want to use Sharpies because you mess up, but you ought to practice if you *really* want to be doing comics. Use an Ultra Fine Point Sharpie or grab some Micron art pens (they're about $2.50 a piece, and I use the 08 for bold lines and the 005 for detail lines). Try adding more background. If you can't shade on the computer, lots of folks buy a couple of grey Prismacolor markers and use that to do quick shading on their characters - it adds extra depth. You do want to ink for that though - not pencil because of the extra problems with brightness and contrast in scanning pencil works.
And there you have it. Hope it helps!
As Black Sparrow told you, up your brightness and up your contrast. As you increase the brightness, progressively darker things will fade, so then you up your contrast so that the lines you have left after the grey fuzz has faded get darkened up again and now you have cleaned up lines. You can further clean these up if you go back over them on the computer. Of course, if you ink in the first place you can just scan the image as B&W mode and then convert to grey (or color) and shade or color on the computer (that's what I do).
This is your comic after only playing with the brightness and contrast. It took me about, oh... 5 seconds, but it's a marked improvement in visibility, clarity and, dun dun dun!, Presentation.
Next, I noted you did something that a lot of people starting out do: you don't make full panels. I'm guessing that folks are drawing up to the edge of the paper so when you make a panel you're just making two lines because the other corners are the page? That doesn't translate into the web and it doesn't look good. You need 4 sides to your panels. You can do panels without sides, like that one in the middle, but it may take some practice before you can do anything particularly complicated with your panels.
What I did here was grab the pen tool in Photoshop and drop some lines down for panels one, two and four. Since panel four had that curved line I went back to the pen tool icon on the tool bar (left side of Photoshop), right clicked and grabbed the Convert Point Tool. I clicked on the area I'd designated for panel four and used that tool to create the arch along the top. Then I did a right click, Stroke Path (with the brush set to 5 pixels, black ink, full opacity and flow) and voila! You have panel boxes that are smooth and beautiful in about a minute.
After that, I attacked your speech bubbles and text. Here's the thing: these are things that can look good regardless of how well you draw because you can just use tools like the Shape tool in photoshop to make an elliptical (the bubbles) and then use Stroke and Fill to make the outline and fill in the bubble with whatever colour you want (here I just filled with white).
Above that, I added text. I know you already did your text on the computer but it looks like you used Arial or something else ill-suited to comicing. It just looks a bit too blocky, so here I used Letter-O-Matic!, which is a FREE font you can get from BlamBot. Some of your panels didn't have speech/thought bubbles but... it's kind of ugly, so that's why I did bubbles for everything. I simply left off bubble-tails for what looked like thought, but you can also just add a bunch of circles to indicate thought, or use a square with faded text instead of a bubble, or other things. It's hard to make unbounded text look good on a comic though.
So now you have a somewhat cleaned up page that is B&W, has panels and has speech bubbles with comic-appropriate text. From *here* you can look at your actual art and think about how you want to improve that aspect of it.
I'd recommend some inking - I know you said you didn't want to use Sharpies because you mess up, but you ought to practice if you *really* want to be doing comics. Use an Ultra Fine Point Sharpie or grab some Micron art pens (they're about $2.50 a piece, and I use the 08 for bold lines and the 005 for detail lines). Try adding more background. If you can't shade on the computer, lots of folks buy a couple of grey Prismacolor markers and use that to do quick shading on their characters - it adds extra depth. You do want to ink for that though - not pencil because of the extra problems with brightness and contrast in scanning pencil works.
And there you have it.
Hope it helps!Well I tried to follow atleast some of the advice here for my newest page. Meaning white, borders, bubbles, and I tried to make use of the anatomy book I bought.
Is it any better than before or did I mess up on it(excluding the horrible explosion, that's the result of 30min of work and the best I could do)?
Is it any better than before or did I mess up on it(excluding the horrible explosion, that's the result of 30min of work and the best I could do)?
I think it looks better, though I'm not sure why the angled lines on some of your boxes turned out blocky... are you doing the Stroke with the pencil or the brush?
The image is a lot clearer now, and the next step I'd recommend is some shading on the characters to give them a little volume, or adding in backgrounds. You have a much nicer base for the pages now, though!
(Oh, and it's "all right," not "alright". You see "alright" in lots of common usage which does perpetuate it, but it's still incorrect.)
The image is a lot clearer now, and the next step I'd recommend is some shading on the characters to give them a little volume, or adding in backgrounds. You have a much nicer base for the pages now, though!
(Oh, and it's "all right," not "alright". You see "alright" in lots of common usage which does perpetuate it, but it's still incorrect.)
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Black Sparrow
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The page does look nice and cleaned up now. That's definitely better. Now, just practice, practice, practice. That's the only way to get better at drawing, if you're serious about learning. Your eye will develop. Just don't expect it to happen in a matter of days.
(I do like the detail work on the left character in the top panel.)
(I do like the detail work on the left character in the top panel.)
...I think I love you...FLittle wrote:(Oh, and it's "all right," not "alright". You see "alright" in lots of common usage which does perpetuate it, but it's still incorrect.)
This is going in my notebook titled "Things I Didn't Know about Surface Dwellers."
This is from the dictionary feature that comes with OSX:
alright
adj : nonstandard usage adv 1: used to reinforces an assertion; "it's expensive all right" [syn: all right, without doubt] 2: sentence-initial expression of agreement [syn: very well, fine, all right, OK] 3: in a satisfactory or adequate manner; "she'll do okay on her own"; "held up all right under pressure"; (`alright' is a nonstandard variant of `all right') [syn: okay, O.K., all right]
Looks like it is a word, sorry.
alright
adj : nonstandard usage adv 1: used to reinforces an assertion; "it's expensive all right" [syn: all right, without doubt] 2: sentence-initial expression of agreement [syn: very well, fine, all right, OK] 3: in a satisfactory or adequate manner; "she'll do okay on her own"; "held up all right under pressure"; (`alright' is a nonstandard variant of `all right') [syn: okay, O.K., all right]
Looks like it is a word, sorry.
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Mercury Hat
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The nonstandard bit means it's widely used, but hasn't gained official acceptance by scholars.Biev wrote:This is from the dictionary feature that comes with OSX:
alright
adj : nonstandard usage adv 1: used to reinforces an assertion; "it's expensive all right" [syn: all right, without doubt] 2: sentence-initial expression of agreement [syn: very well, fine, all right, OK] 3: in a satisfactory or adequate manner; "she'll do okay on her own"; "held up all right under pressure"; (`alright' is a nonstandard variant of `all right') [syn: okay, O.K., all right]
Looks like it is a word, sorry.
Like the word "irregardless" which does technically exist as a word, but it really shouldn't
.
<Legostar> merc is all knowing, all seeing, and not caring
Yup! Nonstandard also means "things that make you look bad in the US corporate world". Is it fair? Heck no. Is it reality? You betcha.Mercury Hat wrote: The nonstandard bit means it's widely used, but hasn't gained official acceptance by scholars.
The funny thing about the bastardization that is "irregardless" is that people use it to mean the same thing as "regardless"; it's a very odd syntax error when you really think about it.Mercury Hat wrote: Like the word "irregardless" which does technically exist as a word, but it really shouldn't
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Joel Fagin
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The Oxford English dictionary was recently updated. Those words might now be featured.
No way to check online, alas.
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No way to check online, alas.
There are plenty of precedents, although the only one that comes to mind this late at night is inflamable, which means "flamable".FLittle wrote:The funny thing about the bastardization that is "irregardless" is that people use it to mean the same thing as "regardless"; it's a very odd syntax error when you really think about it.
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Mo
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Ah.Mercury Hat wrote:The nonstandard bit means it's widely used, but hasn't gained official acceptance by scholars.Biev wrote:alright
adj : nonstandard usage adv 1: used to reinforces an assertion; "it's expensive all right" [syn: all right, without doubt] 2: sentence-initial expression of agreement [syn: very well, fine, all right, OK] 3: in a satisfactory or adequate manner; "she'll do okay on her own"; "held up all right under pressure"; (`alright' is a nonstandard variant of `all right') [syn: okay, O.K., all right]
And yet again I've learned something new.
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Dr_Destruction
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Forgetting the dictionary for a moment.
First thing you have to do is get a pen with a wider tip. Get a soft lead pencil and draw with that. Then go over it with a pen to even out the scratchiness. Then erase all the pencil work. If you want you can shade with the pen either by making long straight lines within the area to be shaded or by making a lot of dots. (The second method is very time consuming.) Then you can worry about scanning/editing/composing.
First thing you have to do is get a pen with a wider tip. Get a soft lead pencil and draw with that. Then go over it with a pen to even out the scratchiness. Then erase all the pencil work. If you want you can shade with the pen either by making long straight lines within the area to be shaded or by making a lot of dots. (The second method is very time consuming.) Then you can worry about scanning/editing/composing.
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...not sure where to start. hmm..
It may help you greatly to purchase a comic book you enjoy and trace all the lines from the first page to the last page with a pencil. You simply need more practice holding and using a pencil.
It may help you greatly to purchase a comic book you enjoy and trace all the lines from the first page to the last page with a pencil. You simply need more practice holding and using a pencil.
I'M MAKING A GAME | GALLERY | The old webcomic:http://www.skimlines.com | [url=irc://irc.esper.net/keenspace]irc://irc.esper.net/keenspace[/url]
I have no "professional" advice to give you. Taking the above into account will definitely improve your comic.
But I wanted to comment that while there is lots of room for technical improvement, it seems that you are having lots of fun with your comic. I like coming away from your comic with that feeling.
But I wanted to comment that while there is lots of room for technical improvement, it seems that you are having lots of fun with your comic. I like coming away from your comic with that feeling.
