Go ahead...rip my art apart...

[Thatreevesgirl]

I want to thank everyone in advance that takes a look at this to critique. I'm trying to solidify my own style, and have been having problems especially with coloring. I have gone from a more washed out look to this one which is a bit bolder. I think the colors are a bit rough...but I'm not sure quite what to do with them.

I want the style RIPPED APART. I will not complain at all about people overcriticizing. I have been lucky enough to have some of the people in my comic community help me improve a lot in a short amount of time, but I want to improve more. I will take ALL advice and try to apply it the best that I can. I want to become a better artist, and hopefully you can help.

I like manga, but wanted it to be able to stand apart from the generic manga-ish stuff. That is why I made it full color.


(the one thing that I know is horrid is the town in the background...I have to admit that this is laziness more so than lack of ability...though I shouldn't use that as an excuse)

the comic link is in my sig if you need more pics to reference off of.


THANKS AGAIN

[FLittle]

I want the style RIPPED APART.

Okay! I'm going to take that to mean that you won't be morbidly offended that I drew on top of it to illustrate my point.

Here is the general critique:



1. Atmospheric perspective. Go outside and look at the sky; it's lighter "down" at the horizon. To get this effect in, say, Photoshop, the easy, clearance-sale-cheap way to do it is to select the area you want your sky in and do a gradient fill in this case with just yellow and white. Where you draw the fill line affects which area has what shade (so if you draw the line down past the mountains the whitest area will be where you can't see, since you have just the skyline selected, so you can go from dark to pale yellow instead of from yellow to stark white).

2. The background. I personally like the smudgy effect for the mountain and the blurry town doesn't bother me. It looks like it's in the distance and you wouldn't necessarily see it clearly anyways. I did suggest an alternative if you want to clean it up though. By making each box look clearer but erasing the outlines (just use your Normal brush in Photoshop and trace over them) you can still get the "less distinct, hey it's in the distance" feel.

3. Shading and highlights. I like the extra highlight on the dunes (?) in panel 3, and you could try that in the other panels. I wouldn't use it in the background (like the mountains) but it can help bring your foreground farther forward against a muted background. The other thing is that you shade your character, and do some highlights like in her hair, but they are hard to see. When you're coloring and coloring it'll look darker to you because you're focusing on it, and then the final product doesn't have a lot of contrast. If you want to keep the colors really soft, maybe you could just draw the shading farther and do more tones - so a gradual shadow. To illustrate what the heck I'm talking about I did this for you:



Yours is on the left, my addition is on the right. I used a combination of the Normal brush and the Multiply brush and I did her hair, skin and part of her clothes (the white on the top of her outfit and those red straps on the sleeves).

Most importantly, you can see right away if you even *like* what I suggested by seeing an example of it. If you hate it, don't bother with it.

For the hair I grabbed a darker shade of pink/magenta and used the normal brush to go over the shading you already had. Then I used the normal brush (full opacity in both cases) to cut back into it a little, to make it more like strands of hair. I grabbed a darker pink, put the brush to multiply (about 35% opacity and flow) and dropped a teensy bit of extra shading on top of her hair. I redid the highlights with some random lighted strands like you had on the right (our right) of her head and then made the left-side highlight more prominent.

On the skin I used the multiply brush (about 35% opacity and flow) with a darker skin tone (So I use the colorgrab tool to select the original skin tone, then just select a tone that is down and right of that). I "painted" after parts of the skin and went over extra in spots that needed more shading. I followed what looked to be like your original shading that was just too light, and I did that for *all* areas (so hair, skin, clothes are all your original shading areas, just darker).

On the shirt I did the same thing, but used a blue-ish grey to go back over your lines, and on the straps I used a darker maroon. I had done it a little too dark all around instead of just near her torso, so I grabbed the original red/maroon and put it on Normal at about 50% opacity (100% flow) and wiggled back over it a little. Then I took a really light red/pink and made the highlights with the brush on normal (multiply only works for going darker) at about 35% opacity and fill.

And there you have it. I really like the art, so all I really found to comment on was the coloring and ways to make the art stand out better. Hope it helps!

[Dr_Destruction]

You're good, but not quite good enough to work without models. On the first panel the legs are sprouting from somewhere below her hips. On the first and second panels the taper to the forearms isn't correctly proportioned. Make an oval then a rectangle sprouting from it that's the same length as the oval. The outline conecting these two shapes should be two concave lines that start at the apex of the oval and end just below the end of the rectangle. That straight tip at the end of the outline that you're left with is the wrist. Also in the first panel; two left feet.

[Thatreevesgirl]

Wow!!! Thank you so much for the highly detailed critique FLittle. I'm very new to the realm of color. I can handle screentones well, but I have to admit that I'm just getting used to shading. I will definitely try to encorporate the shading techniques that you suggested...I'm sure that it is just going to take a lot of practice.

Dr_Destruction-I don't have any models but you are right, I need them. Its hard just imagining the scene in my head and just popping it out on the paper. I started doing art about 3 years ago, so I'm relatively new to it. You should have seen some of my crap from back then. It makes me wanna cry now.

I'll work hard to try and get it going better. And if anyone else has any suggestion at all I'd love to hear it.



THANK YOU AGAIN!

[FLittle]

If you need some pictures for models, just look around the internet. I dunno how old you are, so things like Suicide Girls and DOMAI may be out for you (they're porn sites, but they do mostly pin-up type photos and are great for getting normal poses but having nude models so you can learn the body structures). When I was in high school I started getting the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendars (like the desk planner) and things like that so that I could get near-naked pictures to study how bodies are really put together.

Or bribe a friend to sit and model for you every once in awhile so you get some practice.

[C.w.]

Ripped apart, eh? Well, one of the things i first notice is the lack of line intensity changes. The thin lines are ok if you have contrasty shading, (as in FLittle's example) but with the pastel like tones you've been going with, line thickness variations will add a sort of "pop" to your images that brings them a long way. It doesn't even have to be a lot - as little as doubling or tripling it in certain spots would do it (that might sound like a lot - it's not - especially with how thin your lines are.) As for how and where to do it, look to black and white art, (and i do mean black and white - no screentones, greyscale or the likes) especially american style comics. Japanese style comics (that i've seen) tend to use real thin lines.

Of course, that's where the entire critique falls down, because you're emulating a manga / anime / whatever style, (japanese media isn't my thing - just the occsional glance when someone points out something outstanding) which is cool, but it's ok to have other influences.

Before posting i went and looked at the rest of the comic - i'm curious as to why you changed panel styles - from no outside gutters and close panels to large gutters and distant panels. Personally, i'm not a fan of distant panels (save perhaps in "infinite canvas" settings) - just seems like wasted space. The outside gutters are a good thing to have though. Perhaps you might want to reconsider using black gutters. They seem to seperate the page very distictly next to the pastel interiors - for me, it seems to break the flow of the page, and looking at the page as a whole it seems more like three disonnected pictures.

Of course, while i'm talking about page composition i'll say something about panel composition. Your panels seem to be composed very... ultilitarianly. That's not a bad thing, but it's not a great thing. Look to photographers for inspiration - deviantart is full of 'em. There are a lot more ways to look at things than striaght on with a 50mm lens.

As for your actual artwork, there isn't a whole lot to touch on that hasn't been touched on before - but i'd like to say two things - first, that green skee-ing lizzard seems ill defined, as if he's just a blob with legs, a tail and a head. Give him some shading, scales, whatever.

The largest thing that you can do right now to improve would be to ditch the font. It's far too bold, brash, and doesn't seem to fit the mood of the piece at all. The rest of it will come, but it'll take time. You're doing very well right now, and if you work on it you'll go from good to great - just keep drawing!

[Biev]

I think your art is awesome v('.')v

[Thatreevesgirl]

thank you again to all of you that commented on the art. I really appreciate it so much. I tried hard to encorporate the stuff that you all told me.

I am saving up for an actual professional comic font. I think that will help. I worked mostly on the coloring. Here is my latest page...I hope that it is improved. I spent A TON of time on it.

[TellTaleHeart]

I wouldn't bother spending money on a font, there are plenty of free fonts avaiable at http://www.blambot.com/ and http://abstractfonts.com/. Save your cash for more art supplies abd computer stuff.

The page looks great, the hair has certainly improved since your first example. You appear to be using bold lettering for everything instead of saving it for emphasis. And even the fanciest font won't change the fact that you mispelled "cannibals" and used "there's" instead of "there are".

[Thatreevesgirl]

oh my god...you are right...this is why I usually never post a page without sending it to my beta.

And my font isn't bold...well, its not set to bold...its just the way it is. I know of the free sites, but have never had good luck with them. I'll have to spend some time searching for one when I get the time.

[FLittle]

Blambot is awesome - I have a ton (read: about 20?) of fonts from there and I'd recommend Letter-O-Matic! or AnimeAce for comic fonts (both are free, though they do also sell "pro" fonts at blambot). If you can't figure out how to install it, I can walk you through it (it's really easy). Oh, and Badaboom is fun for sound effects and such.

I definately like the increased contrast - your shading stands out a little better. I would suggest trying a little more red in your skin tone shading though - it gets a little lost. If you want it to look soft I know you don't want to go too dark, so just adding some reds to it will, heh, flesh it out a little better. (If you're using photoshop, go to the color and double click to select it, the color select window pops up and I think it defaults to the RGB look. Select a color a little down and to the right, and then slide the bar a teensy bit further towards the red at the bottom of the scale.)

[Dr_Destruction]

The girl's shoulders are sprouting from her neck. After you have both lines for the neck make a straight line below them that is going to determine where the clavicle bones rest. This line should be the same length as the width of her torso. The shoulders are drawn from two balls on the end of this line.

I don't usually pimp my tutorial page but there are some specifics you can use from there.

http://pillarsoffaith.comicgenesis.com/tutorial.html

There's a step by step for the upper half of the body.

[Robin Pierce]

Along with some of the other comments, it strikes me that your light sources aren't constant. For example, in panel one it looks like the light source is in front of her. Which is fine, but then when you have the same shot, from the side... the light source should be from the side. And it isn't. :S

[Thatreevesgirl]

thank you, thank you! I will work hard on the newest comments (and the old ones) for the next page. I really appreciate many of you helping me improve. I'm trying my hardest...and it'll probably take lots of practice (so don't shoot me if I don't have it 100% changed by the next page). But I will definitely try.

[KODAMA]

You need to use a definite light source MORE. Your light source is alwas terribly value, and the light is always white. Light from the sky is blue, and light from a fire is yellow. Shadows are not always off black, but actually colored.

Your main character also seems to have a stiff-face syndrome, where she is always making the same face ( :| ). Please think about what the character might be feeling in various situations. If she's lost and bored, will she feel bored or scared? Be a bit more bold with facial expressions, and don't just limit yourself to cutsey cliche anime faces.

It's great that you're spending "a lot of time" on your comic, but what you need to really do is not spend more time drawing the same mistakes but try harder to incorporate a definite source of light (thus stronger meaningful shadows and highlights that actually complement the light source instead of being a big black stain clouding up your character) and make your characters more facially and gesture wise expressive (happy: big movements, open mouth, eyebrows up / sad: eyebrows down, cramped gesture, small movements)

your backgrounds also need to be complemented by a an actual light source. You rely too much on your lines to express everything, and while lines can indeed express a lot of things, you'd need to work much much harder on your mastery of light sources to be able to rely only on your linework to express a clear understanding of light sources so that the correct mood is expressed in each cell and page.

Right now all your backgrounds are: Gray.
To emphasize your characters, you may want to try drawing linework for background in a very thin pen (or simply sketch in pencil) or not draw it at all but only express it through colors and hues. It'll be difficult at first, but it will help the viewer to focus on what actually matters (main character and other interactive objects) instead of what doesn't matter (texture of the wall.) Please also try to use bolder colors on your main characters. Objects at a distance are closer to gray (less contrast) while closer objects (especially ones in sunlight) are bright and bold on color.

I hope this attached page helps explain a few more things.