Comic Genesis Forums

Heys. I need someone to start critiquing my strips. I'm not asking for essays, just a few phrases once a week. Just a "panel 2, fingers look too blocky, panel 3, perspective is inconsistent among female character's afterimages, panel 5, right side of face is too sharp and slanted." Something to work on. I can only update Mondays these days, and past strips are obselete in terms of my current knowledge. You can also skip my blog underneath each comic, although the navigation buttons are below that.

So far I've read Andrew Loomis' "Fun With A Pencil" and "Figure Drawing for all it's Worth," Burne Hogarth's "Drawing the Human head" and "Drawing Dynamic Hands," Jack Hamm's "Drawing the Head and Figure" and Christopher Hart's "Drawing Cutting Edge Anatomy," and I'll read any art book you recommend, do any exercizes you suggest, but ultimately I don't have the resources to attend professional classes.

Let me know. Thanks.

I do like the fact that the person in your tagboard who offers advice, gets insulted for it, when he is absolutely right.

Get some loomis, and work on your anatomy, because its going to be very hard for anyone commenting to fix it. Your art problems are systemic, and I would say someone like Loomis is as good a start as any.

http://www.fineart.sk/index.php?cat=1

Figure drawing for all its worth is where i would suggest you start.

Hate to tell ya, but you probably wont find anyone willing to take time of thier already busy comic schedules to do that for you.

I suggest hanging out on the forums more, get to know some people better, then once you make some good friends, exchange critiques with them. You critique them, they critique you. It will be a win-win situation for you both then.

Gothia

It's great that you're making the effort to get better at art, and there's a definite improvement since the first strip. Unfortunately, you may have jumped ahead a bit in the learning process - you're showing off some neat stuff as far as dynamic poses, camera angles and physicality go, but your problems are all with the fundamentals.

The main problem with your stuff right now is the anatomy. You've clearly been doing your reading on the subject, but understanding how it fits together isn't always enough (especially in fight scenes with convoluted poses). You should really look at reference photos, get someone to model for you, or even look in a mirror to get a better feel for how the poses you're using work. Everything's in the right place, it's just not working together yet. Tied into this is your line weights - every line has the same weight to it (they're all the same width), giving the image a flat look. You don't need to vary it a LOT, but you do need to vary it, especially considering how much you exaggerate perspective. Thicker lines around key parts of the anatomy will help you add coherence to the poses.

At this stage I think you can stand to do away with the coloring altogether. It's very sloppy in many places (as in, I can see the outline of your Photoshop brush all over the place), has no cohesive color palette, and is inconsistently detailed - you frequently have a single flat color for one object in a scene and a paint-style graded shadow on another, making them look they're not in the same place. Shadows also seem to fall largely arbitrarily. I get the feeling you could be doing much better work with the color but simply aren't paying enough attention to it. If you really want to keep the color, you should once again go looking for reference photos - find pictures of people in places that resemble the time of day, light sources and surroundings in your comic, and look at the colors. Hell, you can even use the eyedropper to pull colors out of the photo itself - that's a really easy way of limiting your color palette to something more cooperative.

I recommend Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to you for practice with drawing what you see. It's an excellent book for this purpose - you're going to be bored by some of the assignments in it, but DO THEM. They WILL help train you to draw what you see, as opposed to what you think you see. You'll probably see a significant improvement in your art immediately. I also strongly advise you to find lots of reference photos. For panel layouts as ambitious as this comic has, you should be drowning in reference photos - for the color scheme, for the poses, for the camera angles. It'll take a lot longer until you get the hang of doing it, but it will make your art better if you take it seriously.

To summarize: you clearly have potential, and you've improved a great deal in a short time. If you don't get discouraged and continue to push yourself to learn the techniques and do the dull training drills, you could be producing some truly standout stuff fairly soon. In the meantime, you're biting off more than you can chew with the level of complexity to this project - it's a bit like teaching yourself mechanics by building your own car. You can do it well, but it'll take forever and be immensely frustrating. Making extensive use of photo reference will help you considerably in the short term, and improving your drawing fundamentals - especially in regards to accuracy and precision - are absolutely necessary before you progress to anatomy. I saw a panel with some muscle cross-section in it - your anatomy's fine, it's just not working within your drawings. To use the car metaphor, you skipped basic welding and went straight to elaborate paint jobs - the paint could be masterful and still not disguise the amateurish metal joints. Needing to develop your fundamentals doesn't mean your research into more advanced stuff is meaningless, just that the fundamentals need to be stronger in order to carry the more advanced stuff.

I know you specifically asked for quick fix critiques, not an essay on how to improve overall. The thing is, your problems aren't with details that can be fixed with the kind of crit you're asking for. And nobody's going to bother to crit your stuff if you respond with patronizing insults like you did to the guy on your tagboard. (Except me, apparently.) Keep working at it, work on your fundamentals, and don't be rude. That's it.

From what I've seen, a basic starting point for a critique can be thumbs.
Note which side of the hand they're on. A staggering amount of your panels have back to front hands.

Thank you all for your comments.

First off, yes I'm abrasive. If I had social skills, I wouldn't be on the Internet.

As I said in my post, I STARTED with Loomis. If you're suggesting I read Figure Drawing for All It's Worth again rather than move on to the next book, I might do that. I still use his 8-head theory and all-same-height-characters-intersect-horizon-at-same-body-part perspective lesson.

Mr. Bob: Am I still messing up on the hands in the more recent strips? I thought Hogarth cured me of that.

Duralict: I appreciate the detail. You're the second person to recommend Betty Edward's "Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain," so I will track that down, promise.

I know I should focus on standard camera angles and no color, but I'd rather try my best each time to make the scene as exciting as possible, even if it takes longer and slows down my process. PV isn't just a comic to me, it's my motivation to improve, and each strip is a new experiment; I mean, it's not like I'm trying to sell any of this stuff.

Line width...I'll try going over some things twice when I ink it.

What did you mean by your comments about "fits together"? Are you saying that the joints, knees/elbows are the parts that need work? Should I go back and re-read tutorials on the internal skeleton and which bones poke out?

Thanks.

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plotlessviolence wrote:
Mr. Bob: Am I still messing up on the hands in the more recent strips? I thought Hogarth cured me of that.


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Well, looking at the most recent strip, panel 3 has both characters with wrong hands.

HOLY FUDGE, Bob, you're right! I can't believe I'm still doing that. I'll have to go back and fix it.

plotlessviolence wrote:I know I should focus on standard camera angles and no color, but I'd rather try my best each time to make the scene as exciting as possible, even if it takes longer and slows down my process.

This is totally fair, but we're talking a LOT of extra work here. The best way to improve your drawing accuracy quickly is through isolating each piece of the process and working on it until you understand it thoroughly - that's why drawing classes always make you do so many still lives, and drawings of plain boxes. You CAN improve trying to fix everything a little at a time every page, but it'll be a slow and torturous process and you'll never be able to tell what you're doing wrong. If you're determined to include all this stuff in your comic, then do other drawings for the practice - start with simple forms (boxes. Draw lots of boxes.) until you get to the point where you can perfectly depict their relative sizes and locations, then move on to more complex shapes (still lives. I hate them, but you gotta do 'em.) until you can perfectly depict volume and shape, etc. It's slow and boring, but that's why they're called "fundamentals." And the nice thing about them is that they're so simple that you should be able to whip out five or six of them in an hour, especially at the box stage - and if you binge on practicing this stuff and try to get through it all in a day or two you'll just forget it anyway, so it's going to be a long-term commitment do spending a few minutes or an hour or two working on it every few days.

What did you mean by your comments about "fits together"? Are you saying that the joints, knees/elbows are the parts that need work? Should I go back and re-read tutorials on the internal skeleton and which bones poke out?

What I mean is that some of your detail work - like the muscles and bone cross-sections in one of the pages a few updates back - look fine. The problems with your anatomy are mostly to do with the silhouettes, proportions, and poses - basically, you're going wrong in the first step or two, and the error just gets compounded the more detailed the art gets. Check your centers of balance, check your proportions. Several panels have the characters with heads that are significantly smaller than one buttock, for example. Pieces of their bodies are larger or smaller than they should be in respect to the other pieces are all over. This is why I think reference photos will help you a lot; a lot of body parts seem like they should be a different size than they actually are, so unless you've got some good reference to work from you're going to be constantly falling into the same common errors in proportion. People aren't shaped the way we think they're shaped, and the mistake can be tricky to spot early in the process unless you've trained your eye. Using reference photos is a good way of forcing your eye to see the errors.

So seriously, draw boxes. Put three on a table and draw them. It shouldn't take more than maybe ten minutes. Then hold up your drawing and see if it's right. Judging by the specific problems you're having with anatomy, I'm betting you'll find your problems with relative sizes and placement are suddenly very clear - and pretty easy to solve. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain should be a great help to you: it'll teach you these fundamentals, but the assignments are also set up in a way that makes it very easy to see WHY it's so important to take at these skills one step at a time and learn them individually. It's also targeted specifically at people with your kind of difficulties and motivation to improve, so you should get a lot out of it if you put the time in and take it seriously.

Good luck!