Some random drawings after looking around the whole forum and seeing that a lot of you guys are for real working artists, I thought I'd get ur opinion on a few of my drawings. I'm just a college student who learns from Youtube videos like Mark Crilley's and IDrawGirls.com lol... After finishing stupid college i want to try and take art seriously. Please what is something I could work on that would dramatically improve my shiz... maybe a major or more obvious weakness.. encouragement and maybe some of my strengths would be nice too lol thanks
A comic inspired by my old boring job... no, the character is not me
Message received. Problem is when people are making what look like pretty obvious mistakes you have to cut through the layers of excuses before deciding what is genuinely an artistic choice and what is not. There was no offense intended and It's pretty obvious that you can draw an eye ball when you choose to. It's still not a design choice I'd make, though. The novelty would wear off quickly and then I'd be stuck with a character that had no eyes.
Some other things that I'd change. Word balloons are not a bad thing. I'd wager to say you omitted them for the same reason that you omitted the eyes. You seem to be going for a look other than traditional. But your choices, while interesting have already begun to hinder your comics. No eyes means limited expressiveness, no word balloons means limit ability to establish context. It's really hard to draw backgrounds around floating words, especially when dealing with a colored strip. Not to say that both of these things aren't possible to carry off I just thing that you may be getting ahead of yourself with some pretty advanced techniques and it shows.
Here's a quick mock-up of a few changes I'd make (I left out the eyes because that's a stylistic choice that I can't really help you with)
An alternate version with Sentence caps
Ok,
Panel 1:
First thing I did was change the font. I like the sentence caps that you had. Gives things a more intimate feel. But for the sake of this example i used Anime Ace from Blambot.com. I wouldn't marry it or anything but do try to look for something more stylized. An all caps font does let you get more text into the same space legibly though, because you can get away will making it smaller.
Next I dropped a shadow under the guys feet. You had him standing in mid air which was very spooky. If you're not going to do the establishing shot then at least apply some kind of physics.
Next I moved the words around. Couple things here: First if you want to omit word balloons then you should still try to make your words conform to a shape. Otherwise you have to spread the text cells really far apart so people know what words belongs to what cells. Also leaving out the word balloons means that you want to keep a person's text at least mouth level and up. Having his words down by his feet disconnects it from the fact that he's speaking them right now. They start to look like they might be his thoughts or someone else's narrative caption. Finally you need to give yourself plenty of space between the words and the objects/characters/panel borders around them. These spaces needs to be as consistent as you can keep them to train the readers eyes how to look at each panel.
Again these are pretty advanced techniques that you're messing around with and all these problems can be solved by sticking some word balloons in there.
Panel 2:
I flipped things horizontally but kept the couch on the right. This is because since you seem to be using the blank canvas as your background an abrupt change in camera angle can at least create the idea of space in three dimensions even if there are no visual cues for the reader to pick up on. Also your couch needed more of a shadow. The entire underside would be dark unless the light source were somehow sitting on the floor which isn't there. Putting a shadow under the kid again wouldn't hurt either. Just so he's not floating (those pesky physics)
Panel3 3:
Not much to change here. Again you want to make sure everything the kid says is around mouth level or above. I picked him up off the panel border as well. I suspect you were going for something there, in which case feel free to keep him there but once you open that can of worms you better stay consistent with it. You can't break the forth wall that way in your first strip and then stop doing it when you get bored with the novelty. Not a good look.
I also added the question mark to show that he's thinking about what to put next. The word "Uhm" does get the job done but so does having a thoughtful expression on your characters face. You know what are really great for expressions? EYEBALLS!!! I'm just sayin'.
Panel 4:
Commit to that closeup! watch the placement of your text again and pull in way close there. I'm not going to get started on the floating head thingy you were going for.
some final notes: Ellipses. That's what those little dots that imply a pregnant pause or that a character is about to say more are called. There are only three of them. Dot, dot, dot. You got it right most of the time but it's simple enough you wanna make sure it's right all the time.
I'm probably gonna take some heat for this but your style choices tell me that you would benefit from reading some good manga. I think that's where you'll find a lot of the techniques you'll need to pull this off.
Also try not to get offended by people's crits here. Not because they are not offensives sometimes or because you have to be a stalwart, emotionless rock to improve as an artist but because it's the internet and nothing looks worse then arguing on the internet.
Wow I feel bad about being so defensive now.. Tubesteak seriously these are like the most helpful comments ever... ur changes are amazing
Were u thinking manga influence might help because it's expressive or something? or what did u mean?
PS sorry for being emo. it hasn't happened before and it wont happen again lol
Wow I feel bad about being so defensive now.. Tubesteak seriously these are like the most helpful comments ever... ur changes are amazing
Were u thinking manga influence might help because it's expressive or something? or what did u mean?
PS sorry for being emo. it hasn't happened before and it wont happen again lol
No worries. And yea manga manages to communicate a lot of things that traditional western comics focus less on. Emotions and mood and things like that take center stage more often and are represented visually.
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A comic inspired by my old boring job... no, the character is not me
Some other things that I'd change. Word balloons are not a bad thing. I'd wager to say you omitted them for the same reason that you omitted the eyes. You seem to be going for a look other than traditional. But your choices, while interesting have already begun to hinder your comics. No eyes means limited expressiveness, no word balloons means limit ability to establish context. It's really hard to draw backgrounds around floating words, especially when dealing with a colored strip. Not to say that both of these things aren't possible to carry off I just thing that you may be getting ahead of yourself with some pretty advanced techniques and it shows.
Here's a quick mock-up of a few changes I'd make (I left out the eyes because that's a stylistic choice that I can't really help you with)
Panel 1:
First thing I did was change the font. I like the sentence caps that you had. Gives things a more intimate feel. But for the sake of this example i used Anime Ace from Blambot.com. I wouldn't marry it or anything but do try to look for something more stylized. An all caps font does let you get more text into the same space legibly though, because you can get away will making it smaller.
Next I dropped a shadow under the guys feet. You had him standing in mid air which was very spooky. If you're not going to do the establishing shot then at least apply some kind of physics.
Next I moved the words around. Couple things here: First if you want to omit word balloons then you should still try to make your words conform to a shape. Otherwise you have to spread the text cells really far apart so people know what words belongs to what cells. Also leaving out the word balloons means that you want to keep a person's text at least mouth level and up. Having his words down by his feet disconnects it from the fact that he's speaking them right now. They start to look like they might be his thoughts or someone else's narrative caption. Finally you need to give yourself plenty of space between the words and the objects/characters/panel borders around them. These spaces needs to be as consistent as you can keep them to train the readers eyes how to look at each panel.
Again these are pretty advanced techniques that you're messing around with and all these problems can be solved by sticking some word balloons in there.
Panel 2:
I flipped things horizontally but kept the couch on the right. This is because since you seem to be using the blank canvas as your background an abrupt change in camera angle can at least create the idea of space in three dimensions even if there are no visual cues for the reader to pick up on. Also your couch needed more of a shadow. The entire underside would be dark unless the light source were somehow sitting on the floor which isn't there. Putting a shadow under the kid again wouldn't hurt either. Just so he's not floating (those pesky physics)
Panel3 3:
Not much to change here. Again you want to make sure everything the kid says is around mouth level or above. I picked him up off the panel border as well. I suspect you were going for something there, in which case feel free to keep him there but once you open that can of worms you better stay consistent with it. You can't break the forth wall that way in your first strip and then stop doing it when you get bored with the novelty. Not a good look.
I also added the question mark to show that he's thinking about what to put next. The word "Uhm" does get the job done but so does having a thoughtful expression on your characters face. You know what are really great for expressions? EYEBALLS!!! I'm just sayin'.
Panel 4:
Commit to that closeup! watch the placement of your text again and pull in way close there. I'm not going to get started on the floating head thingy you were going for.
some final notes: Ellipses. That's what those little dots that imply a pregnant pause or that a character is about to say more are called. There are only three of them. Dot, dot, dot. You got it right most of the time but it's simple enough you wanna make sure it's right all the time.
I'm probably gonna take some heat for this but your style choices tell me that you would benefit from reading some good manga. I think that's where you'll find a lot of the techniques you'll need to pull this off.
Also try not to get offended by people's crits here. Not because they are not offensives sometimes or because you have to be a stalwart, emotionless rock to improve as an artist but because it's the internet and nothing looks worse then arguing on the internet.
Were u thinking manga influence might help because it's expressive or something? or what did u mean?
PS sorry for being emo. it hasn't happened before and it wont happen again lol
No worries. And yea manga manages to communicate a lot of things that traditional western comics focus less on. Emotions and mood and things like that take center stage more often and are represented visually.