Yeah, I fix it in Photoshop after so it lines up, so I don't have to do all the coloring from scratch, and I know where I'm going with it at least. But the actual drawings aren't traced. I didn't say I was a savant, I said I think it wouldn't look as good if I started out tracing.
Pretty typical examples of a progression, this one of Matt Smith:
[unused sketch]
The sketch [second from top] was drawn on a piece of paper folded 4x4 so I could roughly keep track of proportions. Then I just sort of warp it in place to match the reference once I'm in Photoshop and it's scanned.
Or I do the opposite and warp the reference, which would have been true of the Rose.
And obviously I do drawings which aren't supposed to match a photo as well, where I have a lot more freedom in terms of proportion.
For the Doctor Who stuff, that was a specific style. I really did want it to match the photos so that it would resemble a live action piece to a certain extent.
To be fair, the OP did say they did used the grid system. Ive been able to get almost 100% accuracy using that.
I still like the drawings and i did assume these where traced - but If this is just for fun, it doesnt really matter.
But, no matter how bad your drawings may turn out to be, it is a lot more fun drawing without tracing.
EDIT: OK after seeing that process shot, its a huge jump between 1 and 2, and a bloody huge jump between 2 and 3.:?
I fixed the proportions in Photoshop before the third drawing there, the cleanup line art. More normally I'd do it after the finished line art, but sometimes I do it first, it doesn't matter too much either way. It does lose a bit of liveliness compared to the sketch, but lines up with the reference for easier coloring.
The line art in the coloured version is clearly not the same as the blank version, though. So I guess you warp the line art to match the reference afterwards, but to what end?
You won't learn anything from it. Meticulously copying and then altering your drawings to fit the reference exactly isn't doing you any favours. Your colouring's painful to look at and seriously, you're not improving just from copying stuff.
You need to actually draw figures. No grids or fiddling afterwards, just sketch sketch sketch and practice practice practice.
What you have now, while certainly very clean, is an almost painfully bland, lifeless style. You need to work on gestures, general body language, facial expressions, anatomy, proportions, stuff like that.
Draw from life, dude. Draw from life a lot. Copying phoographs and poser renders has you end up with lifeless stuff. You could be doing way, way better.
EDIT: And other people mentioned this before, but for fuck's sake don't make a new post for every separate piece, jesus christ. You can fit all of these things in one post. Plus, they're really big, so it's hard to look at more than one at a time, which is a problem when you're trying to compare the line art to the coloured version and such. Plus, th colouring combined with how there's a million of these giant faces makes your thread hard to look at in general.
Your non-Photoshopped images, even in their rough state, have infinitely more character to them than the bland, inked and airbrushed finished pieces. They look kind of like you just ran a picture through a filter. By just eyedropping the colors (or whatever it is you do) and matching the gradients exactly to whats in the photoraf, you're creating this weird stylistic dissonance between the line art and the coloring.
So even while your process is more laborious than I gave it credit for, the point of my critique is still the same: you aren't getting anything out of working like this.
If you want to make your drawings interesting to look at, and not the stilted plastic toy look they have now, then you'll need to learn to use your eyes more. This means not leaning on grids and eyedroppers so much as a crutch, and learning why stuff (colors, lines, etc) goes where it does, beyond just "because that's where it is on the grid".
And again, please stop posting 2 or 3 posts at a time with 2 or 3 images per post.
You all have a point. And I'm shit at bodies and have done very little life drawing, and that's why I'm doing a cartoony comic book right now rather than this sort of Doctor Who thing. Because I need to learn and challenge myself.
I think it's going too far to say I didn't, or won't, learn anything from this, though. I learned a hell of a lot about faces from this method. Studying how my own sketches lined up with t he real thing showed me a lot of what I was doing wrong, and I think that gave me the skills to do the more cartoony work I'm doing now. With or without a grid I can do a human likeness now very easily. What I was doing had to be a little mechanical, but that was to get one, solid image that really looked like the actor.
Keep in mind these were for animation, so I then would have to draw thirty or so alternate heads for the character completely out of my own head. There was no photo reference, Photoshop or grids here, just fun, straight drawing, straight from the pen to the page.
Having studied the heads in that much detail gave me the skills to be able to do that, to know what the guy looked like so I could then screw around with it a little. I'm sure I could do cartoonier versions of the characters if I wanted to that would still look like the actors.
Clearly you've all had an extreme negative reaction to my stylistic choices in the Doctor Who material, finding it insultingly bland. I think I need a little more info on what exactly you would want to see, and what would make it work for you. Clearly you want something much more stylized. And clearly I don't think it's completely artistically invalid to make the choices I was making, since I made those decisions and developed the style in a very purposeful way, bland or no .... but I would like to create art that more people like than hate. So. As hard as it is to hear this sort of thing, please, keep on with the crits, whether I appear to be listening or not.
I often prefer the sketches too, but I think sketches can be misleading. Their looseness gives them a quality which can evaporate really fast when you're cleaning it up without being 100% sure of what you're doing.
Fair enough, but it's still much, much, much easier and quicker to actually just draw draw draw, doing sketches and stuff. You ma have learned a lot, but your stuff still looks flat and lifeless, even your cartoony stuff.
Ask any illustrator and definitely any aniamtor and they'll tell you that a good understanding of the basics is fairly essential to dawing in general.
You're not good at bodies, so you're doing a cartoony comic. Okay. Your comic looks pretty bad, though. It's still quite static and flat, and the colouring's bad, too. Plus, the backgrounds are incredibly busy and saturated and painful to look at as a result.
Seriously. Give the copying and grids a rest and try it the more traditional way. There's a reason why people are still doing it that way.
You keep saying that we have a point, but you never actually do anything that shows us you agree. You keep doing the same thing while you're not actually using any of our advice. You just agree with us and keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. To be honest, it's quite frustrating.
Please, don't show us any of the stuff you've done before now and start doing sketches and life drawings and studies without a grid and start showing us that, because that's the stuff you should be doing if you want to improve. Your cartoony stuff will only get better from it, trust me. All of your stuff will, and it'll stop looking dead.
And seriously, your portraits are huge. They're almost impossible to see properly.
You keep saying that we have a point, but you never actually do anything that shows us you agree. You keep doing the same thing while you're not actually using any of our advice. You just agree with us and keep doing the same thing over and over and over again.
I started this thread today. The work you're criticizing is from 2009. Let's not expect my entire style to change overnight.
Oh shit, sorry, I thought it was older than that, my apologies. That's what you get with so many posts, though.
Anyway, again, sorry, that wasn't very helpful of me. Still, we've got a pretty decent picture of what your general thing is, so posting more and more examples of the same thing isn't really going to help us help you any better.
So if this stuff is from 2009, do you have anything more recent?
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MustangArbiter of Unpopular OpinionsRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
I expect people to change their style minutes after I give them advice. Even if the advice is really bad and designed to cause them physical harm.
The Homestuck stuff is all from this week, and my comic is from the past two months. You've mentioned the comic already but you should be more specific on why it's terrible and how I should fix its terribleness. Diagrams if necessary. You probably think I'm kidding.
No grids were harmed in the making of these pieces. [Except for three Homestuck pieces done in something like the Doctor Who style obviously.]
Yeah, I'm done posting the Doctor Who stuff, and I would have been done a hell of a lot earlier except people weren't getting exactly how the pieces were made. The transparency was broken out. The transparency.
It's probably best for people to kind of understand my process so they can crit properly. Though I have to admit, all the artists I love, like at the MSPA forums and here, I don't understand their process at all. Not remotely. It's like magic to me. Which might explain the level I'm at. Hooray!
As I said, I don't use a tablet, just regular xerox paper, which has its limits in terms of size especially [I'm addicted to using the Median tool in Photoshop to removing imperfection]. My painting skills are ... what they are.
As I said, it took about a week to finish a full animated Doctor Who character. I created many of them. I wasted my life.
I would draw a ton of sketches in a day, and eventually color the best ones, taking a day on each one and being fiddly.
Well, I'll be 30 years old on Hitler's birthday in April 2011. I consider myself a filmmaker, writer and artist in equal amounts. I've directed a few very low budget features, and yeah, (for the one guy who's heard of it,) restored The Thief and the Cobbler and stuff like that, not for commercial release but for me. I went to film school, but I'm from Connecticut and Los Angeles didn't agree with me, for reasons both stereotypical and not. I write for a magazine interviewing film editors, and am, as of November, otherwise unemployed and terrified. Can't pay bills, weeping in the horn pile.
I've always drawn since a very young age, but probably never took it seriously enough. Because my father was/is a cartoonist and his life wasn't a happy one, I suppose, and I felt I had more to say as a writer. I always did do pretty similar realistic likenesses, and I didn't use a grid until the Doctor Who stuff. Capturing the look of someone in a simple pencil or pen sketch, that was always my thing.
Someone offered me a tryout to be a Simpsons layout artist once, and I did my best and failed hilariously. I wouldn't want to draw in that robotic style anyway, and clearly I have my own robotic style! Zing!
I've done some [very little] professional work, going back to doing official Monty Python merchandise back in 1999 when I was 18. Not too much, though. I've barely tried to get graphic work, because I barely know how to get graphic work. I'm assuming there are connections involved, as in film. I never mastered that either, and continue to be broke and weeping in the born pile.
I was always just good with pencils and pens. Maybe a little watercolor. My normal, trad painting skills are hilariously lacking.
I started doing the Doctor Who stuff at the very end of 2007. I started out rough and over time I refined the style and made it much more accurate, and better to my eyes. I kept doing it throughout early 2009, and occasionally after. I do feel I learned something doing it, as the work was refined to a level of clarity that ... well, people can now say it's horrible and bland and looks like a photo run through a filter. Even though it's 90-99% simple line art. Hum. Well, there are still a few bugs in the system.
I recognize I've got a ways to go in terms of bodies and things. The facial likenesses have become a shield- for those who like them anyway- covering up the stuff that I need to learn. I've been prouder of myself for blocking out body forms in a sketchy way for my comic, and these sketches I'm proud of are so hilariously terrible in actuality, but for me they represent me trying to learn.
Like Richard Williams himself when he was young, I'm hiding behind details and technique, which I know I can do, and am well aware of the actual 3D animation skills that are lacking.
There are artists that inspire me and I think a lot of them post here, and on MSPA. But a lot of it is very painterly stuff which I know is done with tablets and things and it might as well all be magic.
I tried to use a tablet once, and decided to return it- the style of working was so absolutely foreign to me that I thought I should plug on with pen and paper rather than spend a few months drawing like a child?
So, I'll be 30 soon, and I wouldn't mind having a career doing this, if people start liking what I'm doing. [Which is not to say that people don't like what I've been doing- they do. But one needs to appeal to a wider audience to have commercial appeal. If this forum thinks it's garbage I need to listen to that.]
The Chosen Ones project is a major one for me, as it's at least three screenplays long, and I slept on the project for five years before coming up with the version we see now. It looked a lot worse before, and the script is better now too. I've had minor bites on the project from producers over the years but I really doubt it would ever get made the way I've written it, so, comic time. Also, I need to learn how comics work.
Wow, you posted a whole heck of alot at once. Slow way down and we can focus on a few works at a time. People are getting crazy impressions because you've posted so much. Check out the other threads on the forums, most people post something new every few days, and unless we need to look at their works overall for a more through crit, they only post what they currently are working on.
Clearly you've all had an extreme negative reaction to my stylistic choices in the Doctor Who material, finding it insultingly bland. I think I need a little more info on what exactly you would want to see, and what would make it work for you. Clearly you want something much more stylized. And clearly I don't think it's completely artistically invalid to make the choices I was making, since I made those decisions and developed the style in a very purposeful way, bland or no .... but I would like to create art that more people like than hate. So. As hard as it is to hear this sort of thing, please, keep on with the crits, whether I appear to be listening or not.
Don't get the wrong impression, no one is going to tell you you have to make one type of art or another. We are going to tell you what is detrimental to your improvement as an artist, though. The extreme negative reaction is because tracing is a pretty common thing it will do you no good. Grids, while great for certain types of painters, are only going to take you but so far when it comes to creating new forms freehand.
So from what I'm gathering, For the dr. Who stuff, you are drawing by pencil, then overlaying over the photo to fix errors, then letting the underlying photo come through to texture/color the drawing?
From what I'm seeing, there are a few issues. Photos, particularly of celebrities, tend to have terrible lighting for drawing. Your ink drawings aren't so bad, but when you jump to color, you start to show a lack of foundation in light and volume, which is really what painting is about. I believe that you arent tracing, but I still think you are following photos too closely (even when you are making up stuff). Photography is great reference, but you need to study artists for techniques, and color theory. Trying to make cartoons purely from photos is pretty difficult without some good, grounded ability to make up form and space, and exaggerate in ascetically pleasing ways.
For cartooning, I recommend john K http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/ With your comic, the problem with copying photos is showing in your expressions, which aren't very expressive. John K can help with that, by making you feel bad for not respecting the golden age of cartoons and liking shrek. You wont agree with him on everything, but there is good advice in there.
As opposed to no handle at all. Which is what I kinda got.
I hate John K, by the way, even though like him, I grew up with Beany & Cecil [we had Beta tapes]. I really, really, really hate John K, and those who imitate him, so yeah. Just putting that out there. [Ren & Stimpy was good but that doesn't justify his opinions and work these days.] I'm not a fan of a lot of modern design trends either. =\ I mean, I like the way Lauren Faust draws ponies, but no way in hell would I draw like that cos that's not my mind.
At this point I just draw what I see and I guess that's my style.
I don't like Shrek either, or any robotic dead-eyed CGI cartoon, and I don't like UPA-ish styling. I do like The Thief and the Cobbler though. So that's a start maybe?
So from what I'm gathering, For the dr. Who stuff, you are drawing by pencil, then overlaying over the photo to fix errors, then letting the underlying photo come through to texture/color the drawing?
It was usually ballpoint pen [I'm using pencil again now; don't know why I was using ballpoint except for looseness I guess], and then fine point Sharpie [pigment pen, now]. Then I'd make it fit the photo [sometimes only inking afterward], and use the photo as a starting point to figure out the color. I'd do a million loose sketches from a million different photos and only color a few of them, cos the coloring took ages for all the obvious reasons. I think I was purposely going for a sort of flat look to make it generic for animation, but also it was extremely hard to judge color on my old monitor. I think maybe it's hard to judge color on any monitor. It's a shame that monitors vary so much.
Here's a typical run of strips from The Chosen Ones ...
Again, I apologize, I was under the impression that the thread had been going for longer than it actually had been, and I want to apologize for any overly harsh words in general. I'm prone to hyperbole from time to time.
As for your comic, the backgrounds are incredibly busy and incredibly saturated. They distract from the characters. The first page or two especially, with the Mondriaan-like backgrounds. Where are they? What are they doing besides talking? What's going on? These are all mysteries, largely due to the backgrounds. Only after a while of carefully analyzing the thing do I realize that the blond girl is looking in a mirror.
As for the characters, you've got the beginnings of a nice enough style, but the anatomy and such needs work. Drawing from life and sketching a lot and so on will help you with that. It's someting else in every panel. Arms connect weird here, necks are wonky there. You need to brush up on anatomy and proportions and such so you have a good foundation to build on with your style. At the moment your figures lack structure. In the last panel in the page I have quoted, the girl with the black hair has feet that are all kinds of fucked up. They don't really look like they have any kind of underlying structure, and so the way they connect to the leg is all messed up, leaving the whole thing to end up looking flat. Like she has cardboard cut-outs for legs. Similarly, her fingers are just a smooth zig-zag with one lumpy wrist and a left thumb that seems to be attached to her right hand.
Looking at the page again, you do know the basics, but you need to work them out a bit more. You more or less know how long an arm is supposed to be in relation to the rest of the body and some basic shapes etcetera, but right now you're still having trouble with keeping all of that stuff consistent. You need to practice these basics a lot and keep in mind that they're part of a 3-dimensional structure. There's a lot to be said for flat artwork, too, of course. A lot of animated series and films use that kind of design, but I don't think that really works with your personal style. You could change it, of course, but knowing the basics is never a waste of time.
The faces in your comic are pretty nice and expressive, but you could do with a bit more variety as far as expressions go, and they could be a bit more lively. There's not a whole lot of energy or life in their expressions, so they end up looking tired or doll-like.
In the other pages, the one with the alien, the 3D rendered backgrounds are also incredibly busy and full of super-saturated colours, so they literally hurt to look at. All of the little fiddly bits and the brightness and the sheer amount of different, extremely bright colours do not do those pages any favours.
Plus, the highly detailed, 3D-rendered backgrounds don't fit your style at all. They look almost as out-of-place as a photograph would look as a background. The detail of the background, especially when compared to your characters and their rather variable anatomy makes the alien seem even more out of place than usual, too. It emphasizes how flat he is.
Basically there's a certain amount of disconnect between the faces of your characters and their bodies, too. The faces have way more detail than you'd expect if you were going by the bodies, and vice versa. Brushing up on your anatomy and so on would definitely help you make their heads and bodies look like they actually fit together, too.
Do you have any books on art and so on? Drawing, that kind of stuff. I suppose the stickies here have a bunch about that, so yeah, check those out, like Bombs said.
I've got a lot to learn in terms of anatomy and understanding how 3D shapes work and being able to translate that to the page mentally. I don't think that's going to come easily or quickly.
There's only a few points in your post I'd do anything more than quietly agree with, but ...
I know it's a bit to ask, but could you click through some of the 20 pages so far quickly and comment on a few other of the pages? http://orangecow.org/thechosenones/?p=37
Backgrounds are something I'm figuring out, and at times I'm doing really complicated ones that take awhile, when I shouldn't be once I know what to draw and what to leave out.
This page, for example, has very complicated backgrounds that you barely see, and this has been somewhat typical so far.
Each background has one doodled but very detailed pen drawing, and a lot of Photoshop coloring, again with a photo as some sort of basis.
Both scenes I quoted, the Mondrian and the 3D lair, are unusual in terms of backgrounds. I really did want a Mondrian with very fractured perspective [I thought it would be a change of pace and would allow me to show both characters], and I really did want all the photo-like detail of a 3D render back there- partly because I didn't want to draw the thing I suppose, but I wanted it to look better than something I would draw and swear over.
I'm thinking of the comic as being animated cels on some sort of painted background I suppose. It comes from its roots as a supposed animated series.
I'm really not sure how I would have handled either scene differently, as these choices, though odd, were exactly what I was going for. Well, obviously I could have drawn them with traditional backgrounds, and that would be different. I'm just starting to even get used to attempting that.
Well the thing about those backgrounds is that, even though you may have wanted them to be like that for whatever reason, they still don't fit. At least not with the characters. Individually, the 3D background might look better than your drawings (I'd disagree because I dislike that specific style of 3D, the kind that is really obviously 3D), but when you use it as a background it doesn't work and ends up dragging the whole thing down. Also, again, I must mention the fact that the 3D background is oversaturated and too busy, and ends up being tremendously distracting.
The Mondriaan has a different problem. The problem there is that there's no perspective. You have your characters, and then you sort of dump them in a Mondriaan, and that's it. You can't tell where they are or what they're supposed to be doing so it's terribly distracting here, too.
I know there's that awesome bit from the Thief and the Cobbler, which I'm reminded of instantly when looking at the Mondriaan background. With the chase in the palace and the funky, abstract mosaics all over the place, and yeah, that was great, but comics don't work like that. At least, they don't work like that if your characters aren't Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD.
The problems I'm seeing so far is that your backgrounds rarely fit. You have your characters, and they're drawn in one way, but your backgrounds are all over the place. You've got these photomanipulation-like things like how you did your Doctor Who portraits, you've got these super-detailed, ultra-bright 3D backgrounds, you've got the incomprehensible abstract planes with no frame of reference whatsoever etcetera etcetera etcetera.
It's a mish-mash at this point. What I think your comic needs is a more unified aesthetic. You're doing all these things in your comic, but none of them have anything to do with the others, aesthetically.
Mind you, this is just my opinion, but I just don't think that your comic benefits from the backgrounds being all over the place like this.
At this point I just draw what I see and I guess that's my style.
"Its my style" is the defense of an artist who doesn't want to hear what people are saying.
Your work has flaws. Now, we could go over each piece and work out exactly whats wrong, whats not working, etc. But thats not going to help. What you need is a general approach to getting better. Fortunately its a one size fits all that has worked for practically every artist everywhere and everywhen if approached properly!
Draw from life, do studies, and in a small piece of personalized advice, stop tracing.
On another note, it doesn't matter if something in your work was intentional or not, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
You dont really have to like john k, But you should find someone like him you do respect. I wouldn't expect anyone to imitate his artwork, Of which I am only partially fond of. But he argues some basic principals that are pretty hard to disagree on, the biggest one being construction, which you dont need as much help with. Still, I would separate ideals about style and art from useful resources. I have had plenty of teachers who hate everything about comics and cartoons who still had good advice for me and my art.
Richard Williams is another good place to start though.
I mostly suggested K because of the plain expressions, Particularly in the comic pages. Sort of like with that last page you posted, I've never seen someone sing with a more neutral expression. Richard William has a lot to teach about acting, showing expression without words. Those last two panels without words, for instance, wouldn't have anything interesting going on.
Being into drawing what you see is great, but you are missing a whole level (light) and reducing stuff down to cartoons is a different level. If you want to copy anything, you should study art that will really get those basic principals hammered out, and not just photos.
Oh, he's just muttering to himself, not singing loudly, but I get your point.
Fine. Whatever you are doing to make these match exactly when overlayed:
I'll accept "whatever," as opposed to "tracing." Yes, they match up. I'm the one who matched them up. That was the entire point of the style, and something I was fairly proud of at the time. Let's move on from that.
Anyway, yeah. I'm reading every single saved Angel of Bacon paintover crit right now and looking at art books and tutorials and things. But I should be sleeping also. This should occur.
All I know at this point is that there's a lot I don't know. I've barely done figure drawing and barely attempted painting, or thinking about a light source while drawing. I certainly didn't intend the Doctor Who stuff to look like paintings.
If I could just critique... y'know, like one thing.
use the EDIT button...
It will help make the thread not so goddamn long o_O
Now that that's off my chest, I really like what you have going so far. Pretty unique visually. And loving the cartoony look. Is it bad that I think of Dr Mrs. The Monarch when I see the brunette on the first page? :P
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The_Glad_HatterOne Sly FoxUnderneath a Groovy HatRegistered Userregular
I hate John K, by the way, even though like him, I grew up with Beany & Cecil [we had Beta tapes]. I really, really, really hate John K, and those who imitate him, so yeah. Just putting that out there. [Ren & Stimpy was good but that doesn't justify his opinions and work these days.] I'm not a fan of a lot of modern design trends either. =\
Try not to look at his blog from a style point of view. If you just go there for animation tips it is definately one of the ultimate web resources available at the time. This man analyses each and every aspect of animation and raises some interesting points. Even if you don't agree with how he handles everything and the choices he makes, you're missing out on a huge learning opportunity.
There is a big difference between moving arms around and animating a movement, and John K's blog would help you out a lot, if you're interested in improving.
Also, and other artists talked about this too, be carefull about defending your own style too much when you're just starting out (anything under 5-10 years is just starting...). Every artists pretty much vomits in disgust on what/ how he drew a few years earlier, and you probably won't be an exception.
Glad-Hatter- I've read some of John K's blog, and from time to time he does say something I agree with, but he also has terrible taste and says a lot of things I don't agree with, so ... yeah. I was actually reading a bit of it yesterday just because people were recommending it, and there's a few things I wanted to put into the mental notebook.
But still it is annoying to read- I really don't want to have to read that Jim Tyer or some hack doing 60s Yogi Bear comics is a genius, whereas Richard Williams is the poster boy for unappealing design. I also don't like literally anything he draws himself.
I'm staggered that people copy his style and try to be like him. If nothing else, for the fact that influences shouldn't be obvious.
I hope animators are still reading Preston Blair and, yes, Dick Williams. [The Animators' Survival Kit!]
Also, and other artists talked about this too, be carefull about defending your own style too much when you're just starting out (anything under 5-10 years is just starting...). Every artists pretty much vomits in disgust on what/ how he drew a few years earlier, and you probably won't be an exception.
Yeah, I was vomiting in disgust at something I drew 14 years ago just yesterday. [And wanting to redraw it!] And I certainly vomit in disgust at most things I drew about 10 years ago, or sooner.
I think I'd have real mental problems if I were already vomiting in disgust at things I drew yesterday or last year, though. But you all can go ahead and start without me.
[If people are gonna swear and imply I'm lying about things, then I'll defend myself against that at least.]
I've been drawing for longer than 10 years though, if that's the guidepost here. I'm a few months short of 30. I just always did line art rather than painting. And what life drawing I did was a long time ago.
Black levels these days are all over the place- what used to be completely black on a monitor is now a milky light grey. This is true of DVDs, which boost the black levels something fierce, and true of LCD monitors.
But what's driving me nuts is- the LCD monitor I'm viewing this on- converted to work with my Mac- is getting greyer and brighter by the day now, for no reason I can see. Things I created a few days ago to have high contrast now have no contrast and milky, milky greys.
I used to have a CRT monitor, which had a heavy black level dropoff. Any dark areas would come off as black, and be impossible to see. When I'd create a DVD, it would often be a shock when what was supposed to be completely black would suddenly be a bright grey, showing all kinds of compositing errors that had been completely invisible when I was working, and which I'd never be able to see in FCP.
If you've looked at any of my work in this thread, what you're seeing is probably very different than what I saw when I created it.
Anyone wearing a dark suit and having dark hair- those should be almost completely black, and right now on my monitor they're looking bright grey. Yes, there's detail there, but it's supposed to be subliminal. The Doctor's black suit is now a very bright grey and everyone has no contrast whatsoever on their faces, when I originally created the contrast to be quite intense. This takes a lot of the appeal out of the work for me and makes it much less interesting.
I created this just a few days ago, and her hair is black and the detail should be almost invisible. But the contrast on my monitor is now diminished so much that her hair is a bright grey, and there's no contrast in her face.
This is driving me nuts. Can I ask you - what do YOU see, contrastwise, on your monitor, when you look at my images?
I've been reading the art books of Andrew Loomis, which are amazing and obviously far above my skill level, but I'm planning to set aside some time and work along with them, as he talks a lot about anatomy, perspective, working with form in three dimensions, shading, tone, lighting ... those difficult basics that I lack.
I was then trying to motivate myself by looking at modern comic books, since I was in the mood to try to draw a more traditional comic, but the Batman material I looked at was very shoddily drawn. There's a lot of good art in comics today, but there's also a lot of crap that won't teach an artist anything.
I prefer the consistency of older comic book art- there's a sameness to it, but also a really confident grasp of the fundamentals which isn't there in a lot of today's comics.
I've been doing a lot of studying and thinking about things, but I'm afraid what I'm actually drawing isn't reflecting much of that yet.
I drew two pieces as Christmas gifts. I was rushing to meet that Christmas deadline and I'm afraid that in that rush I did use some cheats and tricks to get the things done.
That said, these are simple pen pieces and I was really thinking about contrast here, lighting and tone, so there was more than the usual on my mind.
A friend had requested a "smoking dog." I thought of a noir scene, and also had in mind Bec, the omnipotent dog from Homestuck.
I basically traced the rough form, I'm afraid, and then concentrated on detail and lighting. I'm happier with the fur than I am the suit- the style of penmanship just didn't work for the non furry parts. The lighting is exaggerated but definitely matches the photo, which was of Cary Grant. Except now it's a dog.
Sting was hard to draw. I did a lot of roughs from a lot of different images, and finally went with this one due to the intense contrast, which I thought would be interesting to draw.
This and all the other rejected Stings I drew were designed using a 4x4 grid system. Folding up a piece of paper into 4x4, like I did on Doctor Who, and putting a similar grid on the picture on my monitor I was looking at. I know, I know. I was rushing. I'm sorry. I gotta stop.
His stubble gave me some opportunity to do shading without feeling stupid, but it woulda been better as a painting.
I did this for a lady I was dating, who happens to like Sting. She broke up with me tonight. Don't think it had anything to do with this, though.
I think you might be approaching this the wrong way. That is to say, as far as I can see you're approaching this thing in the same way that you've approached it previously. Which is wrong.
Loomis isn't beyond your skill, you seem to be under the impression that the goal is to instantly pick up these skills. That's not true. Loomis talks a lot about constructing figures from basic shapes, which is something you need to do because a lot of your stuff, as mentioned previously, lacks structure. Start with basic shapes and work your way up from there. If you think Loomis is beyond your grasp even with that, try Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Figure Drawing.
Remember, the objective isn't to isntantly transform you into a magnificent artist, or to perfectly copy what Loomis or Hogarth or whoever do in their books, but to learn by practicing.
And do sketches. Lots of them. Sketch a lot. Do life drawing, look at how things really look in real life and try to put that down on paper without resorting to shortcuts liek "eyes are supposed to be this shape" or stuff like that.
As far as I can tell, you're just doing the same thing over and over and over. Did you take our advice and actually try sketching? You haven't shown us anything to that effect, you just keep showing us finished pieces. You can do those, yeah, but if you do those exclusively you're not going to improve very quickly for a variety of reasons. You lose track of the bigger picture and get bogged down in the details, and the bigger picture means the basics of structure and form in this case, which is what you should be focusing on.
If you have sketches and studies and life drawings and so on, please show them to us so we can help you with those. If you keep posting finished pieces, it's a lot more difficult to help you improve.
And also: You don't need to make a new post for every new thing you want to say. Please, use the edit button. If you keep filling up your own thread with quadruple and quintuple or more posts it's going to get very difficult to read. I mean, it is very difficult to read. Just edit your posts, please.
Using style as a means to hide you're weaknesses is not an excuse at all. It would be better for you to do things the opposite way, and learn to draw from life and THEN work on developing your own style. It doesn't sound as exciting as drawing the way you're comfortable with, but you'd be surprised how much you'll see improvement, even just from one drawing to the next. Don't be afraid to leave your comfort zone - it's the only way to expand it! Keep on truckin' (:
And now the part where it's been awhile but I get up enough nerve to post here again ...
I remember I did a stack of hundreds of Loomis body structure sketches at the time [Early January, or late December] ... but haven't done any real body structure studies since. At the moment I've been painting.
Albert Einstein. Acrylic paint on a 16 x 20 Masonite board.
This was a commission for a high school friend, a gift for her husband (they'd just been married).
A detailed line drawing was drawn in Sharpie as preparation, then painted over. Total painting time was 13 hours - one 8 hour session, and one 5 hour session.
If classic pinup artist Gil Elvgren had painted Princess Peach, from Super Mario Bros. And poor Bowser. Drawn with pigment pen on 14x17 Bristol board. Copied from a Gil Elvgren painting. Not actually traced, but copied so exactly that it makes very little difference I'm sure. I really need to not do that again.
I haven't done any coloring on it; I'm considering actually painting it. If anyone who's really good at coloring wants to tackle it I won't stop you!
This was intended for my webcomic The Chosen Ones. I'd done a previous pinup of Peach, but wasn't happy with it. So I went with the Elvgren style ... which I also did awhile back on another piece. But as I said, I need to not do that again.
MustangArbiter of Unpopular OpinionsRegistered Userregular
edited June 2011
Those are infinitely more interesting than everything else you have posted here combined. Soft brush digital colours make me want to puke, but your acrylics of Vincent Price and Albert Einstein are just plain good, especially Vincent.
Lesson of the day, use your hard edged brush in conjunction with your soft brush when doing digital colours. It allows you to add definition where your soft brush is utterly unable to. I really think you need to take a new approach to how you work digitally, everything you have posted up until now, smacks of shortcuts. Digital does make the process quicker, but it doesn't mean you can skip steps altogether.
I must say that the Doctor Who animated stuff was never intended to look like paintings. The soft color underlayer, which had a lot of the original photo in it somewhere, was intentional for the style and, I felt, necessarily vague, so that it would be flexible for animation and work with many different expressions in the line art faces, without a lot of changes.
I know that a lot of people here didn't like that style, which is fair enough. But I hadn't intended it to be compared to proper painting, as if that's what I was going for and I'd merely missed the mark, rather than purposely wanting line art over soft color. But oh well. I don't know if I'll do that style again or what, but at least I'm trying something different now.
Danny Pudi as Abed Nadir from the great NBC sitcom Community, created by Dan Harmon.
Acrylic paint on a 16x20 canvas panel.
The actual painting is rather dark [if more subtle than this], so I did some post work and brightened it up in Photoshop and softened some details that didn't work when brightened. Hence the sort of "halo" softening effect. I've considered doing another day's work on the painting to brighten it up, but I think I might just leave it as is.
The paintings are alot better for a whole ton of reasons, but you are still having some light and form issues. Looking at your Einstein reference, I can see that you are making alot of things really solid that were originally pretty soft, (like the hair on the right side, catching the light) and some edges really bold and hard that weren't so prominent.
More problematic though, is the light. On his forehead we can see two highlights, (the dark pink lines)
The shape of his forehead has a few broken planes that wrap around but still have edges. Even if youd like to stylize things, missing these ques will make your work incredibly flat. Abed looks like a mush of tones, like an under painting without the finishing highlights and shadows.
Photos are usually a really poor reference for finding these edges and forms, because of how softly we tend to light celebrities. Having a better foundation of form is going to help you interpret what you are seeing rather than just trying to transcribe it.
Posts
I literally have it queued up, it will take me under a minute.
[edit]
Actually, whatever
This is your drawing layered on top of your source.
I don't care what you say you're doing. You are not a savant. Quit tracing bro
Pretty typical examples of a progression, this one of Matt Smith:
[unused sketch]
The sketch [second from top] was drawn on a piece of paper folded 4x4 so I could roughly keep track of proportions. Then I just sort of warp it in place to match the reference once I'm in Photoshop and it's scanned.
Or I do the opposite and warp the reference, which would have been true of the Rose.
And obviously I do drawings which aren't supposed to match a photo as well, where I have a lot more freedom in terms of proportion.
For the Doctor Who stuff, that was a specific style. I really did want it to match the photos so that it would resemble a live action piece to a certain extent.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
I still like the drawings and i did assume these where traced - but If this is just for fun, it doesnt really matter.
But, no matter how bad your drawings may turn out to be, it is a lot more fun drawing without tracing.
EDIT: OK after seeing that process shot, its a huge jump between 1 and 2, and a bloody huge jump between 2 and 3.:?
More examples of line art vs. color.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
It looks like proportions were altered before the finished line art on this one.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
You won't learn anything from it. Meticulously copying and then altering your drawings to fit the reference exactly isn't doing you any favours. Your colouring's painful to look at and seriously, you're not improving just from copying stuff.
You need to actually draw figures. No grids or fiddling afterwards, just sketch sketch sketch and practice practice practice.
What you have now, while certainly very clean, is an almost painfully bland, lifeless style. You need to work on gestures, general body language, facial expressions, anatomy, proportions, stuff like that.
Draw from life, dude. Draw from life a lot. Copying phoographs and poser renders has you end up with lifeless stuff. You could be doing way, way better.
EDIT: And other people mentioned this before, but for fuck's sake don't make a new post for every separate piece, jesus christ. You can fit all of these things in one post. Plus, they're really big, so it's hard to look at more than one at a time, which is a problem when you're trying to compare the line art to the coloured version and such. Plus, th colouring combined with how there's a million of these giant faces makes your thread hard to look at in general.
So even while your process is more laborious than I gave it credit for, the point of my critique is still the same: you aren't getting anything out of working like this.
If you want to make your drawings interesting to look at, and not the stilted plastic toy look they have now, then you'll need to learn to use your eyes more. This means not leaning on grids and eyedroppers so much as a crutch, and learning why stuff (colors, lines, etc) goes where it does, beyond just "because that's where it is on the grid".
And again, please stop posting 2 or 3 posts at a time with 2 or 3 images per post.
[edit] Dammit spex!
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
I think it's going too far to say I didn't, or won't, learn anything from this, though. I learned a hell of a lot about faces from this method. Studying how my own sketches lined up with t he real thing showed me a lot of what I was doing wrong, and I think that gave me the skills to do the more cartoony work I'm doing now. With or without a grid I can do a human likeness now very easily. What I was doing had to be a little mechanical, but that was to get one, solid image that really looked like the actor.
Keep in mind these were for animation, so I then would have to draw thirty or so alternate heads for the character completely out of my own head. There was no photo reference, Photoshop or grids here, just fun, straight drawing, straight from the pen to the page.
Having studied the heads in that much detail gave me the skills to be able to do that, to know what the guy looked like so I could then screw around with it a little. I'm sure I could do cartoonier versions of the characters if I wanted to that would still look like the actors.
Clearly you've all had an extreme negative reaction to my stylistic choices in the Doctor Who material, finding it insultingly bland. I think I need a little more info on what exactly you would want to see, and what would make it work for you. Clearly you want something much more stylized. And clearly I don't think it's completely artistically invalid to make the choices I was making, since I made those decisions and developed the style in a very purposeful way, bland or no .... but I would like to create art that more people like than hate. So. As hard as it is to hear this sort of thing, please, keep on with the crits, whether I appear to be listening or not.
I often prefer the sketches too, but I think sketches can be misleading. Their looseness gives them a quality which can evaporate really fast when you're cleaning it up without being 100% sure of what you're doing.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Ask any illustrator and definitely any aniamtor and they'll tell you that a good understanding of the basics is fairly essential to dawing in general.
You're not good at bodies, so you're doing a cartoony comic. Okay. Your comic looks pretty bad, though. It's still quite static and flat, and the colouring's bad, too. Plus, the backgrounds are incredibly busy and saturated and painful to look at as a result.
Seriously. Give the copying and grids a rest and try it the more traditional way. There's a reason why people are still doing it that way.
You keep saying that we have a point, but you never actually do anything that shows us you agree. You keep doing the same thing while you're not actually using any of our advice. You just agree with us and keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. To be honest, it's quite frustrating.
Please, don't show us any of the stuff you've done before now and start doing sketches and life drawings and studies without a grid and start showing us that, because that's the stuff you should be doing if you want to improve. Your cartoony stuff will only get better from it, trust me. All of your stuff will, and it'll stop looking dead.
And seriously, your portraits are huge. They're almost impossible to see properly.
I started this thread today. The work you're criticizing is from 2009. Let's not expect my entire style to change overnight.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Anyway, again, sorry, that wasn't very helpful of me. Still, we've got a pretty decent picture of what your general thing is, so posting more and more examples of the same thing isn't really going to help us help you any better.
So if this stuff is from 2009, do you have anything more recent?
http://orangecow.org/thechosenones/?p=37 [from the start, complete with terrible first panel]
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/
No grids were harmed in the making of these pieces. [Except for three Homestuck pieces done in something like the Doctor Who style obviously.]
Yeah, I'm done posting the Doctor Who stuff, and I would have been done a hell of a lot earlier except people weren't getting exactly how the pieces were made. The transparency was broken out. The transparency.
It's probably best for people to kind of understand my process so they can crit properly. Though I have to admit, all the artists I love, like at the MSPA forums and here, I don't understand their process at all. Not remotely. It's like magic to me. Which might explain the level I'm at. Hooray!
As I said, I don't use a tablet, just regular xerox paper, which has its limits in terms of size especially [I'm addicted to using the Median tool in Photoshop to removing imperfection]. My painting skills are ... what they are.
As I said, it took about a week to finish a full animated Doctor Who character. I created many of them. I wasted my life.
I would draw a ton of sketches in a day, and eventually color the best ones, taking a day on each one and being fiddly.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=106078
Most importantly the second sticky, if anything.
Lemme think of what I should say here.
ok.
>> * Tell us what your goals as an artist are.
Well, I'll be 30 years old on Hitler's birthday in April 2011. I consider myself a filmmaker, writer and artist in equal amounts. I've directed a few very low budget features, and yeah, (for the one guy who's heard of it,) restored The Thief and the Cobbler and stuff like that, not for commercial release but for me. I went to film school, but I'm from Connecticut and Los Angeles didn't agree with me, for reasons both stereotypical and not. I write for a magazine interviewing film editors, and am, as of November, otherwise unemployed and terrified. Can't pay bills, weeping in the horn pile.
I've always drawn since a very young age, but probably never took it seriously enough. Because my father was/is a cartoonist and his life wasn't a happy one, I suppose, and I felt I had more to say as a writer. I always did do pretty similar realistic likenesses, and I didn't use a grid until the Doctor Who stuff. Capturing the look of someone in a simple pencil or pen sketch, that was always my thing.
Someone offered me a tryout to be a Simpsons layout artist once, and I did my best and failed hilariously. I wouldn't want to draw in that robotic style anyway, and clearly I have my own robotic style! Zing!
I've done some [very little] professional work, going back to doing official Monty Python merchandise back in 1999 when I was 18. Not too much, though. I've barely tried to get graphic work, because I barely know how to get graphic work. I'm assuming there are connections involved, as in film. I never mastered that either, and continue to be broke and weeping in the born pile.
I was always just good with pencils and pens. Maybe a little watercolor. My normal, trad painting skills are hilariously lacking.
I started doing the Doctor Who stuff at the very end of 2007. I started out rough and over time I refined the style and made it much more accurate, and better to my eyes. I kept doing it throughout early 2009, and occasionally after. I do feel I learned something doing it, as the work was refined to a level of clarity that ... well, people can now say it's horrible and bland and looks like a photo run through a filter. Even though it's 90-99% simple line art. Hum. Well, there are still a few bugs in the system.
I recognize I've got a ways to go in terms of bodies and things. The facial likenesses have become a shield- for those who like them anyway- covering up the stuff that I need to learn. I've been prouder of myself for blocking out body forms in a sketchy way for my comic, and these sketches I'm proud of are so hilariously terrible in actuality, but for me they represent me trying to learn.
Like Richard Williams himself when he was young, I'm hiding behind details and technique, which I know I can do, and am well aware of the actual 3D animation skills that are lacking.
There are artists that inspire me and I think a lot of them post here, and on MSPA. But a lot of it is very painterly stuff which I know is done with tablets and things and it might as well all be magic.
I tried to use a tablet once, and decided to return it- the style of working was so absolutely foreign to me that I thought I should plug on with pen and paper rather than spend a few months drawing like a child?
So, I'll be 30 soon, and I wouldn't mind having a career doing this, if people start liking what I'm doing. [Which is not to say that people don't like what I've been doing- they do. But one needs to appeal to a wider audience to have commercial appeal. If this forum thinks it's garbage I need to listen to that.]
The Chosen Ones project is a major one for me, as it's at least three screenplays long, and I slept on the project for five years before coming up with the version we see now. It looked a lot worse before, and the script is better now too. I've had minor bites on the project from producers over the years but I really doubt it would ever get made the way I've written it, so, comic time. Also, I need to learn how comics work.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Don't get the wrong impression, no one is going to tell you you have to make one type of art or another. We are going to tell you what is detrimental to your improvement as an artist, though. The extreme negative reaction is because tracing is a pretty common thing it will do you no good. Grids, while great for certain types of painters, are only going to take you but so far when it comes to creating new forms freehand.
So from what I'm gathering, For the dr. Who stuff, you are drawing by pencil, then overlaying over the photo to fix errors, then letting the underlying photo come through to texture/color the drawing?
From what I'm seeing, there are a few issues. Photos, particularly of celebrities, tend to have terrible lighting for drawing. Your ink drawings aren't so bad, but when you jump to color, you start to show a lack of foundation in light and volume, which is really what painting is about. I believe that you arent tracing, but I still think you are following photos too closely (even when you are making up stuff). Photography is great reference, but you need to study artists for techniques, and color theory. Trying to make cartoons purely from photos is pretty difficult without some good, grounded ability to make up form and space, and exaggerate in ascetically pleasing ways.
For cartooning, I recommend john K http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/ With your comic, the problem with copying photos is showing in your expressions, which aren't very expressive. John K can help with that, by making you feel bad for not respecting the golden age of cartoons and liking shrek. You wont agree with him on everything, but there is good advice in there.
For light I suggest AoBs various forum posts like this one: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showpost.php?p=12243927&postcount=2014
You can find more of those in the questions thread. You need to get a better handle on light.
As opposed to no handle at all. Which is what I kinda got.
I hate John K, by the way, even though like him, I grew up with Beany & Cecil [we had Beta tapes]. I really, really, really hate John K, and those who imitate him, so yeah. Just putting that out there. [Ren & Stimpy was good but that doesn't justify his opinions and work these days.] I'm not a fan of a lot of modern design trends either. =\ I mean, I like the way Lauren Faust draws ponies, but no way in hell would I draw like that cos that's not my mind.
At this point I just draw what I see and I guess that's my style.
I don't like Shrek either, or any robotic dead-eyed CGI cartoon, and I don't like UPA-ish styling. I do like The Thief and the Cobbler though. So that's a start maybe?
It was usually ballpoint pen [I'm using pencil again now; don't know why I was using ballpoint except for looseness I guess], and then fine point Sharpie [pigment pen, now]. Then I'd make it fit the photo [sometimes only inking afterward], and use the photo as a starting point to figure out the color. I'd do a million loose sketches from a million different photos and only color a few of them, cos the coloring took ages for all the obvious reasons. I think I was purposely going for a sort of flat look to make it generic for animation, but also it was extremely hard to judge color on my old monitor. I think maybe it's hard to judge color on any monitor. It's a shame that monitors vary so much.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Again, I apologize, I was under the impression that the thread had been going for longer than it actually had been, and I want to apologize for any overly harsh words in general. I'm prone to hyperbole from time to time.
As for your comic, the backgrounds are incredibly busy and incredibly saturated. They distract from the characters. The first page or two especially, with the Mondriaan-like backgrounds. Where are they? What are they doing besides talking? What's going on? These are all mysteries, largely due to the backgrounds. Only after a while of carefully analyzing the thing do I realize that the blond girl is looking in a mirror.
As for the characters, you've got the beginnings of a nice enough style, but the anatomy and such needs work. Drawing from life and sketching a lot and so on will help you with that. It's someting else in every panel. Arms connect weird here, necks are wonky there. You need to brush up on anatomy and proportions and such so you have a good foundation to build on with your style. At the moment your figures lack structure. In the last panel in the page I have quoted, the girl with the black hair has feet that are all kinds of fucked up. They don't really look like they have any kind of underlying structure, and so the way they connect to the leg is all messed up, leaving the whole thing to end up looking flat. Like she has cardboard cut-outs for legs. Similarly, her fingers are just a smooth zig-zag with one lumpy wrist and a left thumb that seems to be attached to her right hand.
Looking at the page again, you do know the basics, but you need to work them out a bit more. You more or less know how long an arm is supposed to be in relation to the rest of the body and some basic shapes etcetera, but right now you're still having trouble with keeping all of that stuff consistent. You need to practice these basics a lot and keep in mind that they're part of a 3-dimensional structure. There's a lot to be said for flat artwork, too, of course. A lot of animated series and films use that kind of design, but I don't think that really works with your personal style. You could change it, of course, but knowing the basics is never a waste of time.
The faces in your comic are pretty nice and expressive, but you could do with a bit more variety as far as expressions go, and they could be a bit more lively. There's not a whole lot of energy or life in their expressions, so they end up looking tired or doll-like.
In the other pages, the one with the alien, the 3D rendered backgrounds are also incredibly busy and full of super-saturated colours, so they literally hurt to look at. All of the little fiddly bits and the brightness and the sheer amount of different, extremely bright colours do not do those pages any favours.
Plus, the highly detailed, 3D-rendered backgrounds don't fit your style at all. They look almost as out-of-place as a photograph would look as a background. The detail of the background, especially when compared to your characters and their rather variable anatomy makes the alien seem even more out of place than usual, too. It emphasizes how flat he is.
Basically there's a certain amount of disconnect between the faces of your characters and their bodies, too. The faces have way more detail than you'd expect if you were going by the bodies, and vice versa. Brushing up on your anatomy and so on would definitely help you make their heads and bodies look like they actually fit together, too.
Do you have any books on art and so on? Drawing, that kind of stuff. I suppose the stickies here have a bunch about that, so yeah, check those out, like Bombs said.
Will this help?
There's only a few points in your post I'd do anything more than quietly agree with, but ...
I know it's a bit to ask, but could you click through some of the 20 pages so far quickly and comment on a few other of the pages?
http://orangecow.org/thechosenones/?p=37
Backgrounds are something I'm figuring out, and at times I'm doing really complicated ones that take awhile, when I shouldn't be once I know what to draw and what to leave out.
This page, for example, has very complicated backgrounds that you barely see, and this has been somewhat typical so far.
Each background has one doodled but very detailed pen drawing, and a lot of Photoshop coloring, again with a photo as some sort of basis.
Both scenes I quoted, the Mondrian and the 3D lair, are unusual in terms of backgrounds. I really did want a Mondrian with very fractured perspective [I thought it would be a change of pace and would allow me to show both characters], and I really did want all the photo-like detail of a 3D render back there- partly because I didn't want to draw the thing I suppose, but I wanted it to look better than something I would draw and swear over.
I'm thinking of the comic as being animated cels on some sort of painted background I suppose. It comes from its roots as a supposed animated series.
I'm really not sure how I would have handled either scene differently, as these choices, though odd, were exactly what I was going for. Well, obviously I could have drawn them with traditional backgrounds, and that would be different. I'm just starting to even get used to attempting that.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
The Mondriaan has a different problem. The problem there is that there's no perspective. You have your characters, and then you sort of dump them in a Mondriaan, and that's it. You can't tell where they are or what they're supposed to be doing so it's terribly distracting here, too.
I know there's that awesome bit from the Thief and the Cobbler, which I'm reminded of instantly when looking at the Mondriaan background. With the chase in the palace and the funky, abstract mosaics all over the place, and yeah, that was great, but comics don't work like that. At least, they don't work like that if your characters aren't Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD.
The problems I'm seeing so far is that your backgrounds rarely fit. You have your characters, and they're drawn in one way, but your backgrounds are all over the place. You've got these photomanipulation-like things like how you did your Doctor Who portraits, you've got these super-detailed, ultra-bright 3D backgrounds, you've got the incomprehensible abstract planes with no frame of reference whatsoever etcetera etcetera etcetera.
It's a mish-mash at this point. What I think your comic needs is a more unified aesthetic. You're doing all these things in your comic, but none of them have anything to do with the others, aesthetically.
Mind you, this is just my opinion, but I just don't think that your comic benefits from the backgrounds being all over the place like this.
"Its my style" is the defense of an artist who doesn't want to hear what people are saying.
Your work has flaws. Now, we could go over each piece and work out exactly whats wrong, whats not working, etc. But thats not going to help. What you need is a general approach to getting better. Fortunately its a one size fits all that has worked for practically every artist everywhere and everywhen if approached properly!
Draw from life, do studies, and in a small piece of personalized advice, stop tracing.
On another note, it doesn't matter if something in your work was intentional or not, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
Except in the case of the Poser bodies where it was necessary to match the lines.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Fine. Whatever you are doing to make these match exactly when overlayed:
Stop.
Its not doing you really many favors. Get better at the foundations of drawing and you won't need these crutches for your art to look better.
Richard Williams is another good place to start though.
I mostly suggested K because of the plain expressions, Particularly in the comic pages. Sort of like with that last page you posted, I've never seen someone sing with a more neutral expression. Richard William has a lot to teach about acting, showing expression without words. Those last two panels without words, for instance, wouldn't have anything interesting going on.
Being into drawing what you see is great, but you are missing a whole level (light) and reducing stuff down to cartoons is a different level. If you want to copy anything, you should study art that will really get those basic principals hammered out, and not just photos.
I'll accept "whatever," as opposed to "tracing." Yes, they match up. I'm the one who matched them up. That was the entire point of the style, and something I was fairly proud of at the time. Let's move on from that.
Anyway, yeah. I'm reading every single saved Angel of Bacon paintover crit right now and looking at art books and tutorials and things. But I should be sleeping also. This should occur.
All I know at this point is that there's a lot I don't know. I've barely done figure drawing and barely attempted painting, or thinking about a light source while drawing. I certainly didn't intend the Doctor Who stuff to look like paintings.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
It will help make the thread not so goddamn long o_O
Now that that's off my chest, I really like what you have going so far. Pretty unique visually. And loving the cartoony look. Is it bad that I think of Dr Mrs. The Monarch when I see the brunette on the first page? :P
Try not to look at his blog from a style point of view. If you just go there for animation tips it is definately one of the ultimate web resources available at the time. This man analyses each and every aspect of animation and raises some interesting points. Even if you don't agree with how he handles everything and the choices he makes, you're missing out on a huge learning opportunity.
There is a big difference between moving arms around and animating a movement, and John K's blog would help you out a lot, if you're interested in improving.
Also, and other artists talked about this too, be carefull about defending your own style too much when you're just starting out (anything under 5-10 years is just starting...). Every artists pretty much vomits in disgust on what/ how he drew a few years earlier, and you probably won't be an exception.
Glad-Hatter- I've read some of John K's blog, and from time to time he does say something I agree with, but he also has terrible taste and says a lot of things I don't agree with, so ... yeah. I was actually reading a bit of it yesterday just because people were recommending it, and there's a few things I wanted to put into the mental notebook.
But still it is annoying to read- I really don't want to have to read that Jim Tyer or some hack doing 60s Yogi Bear comics is a genius, whereas Richard Williams is the poster boy for unappealing design. I also don't like literally anything he draws himself.
I'm staggered that people copy his style and try to be like him. If nothing else, for the fact that influences shouldn't be obvious.
I hope animators are still reading Preston Blair and, yes, Dick Williams. [The Animators' Survival Kit!]
Yeah, I was vomiting in disgust at something I drew 14 years ago just yesterday. [And wanting to redraw it!] And I certainly vomit in disgust at most things I drew about 10 years ago, or sooner.
I think I'd have real mental problems if I were already vomiting in disgust at things I drew yesterday or last year, though. But you all can go ahead and start without me.
[If people are gonna swear and imply I'm lying about things, then I'll defend myself against that at least.]
I've been drawing for longer than 10 years though, if that's the guidepost here. I'm a few months short of 30. I just always did line art rather than painting. And what life drawing I did was a long time ago.
Some things I sketched in 2003 still look similar to what I'd do today .... for better and worse ...
http://orangecow.org/graphicdesign/carolfurhat600.jpg
http://orangecow.org/graphicdesign/uma600.jpg
Carol Cleveland and Uma Thurman, there ...
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Black levels these days are all over the place- what used to be completely black on a monitor is now a milky light grey. This is true of DVDs, which boost the black levels something fierce, and true of LCD monitors.
But what's driving me nuts is- the LCD monitor I'm viewing this on- converted to work with my Mac- is getting greyer and brighter by the day now, for no reason I can see. Things I created a few days ago to have high contrast now have no contrast and milky, milky greys.
I used to have a CRT monitor, which had a heavy black level dropoff. Any dark areas would come off as black, and be impossible to see. When I'd create a DVD, it would often be a shock when what was supposed to be completely black would suddenly be a bright grey, showing all kinds of compositing errors that had been completely invisible when I was working, and which I'd never be able to see in FCP.
If you've looked at any of my work in this thread, what you're seeing is probably very different than what I saw when I created it.
All the Doctor Who stuff-
http://orangecow.org/graphicdesign/whosprites1.html
Anyone wearing a dark suit and having dark hair- those should be almost completely black, and right now on my monitor they're looking bright grey. Yes, there's detail there, but it's supposed to be subliminal. The Doctor's black suit is now a very bright grey and everyone has no contrast whatsoever on their faces, when I originally created the contrast to be quite intense. This takes a lot of the appeal out of the work for me and makes it much less interesting.
But what's crazy is this ...
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3553ps
I created this just a few days ago, and her hair is black and the detail should be almost invisible. But the contrast on my monitor is now diminished so much that her hair is a bright grey, and there's no contrast in her face.
This is driving me nuts. Can I ask you - what do YOU see, contrastwise, on your monitor, when you look at my images?
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
I was then trying to motivate myself by looking at modern comic books, since I was in the mood to try to draw a more traditional comic, but the Batman material I looked at was very shoddily drawn. There's a lot of good art in comics today, but there's also a lot of crap that won't teach an artist anything.
I prefer the consistency of older comic book art- there's a sameness to it, but also a really confident grasp of the fundamentals which isn't there in a lot of today's comics.
I've been doing a lot of studying and thinking about things, but I'm afraid what I'm actually drawing isn't reflecting much of that yet.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
That said, these are simple pen pieces and I was really thinking about contrast here, lighting and tone, so there was more than the usual on my mind.
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/art/MSPA-Bec-Noir-190819916?q=gallery%3Atygerbug%2F14067307&qo=2
A friend had requested a "smoking dog." I thought of a noir scene, and also had in mind Bec, the omnipotent dog from Homestuck.
I basically traced the rough form, I'm afraid, and then concentrated on detail and lighting. I'm happier with the fur than I am the suit- the style of penmanship just didn't work for the non furry parts. The lighting is exaggerated but definitely matches the photo, which was of Cary Grant. Except now it's a dog.
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d35lx5n
Sting was hard to draw. I did a lot of roughs from a lot of different images, and finally went with this one due to the intense contrast, which I thought would be interesting to draw.
This and all the other rejected Stings I drew were designed using a 4x4 grid system. Folding up a piece of paper into 4x4, like I did on Doctor Who, and putting a similar grid on the picture on my monitor I was looking at. I know, I know. I was rushing. I'm sorry. I gotta stop.
His stubble gave me some opportunity to do shading without feeling stupid, but it woulda been better as a painting.
I did this for a lady I was dating, who happens to like Sting. She broke up with me tonight. Don't think it had anything to do with this, though.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
I've been thinking about lighting and tone and trying to be more dimensional in these little things.
[and great, the blacks aren't black anymore on my monitor now ...]
All based on larger drawings, but I like the little pixelly versions.
First one based on a larger drawing, the others inspired by other fanart in some cases.
The shape of the head, and the ear placement, is all wrong. Oh well.
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Loomis isn't beyond your skill, you seem to be under the impression that the goal is to instantly pick up these skills. That's not true. Loomis talks a lot about constructing figures from basic shapes, which is something you need to do because a lot of your stuff, as mentioned previously, lacks structure. Start with basic shapes and work your way up from there. If you think Loomis is beyond your grasp even with that, try Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Figure Drawing.
Remember, the objective isn't to isntantly transform you into a magnificent artist, or to perfectly copy what Loomis or Hogarth or whoever do in their books, but to learn by practicing.
And do sketches. Lots of them. Sketch a lot. Do life drawing, look at how things really look in real life and try to put that down on paper without resorting to shortcuts liek "eyes are supposed to be this shape" or stuff like that.
As far as I can tell, you're just doing the same thing over and over and over. Did you take our advice and actually try sketching? You haven't shown us anything to that effect, you just keep showing us finished pieces. You can do those, yeah, but if you do those exclusively you're not going to improve very quickly for a variety of reasons. You lose track of the bigger picture and get bogged down in the details, and the bigger picture means the basics of structure and form in this case, which is what you should be focusing on.
If you have sketches and studies and life drawings and so on, please show them to us so we can help you with those. If you keep posting finished pieces, it's a lot more difficult to help you improve.
And also: You don't need to make a new post for every new thing you want to say. Please, use the edit button. If you keep filling up your own thread with quadruple and quintuple or more posts it's going to get very difficult to read. I mean, it is very difficult to read. Just edit your posts, please.
I remember I did a stack of hundreds of Loomis body structure sketches at the time [Early January, or late December] ... but haven't done any real body structure studies since. At the moment I've been painting.
Albert Einstein. Acrylic paint on a 16 x 20 Masonite board.
This was a commission for a high school friend, a gift for her husband (they'd just been married).
A detailed line drawing was drawn in Sharpie as preparation, then painted over. Total painting time was 13 hours - one 8 hour session, and one 5 hour session.
At DeviantArt:
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/art/Albert-Einstein-Acrylic-213318427?q=gallery%3Atygerbug%2F14067307&qo=1
Vincent Price, painted in Acrylic on a 14 X 18 inch canvas panel.
Two nights' work.
At DeviantArt:
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/art/Vincent-Price-Acrylic-213317239?q=gallery%3Atygerbug%2F14067307&qo=2
Princess Peach Gil Elvgren Pinup.
If classic pinup artist Gil Elvgren had painted Princess Peach, from Super Mario Bros. And poor Bowser. Drawn with pigment pen on 14x17 Bristol board. Copied from a Gil Elvgren painting. Not actually traced, but copied so exactly that it makes very little difference I'm sure. I really need to not do that again.
I haven't done any coloring on it; I'm considering actually painting it. If anyone who's really good at coloring wants to tackle it I won't stop you!
This was intended for my webcomic The Chosen Ones. I'd done a previous pinup of Peach, but wasn't happy with it. So I went with the Elvgren style ... which I also did awhile back on another piece. But as I said, I need to not do that again.
At DeviantArt:
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/art/Princess-Peach-Elvgren-Pinup-213328135?q=gallery%3Atygerbug%2F14067307&qo=0
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
Lesson of the day, use your hard edged brush in conjunction with your soft brush when doing digital colours. It allows you to add definition where your soft brush is utterly unable to. I really think you need to take a new approach to how you work digitally, everything you have posted up until now, smacks of shortcuts. Digital does make the process quicker, but it doesn't mean you can skip steps altogether.
I must say that the Doctor Who animated stuff was never intended to look like paintings. The soft color underlayer, which had a lot of the original photo in it somewhere, was intentional for the style and, I felt, necessarily vague, so that it would be flexible for animation and work with many different expressions in the line art faces, without a lot of changes.
I know that a lot of people here didn't like that style, which is fair enough. But I hadn't intended it to be compared to proper painting, as if that's what I was going for and I'd merely missed the mark, rather than purposely wanting line art over soft color. But oh well. I don't know if I'll do that style again or what, but at least I'm trying something different now.
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com/art/Community-Abed-Danny-Pudi-213864360
Danny Pudi as Abed Nadir from the great NBC sitcom Community, created by Dan Harmon.
Acrylic paint on a 16x20 canvas panel.
The actual painting is rather dark [if more subtle than this], so I did some post work and brightened it up in Photoshop and softened some details that didn't work when brightened. Hence the sort of "halo" softening effect. I've considered doing another day's work on the painting to brighten it up, but I think I might just leave it as is.
I'm also painting Annie Edison [Alison Brie].
Here are some quick pencil sketches of the entire cast of Community:
http://orangecow.org/art/community.html
The Chosen Ones: Webcomic | DeviantArt | My Website
More problematic though, is the light. On his forehead we can see two highlights, (the dark pink lines)
The shape of his forehead has a few broken planes that wrap around but still have edges. Even if youd like to stylize things, missing these ques will make your work incredibly flat. Abed looks like a mush of tones, like an under painting without the finishing highlights and shadows.
Photos are usually a really poor reference for finding these edges and forms, because of how softly we tend to light celebrities. Having a better foundation of form is going to help you interpret what you are seeing rather than just trying to transcribe it.