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Requesting advice on faces.
MightyMoose
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Hello good people of the forum!
I, like many people, run my own little webcomic. It's relatively new, and I'm still getting the hang of basic things such as lighting, scale, how much speech to use per page, background work, etc. When I've shown my comic to people, I've mainly heard comments on the faces.
To be more specific, I hear that the facial expressions are good, but some of my females look...off. Manly, perhaps? I suppose there's no other way to describe it than to link you to the comic, which I'm not sure if I can do, but it's the only way to properly show it.
The question is this: do you have any advice on how to make my female faces look more...feminine?
If you have any other comments, critiques, etc about the comic, feel free to put them here as well. I like to say that things have gotten better from page 1 to page 40, but I know there are certainly things to be improved, and I'd love to know what they might be. (I'm a trooper; I can take it. ;-))
I, like many people, run my own little webcomic. It's relatively new, and I'm still getting the hang of basic things such as lighting, scale, how much speech to use per page, background work, etc. When I've shown my comic to people, I've mainly heard comments on the faces.
To be more specific, I hear that the facial expressions are good, but some of my females look...off. Manly, perhaps? I suppose there's no other way to describe it than to link you to the comic, which I'm not sure if I can do, but it's the only way to properly show it.
The question is this: do you have any advice on how to make my female faces look more...feminine?
If you have any other comments, critiques, etc about the comic, feel free to put them here as well. I like to say that things have gotten better from page 1 to page 40, but I know there are certainly things to be improved, and I'd love to know what they might be. (I'm a trooper; I can take it. ;-))
Spread the word. It's time for a revolution. (Rated PG-13 for Blood, Language, and Violent Pokeyman Murder)
MightyMoose on
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Also you may want to post some art to get real feedback.
Your drawings seem to indicate a lack of anatomy, your skulls are very lumpy and all over the place. I would be more worried about this than making your girls look more feminine, as some of it is random man chin appearing on a character that didn't have it in the last panel. Getting a nice feminine touch will require some subtle details, but those need to go on top of a solid foundation.
If you look at the drawing there you've done of the woman in the green armchair, her forearms appear to connect just inches away from her shoulders. There is definitely a lot of structural work to be done here. The short and unfortunate answer is that there is no shortcut. If you want to improve your art, you're going to have to pick up some of the fundamentals and really study them.
I'd recommend you start with simple shapes. Learn about perspective and draw simple shapes from as many angles as you can. Cubes are a good place to start, but have fun with it and experiment from time to time. Draw pages and pages of shapes until you just get it, and then maybe move on to something else.
Moose we have tons of tutorials in the stickes that you might find some useful advice in. You seem to have some general ideas about anatomy so I would concern yourself with construction and measuring. You want all the parts to fit together and be the right size, even if you are rotating them in space. Check out animators turn arounds to see how they handle it.
MJordan didn't get better by playing streetball, he practiced the fundamentals.
The panels with just faces look okay, but as soon as you draw arms and other body sections it all falls apart. So keep drawing people and eventually you'll have it all on lock. Also practice drawing people from all angles because your profiles look kinda strange. Like the eyes are so close to the nose it defies all logic of the human skull. I have the same problem.
You've got some good things going on, so bone up on some of the basics and you'll do just fine. Those Understanding Comics books by Scott McCloud would be good to check out if you haven't already, they cover a lot of the basics of comic-ing.
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Uhhh
It's really really important when you're trying to learn to draw what you see, not what you know. What you think a nose or ear looks like is not what my nose and ears look like. I'm sure it's not much like Adam's, or Iruka's either. "Knowing" what one nose looks like means nothing for all the other noses in the world.
Draw from life, go to the park and draw people once a week. Again, draw what you see, not what you think you see!
"What you want it to look like" is irrelevant when trying to learn that, since you want it to look accurate to your reference. Again, I'd suggest checking out the Questions and Tutorials sticky for almost all of the links you'll need in order to learn how to do that, since at first it can be really challenging to get your brain to see objects as they are, and not just "two lines and a circle".
This is bad advice. Focused drawing is the only way to get genuinely good. Otherwise you end up like graffiti artists who can only do graffiti, or a car painter who can only do crab claw flames.
There's a grain of truth in this advice though.
Be sure to practice seriously, but don't let that get in the way of actually having fun with your drawings. Don't let ambition cripple you, but don't let acceptance of shortcomings make you lazy. Some people can handle applying a huge amount of pressure to themselves, while others mainly want to have fun and enjoy a light hobby.
I have to remind myself constantly that it's alright to make a bad drawing sometimes, and even more that it's not a reason to get discouraged, but it is a sign to press on with renewed conviction.
Failing should be exciting, because it's in moments of failure that we learn the most and are closest to taking a step forward.
The road leading from the struggling student to intuitive professional is littered with bad drawings.
I think the proportions look better than before. The only thing I'm worried about on this page is Panel 3. It's supposed to look as if she's turning, but I'm not entirely sure if I've conveyed it properly. Something about the arm looks off to me (although that might be because I stared at it for a long time, haha...)
I'm going to keep on truckin' with this. I figure if I work on one thing at a time, I can slowly and steadily improve with each consecutive page.
There are still a lot of proportion problems, though. In the first panel, for example, she's walking away from him, and from the position of his feet and where hers would fall, she should be pretty far away from him. You seem, however, to have made their heads the same size (might have even made his bigger), which doesn't help with the desired illusion of distance between the two. You kind of shrunk his body down as well, which just kind of makes him look like a comically large-headed midget. As far as body structure, though, you made some strides. The woman looks like she's put together a lot better, and there's more consistency to her face (less lumpy, too).
Keep it up!
Starting to look a bit better though, keep working at it.
Actually an eye is a sphere, sitting inside of a socket. The nose is made up of the bridge, the nostrils etc. Ears are all different and very intricate with a lot of different parts.
Know the structure of what you are drawing, not just the symbol.
Once again, thank you all for the advice.
It looks like you've learned some rough rules of thumb for anatomy - eyes in the middle of the skull, elbows at waist height - are putting down those guidelines and then just going straight into detail over the top the top of them. There's no flow, no concept of how the muscles and joints interact, and hence the figures are stiff, lifeless and lack three-dimensionality. As well, the shoulders are almost always presented straight on to the viewer, which pretty quickly starts to look very odd. I would prescribe a serious dose of gesture drawing, really start to get a feel for how the human body fits together, both moving and at rest.
For your comic itself, apart from the figures there's some noticeable perspective issues leaping out - it's good that you're doing backgrounds and scenes from different angles, but there's an art to choosing perspective, as well as simply drawing the gridlines and making sure everything meets up. I don't know if I want to go into that right now, though, this is getting pretty long already - there are resources out there which help with deciding on emphasis and choosing perspectives that won't look flat (bottom panel), dramatically foreshortened (again, bottom panel), or strangely parallel (top right panel - ok I could talk for a while about this panel - let's just say I see what you're going for, but it didn't quite work). But it wouldn't hurt to do a lot more thumbnailing and roughing before you lay in your panels. They're cramped, the characters are cut off in odd places and have no room to breathe - it's very claustrophobic.
Yup, I agree that a lot of gesture studies will do a world of good. There's a lot to work on, flat and lifeless problems won't be easy fixes. Everything is shown from a very stilted dead on front perspective. How much time are you spending on the thumbnailing/planning stages? How long are you spending on the inking/coloring stages? I'm guessing it's drastically more on the latter. Spend more time planning and thinking things out because all the time in the world spent rendering cannot fix rushed layouts.
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