Not a typical webcomic

BenGPT

Here are a couple of pieces I've been working on this summer. I think I started with the attitude that I was working towards a finished product, but it's kind of changed into just a template for testing new ideas. I don't profess to be great by any means, but hopefully it's not too terrible.

The first one is titled "Ethics," and is based on a thought experiment from my Philosophy class last year. I wasn't too concerned with the anatomy on this one, focusing more of my attention on the graphical presentation. Actually, this seems really loose to me now, although that might just be a result of working on it for days on end. Sorry if it breaks the h-scroll, I drew it on a widescreen laptop and didn't even think that most people have fullscreens.




This next one was done in about a week, to submit to the Live Earth festival on July 4. Any work was accepted as long as it was the right size and themed "Green." Of course, when I submitted it, I forgot to attach it to the email and it was too late by the time I realized. >_<



I'm not looking so much for ways I can improve each piece (unless there's something HUGELY wrong with either of them), but more on what areas I should work on. I've noticed some things myself: folds in clothing, people without references, digital painting in general. I'm going to work on exercises before I start any more pieces. The Andrew Loomis book collection is exciting, but a little overwhelming. Any recommendations on which book would work best for me to start with? Thanks for reading all this, guys, I really appreciate it. Again, don't take these as attempts to create finished works... they're just concepts to test styles on.

Jandiss

wow....um not typical is a pretty damn big understatement...
Is the Ethics one going to be a series of different situations or something? I found it interesting.
My problem was the bottom half. It almost seems unneeded. Or maybe it is, I dunno but it was pretty dark and I had a hard time telling what the hell was going on.

McGibs

im confused as hell by the bottom half of the first page...

is it the guy from the top (glasses?) going back to take the wallet, then calling everyone else dumbasses for not doing the same?

or is it the owner of the wallet (goatee?) calling them dumbasses for not taking his wallet when it was so planely obvious.

OR, is it the first guy, judging by the sequence of panels putting a wallet in the car and then locking the door (and somehow rolling the window up from the outside?) and calling the owner a dumbass?


needs some clarity there boyo.

Mayday

It's another dude, I think. He walks over, picks up the wallet then throws it back in and locks the door for the "dumbass" owner.

I agree, the whole situation is very weird. I can't imagine why even a weirdest person would behave like that woman.

BenGPT

Mayday got it right. There are actually four characters; the last one isn't in the first two thirds. I think if I give the first guy you see more detailed features, it'll be clearer that he's not the same person as the guy at the end.
Just remembered another problem I have. One time, I tried transferring one of my drawings from my desktop to my laptop to keep working on it, and the colors turned out really different. I'm not sure which one is what other people are seeing, or how to fix it. So it might be too dark for you guys to see, but I can see it fine. It causes a lot of problems... any idea?

As for the first image, I totally expected confusion in regards to the bottom part. It's given me a hell of a lot of trouble, and I've been reworking it, rearranging the panels and stuff, for weeks. I think I'll give up on it for now, and if I ever decide to make a finished version, I'll start from scratch to make it clearer. Unless there's an easy solution I'm missing.

Second image, does the basic message get across? I think that's where one of my biggest problems is: translating the main idea in a graphical form that everyone can easily understand.

Mayday

I get the message that we seriously need to work on those thermonuclear power plants, because goddamnit I wouldn't want wind collectors all over the place.

As for the second half of the first image, the sad part about arranging panels is that you have to put functionality over aesthetics. Right now it's hard to understand what's going on because they are somewhat chaotically aligned- you might want to go for a more stable, even if boring, set up.

Lly

Nothing drew me to read any of the text ... BUT I am by habit lazy so maybe it's just me, but there was no "draw" to it for me.

MagicToaster

As you mentioned before, not everyone has a wide screen. Most ppl run their computers at 1024x768, but theres still a lot users that have 800x600 configuration. I'd make your comic smaller than 800 pixels wide.

BenGPT

Lly: How lazy can you get? There are like, 6 lines of text there! Haha, I understand what you mean, though. The characters are just sitting there, with the words floating next to them. More dynamic poses in the future, duly noted. Thanks for that!

MagicToaster: Fixed. I'll be more careful about my image sizes from now on.

Nam

Maybe my monitor is weird but I had a hard time reading the blue text...

Saved

It reminds me of "A Lesson is Learned" .

anable

The text doesn't stand out enough on my monitor. The words and the background are too similar in color. Also, what everyone else said about the bottom half of the page.

I like the windmill picture a lot, but it feels like it should be three pictures instead of one. The windmill picture also seems to have a much better sense of depth.

BenGPT

anable and nam: I figured people would have trouble with the colors. Does anyone know why the colors vary from display to display, and how that problem might be remedied?

Saved: SUCH a good comic. If I were only allowed to read one person's webcomic for the rest of my life, it would be David Hellman's. I'm trying to use him as inspiration without totally ganking his style, though.

Brolo

I agree that it's very much in the style of A Lesson is Learned, and I agree it's a good comic to be drawing inspiration from.

However that comic, like your comic, has a lot of problems in the way it 'reads'. That is, the sequential order that you're supposed to follow the narrative:

It's an art piece, so your eye treats the entire thing like a picture. Your eye is going to zoom in on areas of contrast, people's faces, areas with high detail. However it's a narrative, and there's text, so you want people to start on the top left, and follow along in lines down to the bottom right. So you're already at cross purposes, and you're going to have to compromise to get eye flow to follow along with your art style.

Right now in your first comic the text is the least interesting and most difficult thing for your eyes to follow. You have green on green, blue on blue, red on red - this is not a winning formula. There's a good reason your typical speech balloon uses black text on white - if text is too difficult to focus on, people's eyes simply slide off it. Complimentary colours can help a lot with this.

You're having the same problem with the shape and placement of your panels. What you're doing is incredibly ambitous from an artwork perspective, and you're going to have a heckuva time perfecting it. The standard bordered rectangular panel is nice because it lets you take each panel as a separate piece of artwork if needed. With your style you're going to have to spend more time figuring out how this stuff is going to fit together. Look at the second comic: You've got something good going with the boy in the middle of the upper panel, but then you seem to run out of ideas with how to blend the rest of the panels together. There are simply too many horizons going on in each panel to give it any focus, and they all fall and overhang into one another, so they throw their neighbour's perspective off.

Don't be afraid of leaving blank space in order to give emphasis to the more important parts of your comic. You have an infinite canvas (more or less), so don't feel you have to cram or divide everything into a rectangle, or that you have to fill that entire rectangle with stuff. Here's the last Mac Hall. It's a really good use of varying size panels while still being easy to follow.

I would say for the immediate future try dialing it back a little. Take something that's not quite as dynamic, like a decent comic book, and try following its panel transitions. They're still a lot less static than your average webcomic (which takes a lot of cues from the newspaper three panel funny section), but they've spent a long time learning how to make their work easy to follow.

An invaluable book will be Understanding Comics, if you don't already have it. McCloud explains a lot of what's going on in between panels, and the mechanics of comics and sequential art.

anable

BenGPT wrote: »

anable and nam: I figured people would have trouble with the colors. Does anyone know why the colors vary from display to display, and how that problem might be remedied?

I think your only option is to err on the side of caution. There's no way to make one picture look exactly the same across all monitors, so you just have to be careful and pick colors that will still stand out, even if one person has a crappy LCD that bleaches the screen and another person is using a 5 year old CRT at work.

erisian pope

Colors vary from display to display based largely on calibration of the monitors (the adjustment of brightness, contrast, and color balance). You can find websites that will assist you in calibrating your monitor, and if you and your audience all properly calibrated your monitors then what you see and what they see would basically match.

So calibrate your monitor and you'll at least be seeing the same thing that most digital artists, graphic designers, etc see. Your audience's experience will vary depending on whether they calibrate, but you can't really go out and fix everyone.

There are software/hardware packages for sale that do (supposedly, I've never used one) a vastly superior job at calibration, but using an online tool is a good damn start.

hijinksensue

They both remind me a car commercials (you know the one about the kid "catching the wind" for his decrepit grandfather?). Also the lettering is illegible.

BenGPT

Alright, I'm starting something new. Here's a sky I put together:


And by the way, whoever said look up speed painting tutorials on YouTube is a genius.

And here, I'm trying to put a shadow on the clouds, but the technique is proving difficult. The clouds provide a bumpy terrain, which should distort the shadow somehow. That, coupled with the fact that I'm having trouble figuring out what the shadow of a falling person would look like (no ref's), makes this next try a travesty:



Any suggestions?

furiousNU

How do I put shadows on clouds?

When I paint clouds, I usually put in the highlights first to help me perceive depth better. (And yes I realize this goes against traditional drawing conventions but it works for me)


How do I put a falling person's shadow onto a cloud?

I can tell you how to put the shadow on the clouds in a way that will be easy for you to work with. But you need to make sure you get the shadow's shape right and your clouds properly rendered before you try this.

1. I'm assuming you have a layer for your clouds.

2.Paste the outline of your shadow, and name the new layer "shadow". Make sure it is a SOLID BLACK SHAPE(fill it in with the paint bucket)

3. Move the shadow over the clouds and turn the opacity down to 20-30%(maybe even lighter). You want the opacity of the solid shadow to be of your darkest shadows.

4.Now go down to the bottom of the layers window. Make sure you are on the shadows layer, then click the mask button, it's the rectangle button with a circle inside.

Your layers window should look like this.

Layers

[shadow]--->[mask]
[clouds]
[background]


5. Select your mask(it's next to the thumbnail of your shadow). If the thumbnail has a extra border around it, it's been selected.

6. Select black in your color picker. Then use the paint bucket to fill in the mask with black.

7. Turn your foreground and background colors to black and white. Select a big soft brush(low opacity). Make sure you still have the mask layer selected and use black to darken and white to lighten your shadow! There's no need to use your eraser at all!



This technique is called MASKING. It allows you to subtly lighten/darken objects without damaging the other layers or the image you are adjusting! If you don't like your mask, just toss it and start over again with no consequences!

BenGPT

Good point. I need to use masks more often. And for the record, although I already know how to use masks, your walkthrough was very thorough and foolproof.

My problem has more to do with figuring out how the cloud distorts the shadow, and where to make the shadow lighter and darker. It's pretty hard to find a reference for that, so I'm going to have to figure out the theory behind how shadows lie. I've changed the figure, I'll update when I've got something looking reasonable.

furiousNU

BenGPT wrote: »

Good point. I need to use masks more often. And for the record, although I already know how to use masks, your walkthrough was very thorough and foolproof.

My problem has more to do with figuring out how the cloud distorts the shadow, and where to make the shadow lighter and darker. It's pretty hard to find a reference for that, so I'm going to have to figure out the theory behind how shadows lie. I've changed the figure, I'll update when I've got something looking reasonable.

Yeah sculpting shadows can be hard. Generally speaking, you should make the edges/body of the shadow vary and make sure that the shadow isn't too solid looking. When the shadow is covering an object that is has a lot of light on it, make the shadow lighter. When the shadow is covering an object that is darker(like a crease or something) make the shadow darker.

You can also use the warp tool(under free transform) to warp your shadow a bit.

I have no idea how helpful these are as references is but feel free to take a look:

shadow of a gilder

big freakin cloud

BenGPT

Thanks. How does this look to anyone?

Mushiwulf

It feels like those clouds are too far away to have a shadow be that well defined. Or that large.

Brolo

Yeah, it's either a giant falling out of the sky, or a man standing in front of a painting with clouds on it.

The clouds you have in your picture imply a certain size, which isn't to scale with the shadows that you're drawing in. For clouds like that a human-sized shadow would be tiny, just a little dot on the surface.

BenGPT

Makes sense.
This overhaul any better?


Thanks to furiousNU for the cloud ref.

Mushiwulf

For me, not really. If I had to estimate the distance to those clouds based on the shadow, I wouldn't go over maybe 30 feet, although my initial guess would be much closer to 6-10 feet. It looks like someone in the middle rows stood up in front of the projection. I honestly feel like, at the distances the clouds appear to be, a human sized shadow would be tiny, if visible at all. Also, the clouds look like we are viewing them side on, but the shadow suggests we are getting more of a top-down view.

Look at that glider shadow again. The glider is much bigger than a person and those clouds read much closer than yours and yet the shadow is much smaller. Also notice how you cannot make out much detail beyond the wing? At even those distances you won't get a very detailed human-shape shadow.

furiousNU

Man I should have thought about this earlier, but when you're drawing your clouds you have to consider, from what perspective am I looking at them? Clouds look really different when your on the ground(below them) in comparison to when you're in a plane(above/next to the clouds). You might want to do a little more rendering with the clouds before you mess with the shadow. Don't be afraid to make your clouds really bold. The texture you put into the clouds will make your main figure(the shadow) much more interesting looking.


Two refs:

pov from above the clouds

pov next to the clouds