Art of Falconire
falconire
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
These are two pieces of art for an upcoming comic I'm working on. The cover may be used as some sort of advertisement in the future and the sequential piece is sort of a practice piece for the actual comic I'll be doing, really just made to stretch my creative muscles and ad to my person gallery.
In any case I'd like to hear what people think of them. If you are going to critique and have something negative to say then have the respect to offer some decent advice on how to change the problem, otherwise all critique is welcome.
In any case I'd like to hear what people think of them. If you are going to critique and have something negative to say then have the respect to offer some decent advice on how to change the problem, otherwise all critique is welcome.
falconire on
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...almost.
A lot of people who want to create comics would benefit from reading Scott McCloud's Making Comics. Your panel layout/storytelling needs as much work as the art.
Setting up the locations of the characters and their relative positions is important. Is the girl up on the balcony? Is the man across the street from her? Is the extreme close-up of her coffee cup with dialog balloons overlapping it necessary?
Also: "Unfortunately" and "infinite".
good use of backgrounds!
the word balloons might be a touch big., get a little hard to follow in places
....
baaahahahaha
#1: Why are they emotionless drones? Even comic faces can have expression.
#2: Use better colors. The ones right now are actually making me a bit ill. Use a color scheme generator if you have to.
#3: Try not to be an arrogant prick this time and listen to critiques.
Edit: You know, if you gave them actual eyes and not little circles filled with white, this wouldn't be so bad.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=29171
Scroll down to Anatomy & Illustration - it's probably in one with "dynamic" in the title.
i liked you better when you were angrier
We really don't need any more anger in a falconire thread.
It's really difficult to tell what's going on in the sequential piece, dude. Having the text bubbles go up and down in a zig zag pattern isn't really helping.
The text balloons are huge relative to the amount of text actually being delivered, and their placement distracts from the artwork panels. While I can't comment on the writing, at least fix the spelling mistakes and proofread it before you post this stuff online.
As for the artwork, well the characters look even stiffer than your old characters, the blank expressions and "little orphan annie" eyes are disturbing, and your simplified style seems more at home in a children's picture book than in an adult comic.
The colours are over saturated to the point of distraction, and your character's shading exists independently of your omnipresent light sources.
Your lines seem to be more consistent than they were before, which is good, but they're completely uniform, which is boring. You will eventually have to learn how to vary your line weights, but honestly you need to, yes, work on your anatomy first. It will let you draw characters in a style more appropriate to the story you're trying to tell, and will improve your other drawing skills while you practise.
:^:
You also have to remember that people are affected by perspective as well. We are looking up at the characters, so you would see more of their underneaths. You would certainly be looking up the skirt of that dude. The legs on the goth girl are in the right direction- you just have to imagine that same cylinder approach to the rest of them.
Please use spellcheck, it underlines words in red for a reason.
thnx
In the middle section, I'm not sure in which order I should read the word panels.
There are two useless panels, the one with the closeup of the coffee cup and the one of the wall. I mean, I guess the point is that the brother was standing there, and now he's not? I think it'd be better to have the shot of her with her binocs in the place where the cofee cup is, and then have the bottom be more of a wide panel like the first one, showing the entire street scene she's spying on. You could even make the borders round so it looks like we're looking through the binocs.
TITS OF STEAL
Trigun does not approve of this line of questioning.
Not a bad idea. One of the reasons I did this comic was to improve my ability to storytell and do sequential work.
Yeah, but he's not exactly *human*, so who knows what his internal heat-regulatory system is like...
Touché.
The sequential piece was actually one of four in a mini-comic I did to work out some bugs in my art. In the next coming months this 'Uncommons' comic will be a full fledged webcomic but I want a cintex tablet first, otherwise I won't have the time to do more than one page a week.
I have taken the advise earlier mentioned to stop using pupils only for eyes. I normally don't even draw eyes that way but when I started my first comic I wanted a more cartoonish look, something similar to clerks cartoon. However, I'm changing it back.
I'll also add a few more pieces of art here since someone mentioned I needed more actual art in this art thread. So here are a few pieces.
This is parody of Watchmen I did with my old comic characters which came out about week before we took the site down.
These next two are pages 2 and 3 of the American Girl mini-comic (see above for page 1). The third one isn't finished but you can probably see where I've made changes to page 2.
Well played sir. Well played.
If this is serious though, two things.
1) I'd suggest you stop drawing like this right now. The characters, to be blunt, look terrible. That kind of terrible you only really see when someone talented intentionally draws something poor, using all their wisdom of which things to do wrong. Draw from life, copy other comics, basically, find out how to draw in an aesthetically pleasing way, then you can come back and laugh (or cry) at this, safe in your hammock of the future.
2) If you really want to practice comics or whatever, simplify to your level, and focus on what that comic practice can teach you. Use stick figures, practice perspective, dynamic angles, dynamic poses, and communicating through imagery. Trying to do everything at once is getting you very little of anything meaningful.
quoted for this page
Cintex tablet - do you mean a Cintiq tablet? I know you were talking about getting a tablet before, so I'm not sure if you got yourself a grapphire or Intuos and want to 'upgrade' to a Cintiq.
You really don't need to buy one. Wacom's Cintiq line starts at $2499 USD, and while certainly a professional tool, it won't do much to improve the parts of your comic that you really need to work on. At your level, it would be an incredible waste of money, especially if you already have an introductory Wacom.
A good rule of thumb is that if your artwork is making you enough money to pay for that Cintiq/Intuos/Whatever piece of equipment, then you're probably at the point where you can consider upgrading.
If you don't want feedback, don't bother to post on an art critiquing forum.
When people tell you that the pages look bad, I recommend listening. The speed lines and... large lump coming out of her vagina in the last panel look really weird. Your excuse that the first version you posted was unfinished doesn't cut it--the 'final' version still had the speed lines and lump coming out of her vagina. In fact, in the final version you didn't change any of the major problems.
Grammatically, you want "Now who's the Filch?" not "who'se".
Really? His mother was in labor for over 24 hours? Yikes.
And here in lies Falconire's achillies heel:
Listening.
I'm gonna say this is about the third Falconire thread i've seen since i've been here, and it's always the same; the man posts some art generally thinking that people will overlook the shoddy skills in favor of the overall concept of the work, but when he gets critiques over what he really needs to work on, suddenly to him we're just cramping his "style", and we're all against him or some shit like that. After that, he'll end the topic on a bad note and run away from it, hoping that if he waits a few more months before posting another topic the community will give him a more positive view point of his artwork.
Falconire, the art in that first topic looks exactly the same as the art in this one. I'm not trying to tear you down here, i'm just stating a straight-up honest observation. You need to step away from the thought of buying a tablet and start on pencil and paper. Take that saved money and invest in a basic drawing class for now. Learn to draw what you see. It sounds boring, repetitive, and mundane, but trust me when I say that it's the only way you're going to improve.
It's going to take years of work before you can crank out illustrations that'll be halfway decent. I've been drawing for about two years now, and i'm in no condition to even think about taking my shit digitally. There's just so much you need to work on that it's almost staggering. I really don't like giving crits man; it's just not something that I enjoy doing anymore. But i'll make an exception if there is an absolute need for it, and this is one of those cases.
Just put aside these concepts that you have for now, wipe the slate clean and just start fresh. Buy a cheap notebook to jot down these story ideas that you have and save them for later when you garnish the artistic skills. You're only holding yourself back with this whole comic thing, and if you ever really want people to get interested in your work you're gonna have to suck up your pride, forget everything you think you know about art, and learn the right way.
I might have wasted my time with this post, but I figured i'd give it a shot anyways.
godfather's right, you should probably ditch this comic thing of yours and learn how to draw.
I want a tablet, but I'm not going to get one. Why? Cause I think I need more experience working in pencil, paint and any other medium that catches my attention before working in digital. Each different medium has a different feel to it, find something you like. I believe that when I'm ready for a tablet, my skills will transfer over to the tablet with a little practice.
To be honest, your style right now is a dime a dozen. You've obviously put more effort into it than most comics we see around here, but it still looks like it was churned out in MSpaint. Now I've seen some pretty good stuff in MSpaint, but that just proves that it is the artist and not the tools. Sit down and just pick up a pencil. You need nothing else to make something beautiful.
I'm going to stop now. Like everyone has given you similar advice here. I don't think you'll listen, but I hope you do. Good luck.
These guys are trying to hold your skills back, Falc. Don't listen to them. Go buy that $2,500 tablet, you'll see a noticable improvement.
Haha all I could think of when I opened up that website was falconire sitting at his desk with a 20inch tablet in front of him drawing his comics. Then I laughed
Boy was I wrong.
That, and uh...