Munch, you might want to try varying the vertical viewing angle a bit in some frames. (That was a nice string of V words!) Also, in the first frame, that side view of a passerby is too uniform (centered in that whitespace, straight on side shot, etc.) to me, and draws attention in a bad way because of it. Might be better to just remove him, or have him cropping with the right edge.
Also, I think that poor fella getting his head swoos'ed clean off with a knife. It comes off some bit comical to me right now, and if that is the intent, I think adding a nice speech bubble above his falling head that reads - "Nooooooo!" would do nicely.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited December 2007
Bored, thought y'all might like this.
I'll probably polish it up later, scanned it here at the office on the dinosaur that doesn't go higher than 150dpi and emitts the light of a thousand suns.
You're getting better, in general.
(a) There's very little dynamism to the panels, i.e. almost every view is a straight-on view of a square-framed image. I'd recommend trying some more energetic angles (Frank Miller is a good example of this);
(b) one thing you seem to have a little trouble with (not to be overly critical) is that the individual body parts appear to move somewhat independently of one-another. In reality, our entire body shifts somewhat with even the slightest movement. This is why early computer animation often seemed so lame: if an arm moves without the torso shifting, it belies the absence of any internal connectivity. Personally, it helps to remember that your collar-bones flex at the sternum around 60 degrees. People are really bendy.
(c) in the last panel, the motion-trail of the dagger is impossible: the path it takes there would have required the knife-man to have jumped up, swung the blade horizontally, and then kept it elevated when he landed. Take a pencil in your hand, and swing it at an imaginary neck that high, and you'll notice how awkward the path is. This connects with the previous two points.
I'm not trying to be overly critical, just helpful.
You're getting better, in general.
(a) There's very little dynamism to the panels, i.e. almost every view is a straight-on view of a square-framed image. I'd recommend trying some more energetic angles (Frank Miller is a good example of this);
(b) one thing you seem to have a little trouble with (not to be overly critical) is that the individual body parts appear to move somewhat independently of one-another. In reality, our entire body shifts somewhat with even the slightest movement. This is why early computer animation often seemed so lame: if an arm moves without the torso shifting, it belies the absence of any internal connectivity. Personally, it helps to remember that your collar-bones flex at the sternum around 60 degrees. People are really bendy.
(c) in the last panel, the motion-trail of the dagger is impossible: the path it takes there would have required the knife-man to have jumped up, swung the blade horizontally, and then kept it elevated when he landed. Take a pencil in your hand, and swing it at an imaginary neck that high, and you'll notice how awkward the path is. This connects with the previous two points.
I'm not trying to be overly critical, just helpful.
Don't worry about being too harsh, I've got thick skin and I'm trying to learn, so honest advice is always welcome.
@point A, I have a hard time thinking in extremely dynamic camera shots and perspectives, and I've never cared much for overly complicated page layouts. For instance, there's a webcomic called Dresden Codak that has beautiful art, but the really busy, confusing layouts always bug me. That said, the last few pages of this story have an aerial fight scene that's going to have a few different panels with some forced perspective stuff going on. Hopefully I can pull it off, or at least fail in an entertaining manner.
@point B & C, are you referring primarily to the last panel where BandageGuy is swinging his arm? If so, I agree that looks all kinds of messed up. I was trying to get a feel for that pose by swinging my arm in the same motion while standing in front of a body-length mirror and then turning around and looking over my shoulder at the mirror, which gave me kind of an idea of what it should look like, but not quite. I did try to make his swing look a little more natural by lifting his right shoulder a bit more than his left, and length-wise the arm's basically where it should be I think, so hopefully it doesn't look too disconnected and weird. But my anatomy's far from perfect, and I'm always working on it.
Also, in the first frame, that side view of a passerby is too uniform (centered in that whitespace, straight on side shot, etc.) to me, and draws attention in a bad way because of it. Might be better to just remove him, or have him cropping with the right edge.
Also, I think that poor fella getting his head swoos'ed clean off with a knife. It comes off some bit comical to me right now, and if that is the intent, I think adding a nice speech bubble above his falling head that reads - "Nooooooo!" would do nicely.
In that first panel I went back and added someone talking to that character, so they don't look so out of place, as well as adding some more characters coming and going down the street for that "bustling city" effect. I'll eventually be posting these pages inked and lettered so you can see what I changed. And that head swoos'ing is meant to be kind of comical. I was trying to draw the decapitated character kind of like a big Jim Henson Muppet, with big beady eyes, floppy ears, and that wide, grimacing mouth. I think Muppets getting decapitated's kind of funny so there you go.
Munch, you don't need to show the dude's fingers inside his pocket. It's fairly obvious what he's going to take out of it.
I was actually afraid the panel wouldn't read as a hand in a pocket without those finger indents, but I'll downplay and reduce them when I actually ink the page.
Thanks for the crits everyone, here's a new page. First panel I'm going to add details in when I ink and tweak some of the crowd's faces, and the lights in the ceiling of the third and fourth panels I'm just going to put in digitally so those lopsided ones are just placeholders for now.
that's great man.... As far as the first one goes though I like the bottom one more than the top.
How about some middle ground then?
Tam: same here. How can it not be loved if its only purpose is to design as interesting stuff as possible?
EDIT: Munch- I think your art would really benefit if you practised perspective a bit. Just drawing cubes from different angles will do wonders. (remember to check if the persp. is correct though!).
@point A, I have a hard time thinking in extremely dynamic camera shots and perspectives, and I've never cared much for overly complicated page layouts. For instance, there's a webcomic called Dresden Codak that has beautiful art, but the really busy, confusing layouts always bug me. That said, the last few pages of this story have an aerial fight scene that's going to have a few different panels with some forced perspective stuff going on. Hopefully I can pull it off, or at least fail in an entertaining manner.
I really hope you don't mind this. I tried to draw a reference from the way I understand it, which is from a filmmaker perspective, translating storyboard to shot.
I tried to illustrate what I view as the main issue with your framing. If you think about the camera guy who is taking the "picture" of the frame, he is always holding the camera right at the level of the subject, parallel with the ground or horizon. If you look at the famous Cappy shot (no pun intended) at the bottom, it shows how the camera is elevated looking down at the scene.
For the frame of the guy holding the head, if it's supposed to be dramatic, even in a overdone, comical sense, it might be better to do a worm's eye view looking up, as that type of shot increases the tension of the shot.
Take a look at this:
That is much more dramatic than even a shot that gives us more information, like this one:
That's really all I've got on it. I hope it helps.
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited December 2007
here's todays contribution. Some random cleaner images for a comic strip idea I wanted to submit to the campus newspaper (just head shots) and an alien, inspired by Mayday. Also, I know they're doodles, but I do want to get better and get some crits, if I plan to sketch something every day and post it should I start a daily sketch thread, I don't want to put doodles in there and bring down the mod wrath or anything.
Don't worry about being too harsh, I've got thick skin and I'm trying to learn, so honest advice is always welcome.
@point A, I have a hard time thinking in extremely dynamic camera shots and perspectives, and I've never cared much for overly complicated page layouts. For instance, there's a webcomic called Dresden Codak that has beautiful art, but the really busy, confusing layouts always bug me. That said, the last few pages of this story have an aerial fight scene that's going to have a few different panels with some forced perspective stuff going on. Hopefully I can pull it off, or at least fail in an entertaining manner.
I'm not talking about page layout, so much as the composition of the particular panels. In general, there are rules about composition in photo, drawing, painting, etc. that allow you to have more energetic images. For example, the vanishing point should almost never, ever, be nearly centered either vertically or horizontally in the panel. Another example is that the choice of whether or not something visually 'frames' the content of the panel. Just as exercise, try shifting the vanishing points to the peripheral third of the panels (i.e. top or bottom third, left or right third), or just outside of the panel.
@point B & C, are you referring primarily to the last panel where BandageGuy is swinging his arm? If so, I agree that looks all kinds of messed up. I was trying to get a feel for that pose by swinging my arm in the same motion while standing in front of a body-length mirror and then turning around and looking over my shoulder at the mirror, which gave me kind of an idea of what it should look like, but not quite. I did try to make his swing look a little more natural by lifting his right shoulder a bit more than his left, and length-wise the arm's basically where it should be I think, so hopefully it doesn't look too disconnected and weird. But my anatomy's far from perfect, and I'm always working on it.
I might not have been clear: I'm not talking about your anatomy, but rather the kinetics of how you position that anatomy.
Here's an example I learned in my CGI days back when I was a teenager: think about the walk-cycle for a character. It does not begin with one foot lifting up. Rather, it begins with an overall shift of body-weight away from the moving foot, so that it settles over the hip of the stationary foot. This means that as your foot is lifting, your hips tilt, and correspondingly your shoulders tip and rotate.
Moreover, I think you underestimate the flexibility of the human torso. As I noted, your collarbones have between 30 and 60 degrees of motion vertically, and typically have at around the same degree of motion horizontally. Look at yourself without a shirt in the mirror, and move your arms individually and in unison into different extreme postures. Note that your entire torso is shifting when you do this. Similarly, the degree to which the top of your torso rotates relative to the rest in real life can be pretty severe: non-athletes can often still achieve over 40 degrees of rotation between their hips and their shoulders.
When I'm home later, I'll try and give you a drawing explaining what I mean.
Thanks for the crits everyone, here's a new page. First panel I'm going to add details in when I ink and tweak some of the crowd's faces, and the lights in the ceiling of the third and fourth panels I'm just going to put in digitally so those lopsided ones are just placeholders for now.
Your first panel - with cropped heads, etc. - is easily the best of the bunch. Why? Because it has a great deal more interesting composition. First, you've eschewed the natural ground-plane, by placing the focal interest at eye-level instead of torso-level. This immediately draws the viewer in by surprising them.
However, note a few posture issues:
1) the fist holding the decapitated head: you cannot pose your hand this squarely. His fingers would probably be splayed to grip the hair, they'd be at different rotations, etc. Moreover, your figures are incorrectly sized relative to one another.
2) The other hand, in the same panel: that hand is tense. It's being held further open than a relaxed posture, which is confusing in light of (a) the thumb (which is relaxed), and (b) his overall pose (which communicates calm absence of fear.
3) In the middle-right panel: you've again got your vanishing point right dead center. Don't do that. I understand that you want a straight-on view of the main figure from the side, but the rest of the scene would look better from a slightly skewed angle. This is especially true given that the next panel is almost the exact view/perspective, but with a different background (is that Dr. Klaw? Did Inspector Gadget just kill a doorman?).
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Anyone who keeps up with politics will get it.
so
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It is pretty darn awesome.
visit my webcomic at http://www.kiolia.com/shadowfolk Science fiction, updated almost never.
Good stuff, btw.
Also, d'awwww..
Another comic page. Let me know if there are any glaring errors.
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I'm not grabbing her boobs, I'm holding the nunchuk controller of the Wii.
You are no fun.
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Also, I think that poor fella getting his head swoos'ed clean off with a knife. It comes off some bit comical to me right now, and if that is the intent, I think adding a nice speech bubble above his falling head that reads - "Nooooooo!" would do nicely.
I'll probably polish it up later, scanned it here at the office on the dinosaur that doesn't go higher than 150dpi and emitts the light of a thousand suns.
You're getting better, in general.
(a) There's very little dynamism to the panels, i.e. almost every view is a straight-on view of a square-framed image. I'd recommend trying some more energetic angles (Frank Miller is a good example of this);
(b) one thing you seem to have a little trouble with (not to be overly critical) is that the individual body parts appear to move somewhat independently of one-another. In reality, our entire body shifts somewhat with even the slightest movement. This is why early computer animation often seemed so lame: if an arm moves without the torso shifting, it belies the absence of any internal connectivity. Personally, it helps to remember that your collar-bones flex at the sternum around 60 degrees. People are really bendy.
(c) in the last panel, the motion-trail of the dagger is impossible: the path it takes there would have required the knife-man to have jumped up, swung the blade horizontally, and then kept it elevated when he landed. Take a pencil in your hand, and swing it at an imaginary neck that high, and you'll notice how awkward the path is. This connects with the previous two points.
I'm not trying to be overly critical, just helpful.
Quick doodle of a friend.
Shhhhh.
Tahin, Shaiah and Lacert (as if anyone cared).
Don't worry about being too harsh, I've got thick skin and I'm trying to learn, so honest advice is always welcome.
@point A, I have a hard time thinking in extremely dynamic camera shots and perspectives, and I've never cared much for overly complicated page layouts. For instance, there's a webcomic called Dresden Codak that has beautiful art, but the really busy, confusing layouts always bug me. That said, the last few pages of this story have an aerial fight scene that's going to have a few different panels with some forced perspective stuff going on. Hopefully I can pull it off, or at least fail in an entertaining manner.
@point B & C, are you referring primarily to the last panel where BandageGuy is swinging his arm? If so, I agree that looks all kinds of messed up. I was trying to get a feel for that pose by swinging my arm in the same motion while standing in front of a body-length mirror and then turning around and looking over my shoulder at the mirror, which gave me kind of an idea of what it should look like, but not quite. I did try to make his swing look a little more natural by lifting his right shoulder a bit more than his left, and length-wise the arm's basically where it should be I think, so hopefully it doesn't look too disconnected and weird. But my anatomy's far from perfect, and I'm always working on it.
In that first panel I went back and added someone talking to that character, so they don't look so out of place, as well as adding some more characters coming and going down the street for that "bustling city" effect. I'll eventually be posting these pages inked and lettered so you can see what I changed. And that head swoos'ing is meant to be kind of comical. I was trying to draw the decapitated character kind of like a big Jim Henson Muppet, with big beady eyes, floppy ears, and that wide, grimacing mouth. I think Muppets getting decapitated's kind of funny so there you go.
I was actually afraid the panel wouldn't read as a hand in a pocket without those finger indents, but I'll downplay and reduce them when I actually ink the page.
Thanks for the crits everyone, here's a new page. First panel I'm going to add details in when I ink and tweak some of the crowd's faces, and the lights in the ceiling of the third and fourth panels I'm just going to put in digitally so those lopsided ones are just placeholders for now.
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How about some middle ground then?
Tam: same here. How can it not be loved if its only purpose is to design as interesting stuff as possible?
EDIT: Munch- I think your art would really benefit if you practised perspective a bit. Just drawing cubes from different angles will do wonders. (remember to check if the persp. is correct though!).
I really hope you don't mind this. I tried to draw a reference from the way I understand it, which is from a filmmaker perspective, translating storyboard to shot.
I tried to illustrate what I view as the main issue with your framing. If you think about the camera guy who is taking the "picture" of the frame, he is always holding the camera right at the level of the subject, parallel with the ground or horizon. If you look at the famous Cappy shot (no pun intended) at the bottom, it shows how the camera is elevated looking down at the scene.
For the frame of the guy holding the head, if it's supposed to be dramatic, even in a overdone, comical sense, it might be better to do a worm's eye view looking up, as that type of shot increases the tension of the shot.
Take a look at this:
That is much more dramatic than even a shot that gives us more information, like this one:
That's really all I've got on it. I hope it helps.
Self criting, I'd redo the wave lines on the left side to give it more depth. Anyone else's input is appreciated.
here's todays contribution. Some random cleaner images for a comic strip idea I wanted to submit to the campus newspaper (just head shots) and an alien, inspired by Mayday. Also, I know they're doodles, but I do want to get better and get some crits, if I plan to sketch something every day and post it should I start a daily sketch thread, I don't want to put doodles in there and bring down the mod wrath or anything.
Thanks in advance.
Use a pencil first. Base the details on those basic shapes.
*of course a sphere drawn on paper looks like a circle, but you have to "think with spheres".
I might not have been clear: I'm not talking about your anatomy, but rather the kinetics of how you position that anatomy.
Here's an example I learned in my CGI days back when I was a teenager: think about the walk-cycle for a character. It does not begin with one foot lifting up. Rather, it begins with an overall shift of body-weight away from the moving foot, so that it settles over the hip of the stationary foot. This means that as your foot is lifting, your hips tilt, and correspondingly your shoulders tip and rotate.
Moreover, I think you underestimate the flexibility of the human torso. As I noted, your collarbones have between 30 and 60 degrees of motion vertically, and typically have at around the same degree of motion horizontally. Look at yourself without a shirt in the mirror, and move your arms individually and in unison into different extreme postures. Note that your entire torso is shifting when you do this. Similarly, the degree to which the top of your torso rotates relative to the rest in real life can be pretty severe: non-athletes can often still achieve over 40 degrees of rotation between their hips and their shoulders.
When I'm home later, I'll try and give you a drawing explaining what I mean.
Your first panel - with cropped heads, etc. - is easily the best of the bunch. Why? Because it has a great deal more interesting composition. First, you've eschewed the natural ground-plane, by placing the focal interest at eye-level instead of torso-level. This immediately draws the viewer in by surprising them.
However, note a few posture issues:
1) the fist holding the decapitated head: you cannot pose your hand this squarely. His fingers would probably be splayed to grip the hair, they'd be at different rotations, etc. Moreover, your figures are incorrectly sized relative to one another.
2) The other hand, in the same panel: that hand is tense. It's being held further open than a relaxed posture, which is confusing in light of (a) the thumb (which is relaxed), and (b) his overall pose (which communicates calm absence of fear.
3) In the middle-right panel: you've again got your vanishing point right dead center. Don't do that. I understand that you want a straight-on view of the main figure from the side, but the rest of the scene would look better from a slightly skewed angle. This is especially true given that the next panel is almost the exact view/perspective, but with a different background (is that Dr. Klaw? Did Inspector Gadget just kill a doorman?).