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Kendeathwalker
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Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
The solid blacks help reduce this, but your lines feel kind of wiggly and unconfident. The weight and where they break and start again doesn't seem to always match up with a sense of volume. That would give these sketches a more refined feeling, and recapture a bit of flow and motion even in the static poses.
The mouth on the central guy is reading a bit weird to me. Almost like I'm looking at a profile view of the lip, but his face is more straight on.
Is that a wall of a castle in the foreground?
It's also got quite a lot more texture than everything else.
For example, on the last pic, you spend a lot of effort putting in all the little brow furrows and the lines in between the teeth and the grain of his beard and a bunch of highlights, but given how much emphasis is put on these parts, they distract from the overall read of the head as a whole. Deliberately being subtle with those details and trying more to work on the overall forms would probably go a long way in the long run.
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Could I ask, though, how do you color your pieces? Once I finish a sketch, the only thing I know how to do is flat color.
Example: http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/6122/molotovbrinkngprev.jpg
Let me try to put this another way- I'm going to take your original and my paintover and apply a blur to it, wiping out any sort of detail on both of them (approximating the effect of squinting). Take away the detail on the original, and you're left with a lot of area that sort of blurs together form-wise, and areas (like the upper lip) that appear to glow unnaturally. The paintover, with the same blur settings, maintains a greater sense of form, because this overall read is what I concerned myself with at the beginning- the read that has nothing to do with detail.
The Sterling Hundley example, is successful for the same reasons- strip out all the little stylistic flourishes with a blur and it's still extremely solid and readable. The flourishes are enough to catch your eye, but aren't emphasized to the point where they are distracting.
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If I could butt in with my 2 cents here briefly, trying not to derail the thread: you've got a great light source in the form of the molotov cocktail. Why not try and get darker and lighter tones of your original colours, and try to build up dimensional form on your surfaces by trying to create shading. Lighter near the light source, darker on the other side of the body.
Because of the proximity of the light source, use bold contrasts and sharp lines, as this will show the intensity of the light.
Kendeathwalker, your skills are right up there, I'm glad there are some pro's in here offering you advice, because I wouldn't even know where to start looking to find anything wrong or in need of improvement. This is a real learning experience for me too.
Keep up the fantastic work.
I say this mostly because your kids in the orange painting kinda have grown man faces, and this would help your ink drawings too. Your lizard reminds me off the bull dog in tom and jerry, but the exaggerated turned out elbows dont seem to match his sleek, low profile spine. Its minimized by the dynamic nature of the thumbnails, but I think you would benefit from hanging in the design phase a little longer.
If you prefer to stay with the traditional media for your sketching, you may want to take a very light copic marker or water color and try some silhouette work. I think that might help you loosen up in the early stages. It helps me think of sketching a little more like painting, even on the small scale, and build a form or character in a way that jives with my workflow better.
These inconsistencies are in all of the turn arounds you did, like the first guy; from the front (judging by the width of his neck) you would think he was a real big, thick chested body builder type guy, but then in the profile and half turns he appears to have a much leaner, slimmer build, more like a basketball or soccer player than a weightlifter.
Anyway, the result is that while I can tell that all the pictures are of the same guy because of similarities in color and clothing, they honestly look like completely different people, and this is going to hurt any story based art that you do where there will be recurring characters (such as a comic, which I believe is what you said these were for?).
You start with creativity and looseness as you try to flesh out who the character is through sketching. When you get to the point that you're making something as technical as a turn around, you need to be more careful about lining things up and keeping proportions consistent... The creative point is finalized by the time you hit the turn around.
Very few game and animation companies use turn arounds as a rough loose guide. The modelers I work with take what I've done, put each side into Maya, and model it exactly. If I gave them something this inconsistent, they'd make me redo it until it was perfect.
Same with animators in a 2d format. It's not up to them to guess what It would actually look like if a character turned it's head, its up to them to make what you've designed move.
Same even with comics. If you're doing sequential work, you're drawing these characters from all angles, they need to look the same panel to panel.
The way I do it is I generally do rough sketches of the character in motion or in a 3/4. I then take that into photoshop and do a front view sketched based roughly off that doodle.
Then I pull down guides to landmark points on the front view. So there'll be a guideline at the top of the head, the bridge of the nose, the chin, the shoulders, the hip, the knee and the bottom of the foot. Then I draw the other views based on the first one and the guides.
That way, everything lines up for you, you don't have to think too hard about putting features in the right place, you can think about making it look believable.
My next question is why are you bothering with cartooning for your professional portfolio?
Let's be honest, it's not your strong suit. Your cartooning work is about 5 years behind your illustrative work. It's not something you can just decide you want to do one day and master. It takes years of practice... It's going to hurt your portfolio to put this stuff in there. I love your illustrative work, you're good at that, why not stick with it? You can use an illustrative style in sequential work too. Especially if it's your own personal projects. I've seen tons of beautiful painterly indie comics.
One thing especially to pay attention to are those boxes and circles. The widths of B > C > A. It's probably close enough for the ear, but the hair thing is all over. I think the lack of lines by the nose and shorter bags under the queens eye in C makes her look a little younger, and something makes her head seem slimmer there as well, though I'm not sure what (maybe hair?).
(its 18 inches rather than just 12) Having rulers around is a great thing when doing shit like this, having a protractor and a compass doesn't hurt either. You wont use them all the time, but it can make certain things way easy.
Woah. I looked at this five or six times since it was posted, and did not interpret that correctly till nam posted. I thought it was the other ear with a weird symbol on it. I also didn't notice the audience. I don't know what the girl is doing, but you are missing some potential story telling with her being so neutral. Is she looking at the crowd? Because right now she is just sort of unfocused and looking off camera for no reason I can discern.
Using the gaze of your characters can help lead the eye in compositions too, so you might want to play with that as well.