Hey, I've been lurking here for awhile and have butt loads of respect for everyone's work.
I could really use some fresh eyes on my things lately. Eyes. On my things.
My background: (please just scroll past if It gets too wordy)
I got my first degree in sculpture a couple years ago, and was making things like this:
Also did some figure drawing in school and spent some time at an atelier in florence for a term-that was kind of the peak of my naturalistic drawing skill. I've never been very successful in long drawings, everything starts to look stiff, (how do you fix that?) I got pretty comfortable with quick sketching then, though.
I started a Master of Architecture program last year, but while I was completely awesome at it, I didn't love it enough to continue accumulating debt. Architecture school did at least leave me with a huge stockpile of drawing supplies and vastly improved my graphic design skills.
I would really love to be marketable as an illustrator, and I've been pursuing that with a mix of vigor and panicked self-doubt for the past few months. I also love graphic storytelling...from cave paintings to comic books.
So here's the first few rough draft pages of a story I've been working on. I'm hoping to keep some of the panels, but will inevitably redraw many of them.
I'm having issues balancing "liveliness" with cleanliness in the inking. I don't have a lot of experience in pen, honestly, but I want badly to become proficient. I've been trying to do most of it off the cuff, because any kind of tracing usually ends up way stiff.
I'm using Koh-i-noor Rapidographs on vellum for the scanned drawings. I'd love any advice on media. I have an old wacom Graphire3 which feels very clunky to me now and with which I am wayyy out of practice. I'm also just more interested in physical media for this particular project, I guess.
And here's some recent pages from my sketchbook
Posts
For me the lettering is the weakest part of the comics. it seems almost like an afterthought compared with the deliberate strokes all around it.
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
My only beef is with the lettering, also. It's difficult to read, doesn't grab the eye, and I'm not fond of how close it edges to the balloon borders in places.
Generally, though, awesome. Welcome!
For sure. In most cases it was absolutely an afterthought.
In my inexperience, I really neglected to think about bubble placement as part of the overall composition of the panels, and ended up having to insert them where there was room. I'm also having a real ambivalence about hand lettering--I love it when other people do it, but I can't seem to get it right. So as I was doing the lettering here I was half thinking that i would cut it out and either have someone else letter or insert a typeface TBD.
Does anyone have advice on combining physical media with digital lettering?
Also I'm noticing now there's a bubble with no words in it at all. Artful.
What's here is good, looking forward to seeing some more.
Desperate to find a way to be expressive with color. Trying in vain to absorb some of McJohnstable's technique, but haven't wrapped myself around it yet.
Some cover art for a friends' band.
Despite having been working at this stuff essentially full time for the past couple months, I feel dauntingly adrift. I've been learning a lot, but not in any particular stylistic direction, so I could really use feedback about where to push forward, or where to focus my effort.