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A comic I made...(Korra update)
Johnoshop
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Hello. My name is John.
I am a storyboard artist from Chicago.
I've been experimenting with comics the past few years and I finally got around to
posting them online.
Here is one I did recently...
I am a storyboard artist from Chicago.
I've been experimenting with comics the past few years and I finally got around to
posting them online.
Here is one I did recently...
Johnoshop on
0
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I also chuckled at the alien's keyboard, with it's [esc] key.
Keep up the good work!
Well done
+1
The art is great too. The only panel I don't like is the one with the alien giving the peace sign. It seems to lack the structure your other panels have and the results in something looking really flat. But really I'm just nitpicking.
Thats something I like about the art. Maybe its because I grew up reading old comics that my dad kept like Commando or Prince Valiant, but I feel like the style kinda of goes back to those days. Suffice to say, but it works for me.
Agreed, not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but it's not a style that has ever appealed to me.
This one's my favorite from your site http://johnzylstra.blogspot.com/2011/12/9_24.html
First I want to talk about what I like about your comic. You obviously have a really strong sense for composition, which is to be expected given your background. You are also a competent draftsman... which most people who come around here posting comics are not. I think panels 1, 2, and 16-20 are all fantastic. Not that they couldn’t be improved but I really like how you have chosen to illustrate them.
It is not really a coincidence though, that those are the panels where characters are the least prominent. So obviously my first beef with your artwork is revealed, the character designs. But before I get into it I want to list off the topics I want to discuss in order so that I can help keep myself organized as I write this.
- Characters
- Line Weight
- Digital Abuse
- Use of Blacks
- Use of Color
- Use of Tools (or Approach)
I think that the combination of these things creates a ‘worst of both worlds’ effect which is hurting your artwork pretty significantly in my view. I am notorious on this forum for shitting on digital art, which is fair. But really I just see it as shitting on lazy or bad art most of the time. Now what you have presented is nowhere near what I would call ‘bad’, and 20 nicely drawn panels with zero copy/pasting is probably pretty hard to call lazy, but I am going to try. And it of course comes down to the digital medium once again, which makes it too easy to avoid problems you would normally have to really think about and solve traditionally, by providing serviceable solutions with very little effort.
So lets get into it. Your characters. I think your characters are actually decent if you are going for that super retro comic book look (which I would question the decision to do if that’s the case). But if you aren’t, I think they need to be addressed. Right now I feel like they are going to be using their seat cushions as flotation devices in a few minutes. This is caused by your line weights and digital abuse in addition to the character designs themselves, but I will get into those later. The characters are really generic. They feel like they are caught in this zone where you can’t decide whether they are supposed to be realistic or cartoony. It was really common in early comic books because they wanted to be as realistic as possible while still accommodating the primitive mass printing methods they were using. So if the idea is to capture a retro look, you have done it in the character designs. Unfortunately if that’s the goal the image falls apart in other places. I would sit down and think about where you want your characters to go....realism or cartoonism. Because either way, you can do better and I full believe that.
Line weight. I am surprised that nobody else on the forum has commented on this. It’s usually one of the first things people notice and bring up, but perhaps people were too distracted or intimated by the high calibre of draftsmanship and composition on display to bother with it. Your line weights need to vary a lot more. Sell the important information play down the unimportant information. I don’t need to see big bold black lines to understand that this little girl has an ear canal. Perhaps it’s not even a lack of variation that is a problem, but where and when you use it. This type of decision making is crucial in creating a ‘feeling’ in art. When I draw today I don’t really think about what I am doing too technically anymore. It’s not that I think I have reached some level of knowledge where I my technical skills are perfect by any means, but rather because I am developing a better understanding for what makes something look good and how often I stifle that through trying to make things ‘right’.
Digital abuse. This is definitely the most important issue I see with your piece. I feel like you have sort of taken a ‘worst of both worlds’ approach between traditional and digital artwork. You have taken the limitations of traditional artwork and brought it into your digital piece, but left the nice qualities of traditional work behind by abusing some of the tools available to you digitally. Part of the problem that working digitally has is it puts people into the wrong mindset when they are approaching a piece of artwork. There are a lot of fantastic artists who manage to avoid this problem though, and I think looking to them would be an awesome step in the right direction. I am not saying you have to render everything the way they do. But they approach digital with the correct mindset. They use the tool to their advantage, rather than their detriment.
How do they do this? They think like traditional artists. Traditional artists plan ahead. They do tons of sketches, value comps, color comps...they respect the process because they don’t have undo buttons and erasers which take them back to pure white. You can find a fantastic tutorial Alexandria made about her process here on her deviant art page. Notice how she works out what her value composition is going to be before she even thinks about color? She knows that color is superfluous. It’s the value read which is going to make or break an image. Comic book artists for the most part determine their values using their inks, and then leave most color areas pretty bright. It’s just the cherry on top, not important for telling the image. But if we suck the color out of your images we get something that is a bit of a jumbled mess.
Obviously we can still tell what is happening. But it isn’t exactly attractive. We see our values aren’t really organized in any particular way. I think you had an unusual challenge creating this at night which certainly makes values much much more complex, but that doesn’t mean we can really disregard their importance either.
You told me your were a big fan of Chris Ware, Alex Toth, and Laura Park. Honestly I was not familiar with any of them until you gave me their names, so my information is mostly based on a quick google image search, but I think that maybe this is part of the problem. You can’t obviously love any number of artists. I am a huge fan of both Donato Giancola and John Harris. Two illustrators who could not be much more different. But when I am working, I don’t try to be both Donato and Harris at the same time. It just wouldn’t work. Their strengths are totally different, perhaps even contradictory. Alex Toth obviously thinks carefully about his value compositions to produce impactful images, while Chris Ware makes a point of not thinking about his value compositions at all. Its part of the ‘look’ of his work.
At some point we have to settle down and figure out what direction we want to go ourselves. I can’t have the ambiguous beauty of Harris science fiction universe and the rich realist fantasy world Donato has created at the same time. Certainly I can admire them both but I have to take what I can from them and put those pieces of the puzzle together into something coherent for myself. If something Donato does in his paintings doesn’t work because it ruins something that maybe I have taken from Harris than I have to make a decision about what is more important to me. And I think you have to make that decision as well.
I think it’s just too easy to try to have everything in digital. You have jet black lines on the trees in the background, full bright colors and even pure fight in the foreground and even midground sometimes. You have the fill tool which has allowed you to create these flat colors which just feel ‘meh’. Why not take the extra time and paint the colors in? Take a brush with a little texture on it and turn the opacity to pressure sensitive and get painting. Rush. Don’t take your time. Just paint shit in quickly. Don’t fill in every little gap, there is no point...then you may as well have just used the fill tool. Our goal is to give the artwork character. Digital tools do everything they possibly can to suck character out of your art, while traditional tools do everything they can to inject character. This is an important difference between the two, and why so many digital artists will take images (such as Alexandria/Beavontron’s paper textures) and overlay them over their work. It creates a randomness and character that is hard to achieve otherwise because digital is too mechanically perfect. And honestly I don’t think you should be any different. Play around with textures to add character to your artwork.
Use the digital tools to your advantage. I am not saying you should be adding lens flares, but I think even some corny retro filters (if that’s what you are going for) like this will go a long ways toward making your art feel better:
Anyways, I would love to see more of your work, and I hope you don’t feel I have been too harsh. Keep posting, and I definitely want to see some of the life drawing work you have mentioned.
tldr:
Vary line weights, inject character, avoid flat colors, and plan out your value compositions better.
Great narration
facebook.com/LauraCatherwoodArt
This, on the other hand, has been a beautiful and refreshing experience, I enjoy the sense of humor, I agree with the rest about the art, but I do think that the art fits the comics like a glove.
And, welcome to AC, I really hope to see more of your work.
This pretty much summarizes my position. My wife and I laughed at your first one months ago, this one also made us laugh.
So yeah. I feel ashamed for posting this. I feel like nothing is more unprofessional than fan art.
It's like "Look at me! I can't create anything myself." I rarely do it but I'm not ashamed to admit
that I love this show. Here's some progress on a painting for a friend.
A work in progress.
Good catch, Mustang. I shortened the forearms.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
Post moooore!