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Kendeathwalker
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I like your coloring for the most part, and the shakiness of the lines and shapes works in some places, but in a lot of other places where it's not showing the forms properly it looks kinda bad. The first panel for example, it's a nice texture on the pants, but it's not folded right and gets weird in places, especially around the waist. The hands are rendered nicely but the one on his lap doesn't make much sense. The same arm is a tad wonky, his shoes look smudged, the wound on his chest is a bit too spray painty and doesn't look like it's splattered on the vest.
Basically a lot of little things throughout the comic, where I like what the style is trying to do, but it has a lot of flaws still, at least to me. The kids in the second panel look like angry midgets. The 3rd and 4th panels have some weird proportions/perspective, especially the running shots. The spotlights need to be straighter, the light is bending like you're trying to fit stuff in or bend it around things. Don't be afraid to use a ruler or straight edge.
I really dislike the digital lettering and effects you've used too. I think you should be painting the text in, it looks bleh in it's current form. There's also some frames that aren't reading properly, when he gets shot on the fence for example, the next frame he looks like he's hanging from it dead, but he's obviously not since he's running around in the next ones. Did 3 people escape, and one of em died on the fence? Then the end seems rushed or something, how did the beardy hat guy get stabbed? Did he get slashed twice on the eye too? He's supposed to be flashing back but killing real people right? How did he imagine stabbing a guy in the chest (?) but really shoot him the face?
Anyways, it was interesting, and I read it all so that's a good sign, but I would like to see improvements.
the art style is really nice, very expressive, great use of color
i don't really have crits for it
it's very stylized and i like that.
I'd recommend breaking that single page panel into three full-page-height panels. You may also want to zoom farther out on each successive panel to give the impression that he's getting further away from the prison.
I may have read too many comic books and have become over-sensitive to a serif font appearing in a visual narrative. I keep wanting to see a rounded, hand-drawn looking font (like BlamBot's), but am seeing Times New Roman, which doesn't mentally translate to spoken words... I'm getting the feel of newspaper article. Too distant for the immediacy of the action you're presenting.
You're consistent throughout, so it seems this was a conscious style choice. Please explain.
Your bubbles are generally quite good (notable exception: page 7 when the guard says "the men in the vault died as well": you have to get that tail out of his mouth -- never obscure the face unless you mean it), the tails are missing their outline at times. To help with consistency, I found this tutorial helpful regarding the nuances of Photoshop lettering. If that's what you're using.
I like it though, it's really good work, I love the water colour look it has. Though I agree with Shiboe about the text, it's jarring in comparison to the rest of the art. You should definately consider painting it in.
EDIT: Sorry Ken, your post wasn't up when I was writing this, so you can pretty much disregard everything I said.
EDIT2: Except the liking it bit.
And it's not Senior Sizzy! Gah!
There's alot of confusion caused by lack of clarification. Beardy mcgee isnt clear that its the same guy from before (his eye-scar is too subtle and hidden)
The whole artifact thing is very pointless. The story would work just as well if it wasnt even there and the guy was just escapeing from a prison. So why is it part of the story? In fact... it turns into a coffee cup in the last panel.
You have to really emphasize certain parts of the story to get clarification across, while making other elements more subtle so the reader knows what they're supposed to pay attention to. When the reader starts glossing over important plot points (like the connection between characters, some sequences of events, etc etc) is when people start getting confused and have to start re-reading things that they didnt understand the first time (which is usually a bad thing. you want the reader to understand it right away)
Also, Gibs, the talisman is around his neck on a chain...
The "almost black" digital panel borders are majorly distracting though. The digital roundness to each end looks bad and they look especially bad when adjacent to a darker black.
What you might want to do after you compose your panels in photoshop is print them out very light and draw the panel lines in with india ink and a brush. Then, scan that back in and pop the levels so all you have left are your ink lines and lay that on a layer on top of your work for panel borders.
The SFX lettering is too crisp and digital as well. However, the overlay/screen effect you have going on with it is nice. Some distressing and tweaking of the SFX letters might help that.
However, the worst part of your comic is the lettering. It is atrocious and really painful on the eyes. I can't bring myself to sit and actually read the contents of the word balloons because of it. Check out what dude was saying before, and if you don't have the steady hand to hand-letter these, go to Blambot and get something suiting. Also you might want to go to Balloon Tales and check the tutorials and tips and tricks for both lettering.
All in all though, good job.
In my opinion, the only 3 really and truly fully successful panels are the 3 at the end of page 2. The use of pattern and color and line and flattened composition here really come together to make a fantastic looking little sequence. It's a very nice effect and I'd be all over it if the entire thing looked as good as those 3 panels.
Unfortunately, I suspect the reason behind these panels being so successful is that they are much more about the art and far less about the storytelling than the rest of the comic, making them effectively 3 fine art pieces more than panels in a comic. It's a situation where you can get away with a bit of wonkiness and having 50%+ of the composition filled up by semi-ambiguous patterning, because with these static panels, the thing more or less just has to look good, not communicate much about the story.
Where it falls down in your current execution is when you try to take that nice semi-abstract fine art sensibility, and then try to make do all the things a traditional comic would do, in all the traditional comic ways. Speedlines! Dynamic perspective! Crazy action poses! Realistic(ish) colors! Realistic machinery! Stuff that more or depends on totally solid, perspective-and-foreshortening intensive drawing to make them work effectively. I mean, Batman comics generally don't look like Matisse drew them, because if they did they would most likely be largely incomprehensible.
If you want to work with a more abstract, 2d-design focused style, you have to ensure your color, poses, compositions, etc. play to the strengths of that style, rather than work against them. That's going to mean spending a lot more time working out designs that work in a flat manner, rather than just drawing whatever you would do if you were going to film the thing as a movie. Likely that's going to mean exaggerating your poses to be much more Phil Hale/Ashley Wood, to read boldly in silhouette rather than anything very naturalistic or nuanced. That's going to mean being a lot less literal in your color and perspective and design choices in general. The abstraction and design sensibility isn't being pushed far enough or regularly enough to successfully supplant the information that is being lost by in not be drawn in a more ordinary style, at least in my eyes.
Right now, because of its traditional sort of presentation/story/staging, it makes me wonder if it's supposed to look tighter/more traditional in the art style, and is simply not getting there because of lack of skill, rather than winning me over to the style in a "hey he couldn't tell this story in this way without this style, good job" sort of way. If it were just a story about a dude drinking coffee on a park bench, I probably would be convinced. As it stands, I'm not.
EDIT: By "I may be the only one", I meant, "I didn't read posts that looked long" so this may have been redundant in spots.
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but that being said, the artists who were known for tracing were big in the beginning of last century..and well, vermeer died in 1675 according to wiki
times, ideas and artistic practices have changed drastically since then
there's no longer as much of an emphasis on making things photo-realistic and more of an emphasis on being creative, and expressive
also, i would have asked him what the hell vermeer was tracing since like i said he died in 1675 and the first photograph was taken in 1814
As far as the tracing argument goes...would have never thought to hear that.
I think the reason that tracing is considered cheating (and I do agree with those reasons) is because generally when people trace, it's as a shortcut to getting something to look right, and falling back on something like that makes it much harder to actually learn. I think it's possible to learn by tracing, and it has the appeal that you have proportionally correct results while you're learning but there are easier ways to learn, and besides, you have to know what to trace, or you'll have perfect outlines that look wonky on the inside.
Angel_of_Bacon may have covered some of what I said, but all I read of his post was the part where he didn't read the other long posts, so if I did, it serves him right.
The one thing I could see Neal Adams refering to with regards from tracing was tracing over your own photographs. They are in a sense, your own original works that your merely swiping. That's probably why he says you should pick up photography. However, even swiping is often frowned upon. Look at the flak Greg Land receives, though he's clearly in a league of his own with his lack of integrity.
Another thing you have to consider is that you do not want to become a slave to reference. You need to learn anatomy, study proportions, perspectives, all that stuff, not just so you can become a better artist, but rather so that you are not forced to work your story or compositions around a finite library of stock images. It's already becoming obvious that your tied explicit to using them, as many of your panels offer very generic and repetitive composition layouts. Lots of comic artist take a movie camera approach, where angles and perspectives are drawn out to enhance a mood or give a certain feel and emphasis on that moment of the story. Go watch the matrix, or better yet, 300. Do you think that seen where leonidas stands up after that volley of arrows and swipes his sword on them would be as effective if the camera angle were leveled with him, rather than gazing upwards from the bottom? Believe it or not, assuming the artist knows the fundementals and technical aspects of art, being able to tell a story as described through panels is perhaps the no1 thing editors and publishers look for when going over portfolios.
I'll give you credit though, inconsintincies aside, you do seem very capable of tackling an ambitous project without worry of burnout. Just don't be lured by the many apparent shortcuts or traps working digital can bring. Study the essentials, and you'll do fine.
Sorry for the rant. I do that alot.
"I was born; six gun in my hand; behind the gun; I make my final stand"~Bad Company
Lucky him...unlucky me, because I was getting pretty far into a response (both to him and the artwork) when an errant backspace sent me away from the page, and my response into the oblivion between my computer and the internet. Anyway, I was saying that generally, I agree with him in that those three panels on page two are particularly nice, and that using the style you've got with the story is going to take some considerations and some changes. Overall, I quite like the style (or, to quote AoB, "the ideaof the style"); I think the watercolors especially work well on the present-day scenes, and they have an expressive quality that's fairly unique to the comic-book genre (I don't want to put out the impression that they're unheard of, but I think they help your comic stand out a bit, even if you don't end up continuing with it.
I think an example of what people may have been referring to in terms of your poses seeming forced would be the fourth panel of the first page, and I think it has a lot to do with their expressions, though my eye isn't good enough to figure out why just yet.
I think you need to be more consistent about how prominent you want your lines to be; there are some places where there are none, some with toned outlines, and some with straight black, and it doesn't work, at least for me, to seem them jumping back and forth between the three.
I agree with McGibs that some of the key points in your story aren't clear enough, especially 1) that the red-bearded guy wasn't dead/was important enough to keep track of (yeah, in retrospect, it was pretty obvious where he's pulling the knife out of his stomach, but little else changed, and without the important part, I kind of missed that bit the first time. On the plus side, I do like how you changed the hand from limp to tense so subtly. Either way, I might suggest bringing his right leg up or something; I would think pulling something out of there would make me want to go fetal, at least based on stomachaches I've had. Oh, right, and 2) that the dead guy in the park is the same guy; Gibs nailed it, I think, about the eye-scar being too hidden. The first time I went through it, I thought the guy had gone PTSS and shot a guy who just looked the same.
I don't like the sound effects you've got going on; they don't seem to fit with the art style, at least to me, and there are a few that I think you could take away without confusing the story too much.
Anyway, that's all I have for now; hopefully some of it is useful.
Camera obscura/lucida images is the thought.
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always with the tomfoolery.
The most encouraging thing I heard recently was that Van Gogh spend 2 years with a 6-section view finder teaching himself to draw o.O
what a dick
i mean, he's good
but he's really not that good. definitely not good enough to be an asshole to you and charge for his sig
he really has nothing on some of the artists over at conceptart.org
darwynn cooke will sign your stuff and draw you a little pic for free.
and i think he's better, personally haha.
I haven't seen any of Williams' or Pratt's comic work, so I can't say how well their styles are applied to storytelling.
I am not bashing the idea of a loose style at all (hence my reference to Wood, who I do like and has an extremely loose style), only that your style as presented throughout most of the comic does not currently tell the story as nearly as effectively as it could, which has little to do with just whether it is loose or not, and much more to do with having the discretion to know how and when and why to stylize things to make them function well.
If you were to just take screengrabs from a film and laid it out as a comic, then drew over if as-is applying "style" as you go like it were a photoshop effect, it's going to look like crap because no intelligence went into the thought process, where the difference lies between film and paint and line. And that's sort of what it feels like here: you had a movie in your head, shot your ref, applied "style", and assumed it would just work- and it doesn't, at least not for me.
Partly. The 3 panels I mentioned look like a style has been thought out and you have explicit ideas about pattern and line you want to get across. In the forest segment, it looks more like you just copied off photos, threw some paint on it and called it a day- where did those ideas go? The result is it just looks like a poor attempt at realism, when you should be making it explicit that it is a style and you have thought it out and you've made changes that make the style more effective at expressing what you want to express than straight realism could offer. This isn't something that is coming across in most of these panels.
If you're going to stylize, it's got to be obvious and explicit and jumping up and down saying HEY THIS IS STYLIZED YOU MOTHERFUCKER in big bold letters to the audience, not being limp-wristed about it ("Hey, this is style...I guess") like it is on a lot of these panels.
Now what I was getting at is that you may indeed have been trying to get across the same style and ideas in those 3 panels across the board, but found that the style established there did not have the versatility to be applied in the situations that were demand of it, or you did not have the technical ability to make it work nearly as effectively, or you just didn't put the amount of thought necessary into it, I don't know.
Whatever the case, you need to either push the style further, or lean back more towards traditional realism when the seams start to show, because the middle ground is a terrible place to be. Unfortunately without being you, and not really knowing what it is in your head that you are trying to achieve, it's difficult to give concrete, DO THIS IT WILL MAKE IT BETTER advice.
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But the faces on page 3 are the kinds of things that shouldn't even make it to that point. You should have gone back to the drawing board on those to make them work before ever moving into ink or color.
I get a creepy vibe from your work honestly, I think that you are going to do really well because there is certainly a lot of room for this type of work particularly in editorial illustration, but if you want to really deserve that success rather than capitalize on a 'look'...I think you need to pay more attention to your drawing.
That may sound harsh but I do intend to help. I like you work on the whole, but it usually feels like it falls a little short of what you are capable of.