Comic Zine Cover Feedback

[sams_cartoon_shack]

Hey guys, what does everyone here think of my upcoming comic zine cover:

[Spectorium_1]

Hmm, honestly, not really an art critic. More of an editor, so I'm really going off of personal opinion.

Honestly speaking, my preference in art is a more realistic style. However, the Title going with the art makes sense for the style, but the scene is a bit different from what I was expecting from the title, so I'm kinda curious what's happening. Might get a different reaction from others though.

It also reminds a bit of captain underpants that I used to read as a kid. Bit of nostalgia there.

[darthmongoose]

I feel like the basic concept is solid, but that a variety of little issues make this cover a bit hard to read.

Before I get into the drawing itself, I feel like the text style, size and placement is good, but it'd look even better if you used a font rather than doing it by hand. Hand lettering is hard to do well, and if there's a font that looks similar to what you're after, it's usually best to use one, and just save hand-lettering, (or messing around with the letter shapes in a design program) for when you want something really specific. If you could look for a chunky font and do a stroke effect, it'd look more polished.

Going onto the images... It took me a while to work out what was going on here, and for a minute, I thought I was looking at a wrestling mask. It's easier to go through in bulletpoints if that's okay...

• The mottled texture on the colour is a bit distracting. The areas of lighter and darker colour are too large to make it look like a deliberate texture, so they read almost like shading, but since they're not placed where light and shadow would fall on the stage and curtains, they make it hard to tell we're looking at a stage and curtains.
• Putting rivets onto the borders around the cutaways on the top left and right is confusing because it makes it look like they're really there, not like we're seeing three different angles and a split-screen or montage. It's a bit confusing visually, like the curtain has two big portholes in it.
• The angle on the stage isn't consistent with the angle of the character or the mic stand on the stage, which makes the perspective feel off.
• The size of the stage and the stage being grey makes a dominant colour of the cover a boring neutral mid-grey. There could maybe be a more unified colour palette here, because the pink in the top right clashes a bit.

That said, there are things I like here. There's a strong sense of the comic's general identity and style, and the cover gets across what the story is about really well. I also like how the small figure on the large stage really effectively conveys how young and nervous she is. Overall, the main areas for improvement here are less on the concept and composition, which are pretty strong, and more on the polish of the execution.

[Lensing]

Like darthmongoose wrote, I was first thinking I would look at a mask or an insect head.
Then I figured out it must be an open curtain but it doesn´t really look like a curtain and curtains don´t
usually have giant round windows in it, so I was focused on figuring all that out.
I think it´s a school with the girl standing on stage and one of them is the parent, the other is the teacher.
Why did you put the z behind the suck?
The color combination hurts (sorry)

[sams_cartoon_shack]

Thank you very much for your detailed, constructive input. To address your points:

• Shading is something I really need to study more since most of my comic strips have a flat coloring scheme.

• How should I modify the borders to make it visually clear they're part of the split-screen? Would making them more three-dimensional help with that?

• Like you said, I should also work on improving my perspective.

• I wanted the pink to display a character contrast to the one on the left. Is there a way to show that contrast while maintaining a unified color scheme?

[sams_cartoon_shack]

If it clears anything up, the character on the left is supposed to be the parent while the one to the right is the girl's friend. And the added z behind 'suck' was supposed to be part of my allusion to Kidz Bop.
Darthmongoose already explained some of the issues with the color combination so I don't have much else to say about it.

[Lensing]

Yeah, I was just wondering about the Z behind it, Kidz suck makes more sense imo.
A good thing about the design is that it´s the words are all readable and I also think the composition
isn´t bad. I hope the feedback helps you a little bit

[darthmongoose]

Shading and perspective are tricky! It might be good to think of them as things you can study hand-in-hand. Start doing studies of three-dimensional objects and shapes, and where the shadows fall on them, starting with simple cubes/boxes, cylinders/bottles and cans, and spheres/ anything ball-shaped, and then progress onto studying draped fabric (just drape a towel over a chair kinda thing). It'll really help you level up your work!

To address the other points:

Yes, if you change the borders to just a simple black or white line, or say a white line with a black stroke (like a comic panel border) that'll work just fine!

Try nudging the pink to a more reddish salmon pink colour rather than the magenta-leaning pink you have now. That should harmonise better. Here's a really good video on colour harmony to get you thinking about this stuff:

You have a great attitude to both seeking and taking critique, so serious props on that!

[sams_cartoon_shack]

What do you think of my slightly modified version of the cover? I tried fixing the colors, border, and a bit of the perspective for the microphone stand. However, I didn't do much about the shading since that will take longer to learn than the time I have before releasing the 2nd print collection.

[darthmongoose]

That's a definite improvement!

I totally get that you can't redraw the whole thing for the print run, but this fixes the immediately fixable things and makes it read more clearly. Good job!

[system]

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