Drop your comic, and I'll give you some hard critique

liaroger 2021-07-30 18:26:17 UTC #179

Well alright then ... might as well face my fears.
I'm aware of quite a few flaws (like the sloppy backgrounds and the pacing issues) but now I wanna know what else you're gonna critique.

TAMAnnoying 2021-07-30 22:57:30 UTC #180

GGOkumura 2021-08-01 00:59:17 UTC #181

Yo! I'm late but thanks.

The whole spacing thing is because some time ago, I got my work critiqued and that person said that I should leave more space between my panels. (Don't know if you noticed but in the first chapters, the spacing wasn't that HUGE as it is now) I do sometimes notice there's too much space and try to make the gap smaller.

The text thing about

I do it because I used to see a lot of comics doing it. Someone did tell me to sort-of stop using them as well, since we can see what's going on already. In other instances, I would've written "drip" when the blood hit the ground on a scene, but didn't because of that same thing. Also, yes it was supposed to be 'staaare', I forgot to add the dash

lol I don't. I draw everything in 600dpi, I just use a custom ballpoint pen for the inking and use a default g-pen for the coloring. That is, because I like using the ballpoint pen for inking and such but I don't like textured pens for coloring. Though I've got to admit, I do a lot of the crosshatching you mentioned and add some texturing to my sketching phase and monochrome drawings. I do plan to use crosshatching for fight scenes later on though, since indeed, it makes them more dynamic and 'good looking'.

KennethLopezJr921 2021-08-01 01:09:15 UTC #182

Bring it on! BRING IT ON!

Lucius 2021-08-01 02:12:41 UTC #183

Come at me.

DNoble 2021-08-01 04:06:03 UTC #184

Like I said, there's personal preference and different schools of thought about the spacing when it comes to webtoons. The point is not to blindly 'leave larger gaps' or 'put your panels closer together' because someone said you should, but to think about using the space you're working with effectively to convey mood, tone, and pacing. Sometimes that calls for more space, sometimes that calls for less.

Scott McCloud has a couple of incredible books on the topic of comics and how to construct them, and while he's working in the more traditional page format, he delves into the use of physical space to illustrate how you can handle pacing and flow by manipulating how big or small panels are, how much space is between them, and where you place them.

As far as the sound-effect text labeling thing, it's a similar situation: it's less about 'do it' or 'don't do it' because someone else thinks it's a good strategy, it's about using those things effectively to convey the story in the best way possible, and that means thinking about the reason why the words are (or aren't) there in the panels. Take a look at this page from Scott McCloud's 'Making Comics' where he breaks down the different 'categories' of possible relationships between words and pictures in any given comic panel:

He goes on to explain how each of these types can be used, and what they bring to the table.

Y'know what? I'm just gonna leave a link to a free PDF of both of his books on comics here, because it is one of the single best resources for comics creators.
You'll have to trust a random link from a stranger on the internet if you want to read it, but I can guarantee that I have loaded this link and my computer did not, in fact, explode:
https://pdfcoffee.com/qdownload/comics-scott-mccloud-understanding-comics-the-invisible-art-pdf-free.html
http://www.yorku.ca/yamlau/readings/Making_Comics.pdf

hatch marks don't in and of themselves make the drawing more 'good looking', they're just a thing I'm a fan of for adding depth and form. Plenty can be done beyond that. Like I said, that's just MY sensibilities and how I like to do it. I do think that using the same pen for both your lineart and your shading will help the art feel more cohesive; sort of like how legos fit together because they're all built with the same base components and structure. I've seen it in a lot of comics: Soft, painterly colors with thick, bold linework, smooth and crisp colors with chunky and messy linework, etc etc. Making sure your colors 'mesh' well with your linework can be a really difficult thing, but it can also REALLY help make your artwork look more cohesive and complete.

Awesomeness_Studios 2021-08-01 04:22:32 UTC #185

Alright lets do this:

worstTurtlebestBug 2021-08-01 07:44:20 UTC #186

Hahaha I'm really enjoying reading this thread.

By the way, you should totally get paid to do this sort of thing.

Let me add mine really fast before you do start charging ....

PKLucky 2021-08-01 14:10:54 UTC #187

Thanks for the links to those books, dude! Definitely gonna be a good resource

GGOkumura 2021-08-01 17:32:39 UTC #188

Wow, thanks for the links!🏻 I'll make sure to read them

spadedigsbutts 2021-08-02 04:43:47 UTC #189

Hi this is very random but I showed the "shut up." Image to a friend of mine who teaches a college comics course and he liked it enough that he wanted to potentially use it in his class to show students. Does he have permission to do this and if yes, how would you want to be credited?

DNoble 2021-08-02 06:22:21 UTC #190

one hundred million percent YES, the credit isn't even necessary, but if he wants to credit it to me, D Noble is my actual publishing name... should probably change my forum name to reflect that. And get a PFP...
The same goes for any of the drawings I've done here, Presumably also with the consent of the original artist if it's a draw-over, but please, use any of the stuff I've done here however you like! my objective is to help people learn!

DNoble 2021-08-02 06:51:24 UTC #191

gonna be honest, there's not a whole lot I can say. Gag-a-day strips rely so much less on camera-work and composition than what I usually do, so as long as the drawing is solid (which yours is), then it really comes down to comedy writing, which I am not qualified to talk about in any sort of detail.
The only real critique I have is that the default grey backdrop to everything makes it almost feel unfinished. Even a little bit of color variation to help sell the mood would make it feel like something is going on there, rather than the space around the characters just not being done.
Obviously some actual environment drawing would be great (and probably good for gags, too: the kind of housing arrangement that a bird and a dragon would share could be very interesting to explore), but any amount of texture and color variation would be very welcome.

DNoble 2021-08-02 07:11:43 UTC #192

okay, same thing I've told to a million other people on this thread: Construction drawing, construction drawing, construction drawing.

you need to be thinking in terms of 3-d shapes literally everywhere. You've got a little bit of it there, so I can see you're capable of working like this, but you need to build up such a skill in this regard that you're thinking about this sort of stuff in your sleep. It can be exhausting at first to constantly remind yourself 'three dimensional form, three dimensional form...' for every little detail, but after doing it enough, you won't even have to think about it.
Specifically stuff like the arm holding the cell phone and the hand on the far dude's hip: I can tell you reverted to thinking of them in very flat 2-d terms, so the fingers don't actually look like they're resting on anything, and the arm looks like a paper cut-out.

Additionally, you're using Pillow Shading.

All of this? It sticks out like a sore thumb. I can SEE the shape of the airbrush you're using for this effect, and you're not actually using your light source to define form, you're just kind of vaguely making the character look embossed.
Watch what happens when I take a panel from your comic, extract the lineart, and then just use the basic G-pen in Clip Studio to add some directional lighting:
From this...

to this:

Smoother, cleaner, easier to read, and actually a shitload easier than a more complicated method of shading.
Honestly, less is more when it comes to this stuff. It sounds nice to do detailed, soft, painterly effects all over your comic, but the fact of the matter is, the amount of time, effort, and attention to detail required to make those sorts of rendering techniques work is way too high to be able to reproduce them regularly and quickly enough to make a comic for most artists, especially ones without decades of experience under their belts. Make sure you're using your grey tones in such a way that they increase the clarity and readability of your comic, rather than detract from it.

spadedigsbutts 2021-08-02 08:54:14 UTC #193

Excellent, thank you so much I'll let him know!!

steffiemusings 2021-08-02 09:28:57 UTC #194

Here's mine. I'm ready for the hard critique. I do know my art does need work.

I will be redrawing some pages of the latest updates/fix some colouring/shading errors after the next update.

https://tapas.io/series/Nebula-Beings/

DNoble 2021-08-03 06:56:56 UTC #195

First thing I noticed were your faces. You're clearly going for a style here, and I don't mind that, but you have a lot of places where it's not working.

This isn't a 'realistic skull' that I've drawn here by any means, but it's a geometric shape that is much more analogous to a real human skull.
Like I said, I know you're going for stylization, but the way you've deformed the cheekbones while leaving the chin in roughly the correct spot makes it kinda just look like his face is melting.
I think a great example for you to study would be Nichijou. It's got a similarly simplistic, cartoony art style that moves the 'point' of the cheekbones down, but does it in such a way that it feels natural and cohesive with the chin, the noses, and the eyes.

The faces are almost rectangles, with just a slight curve across the bottom for the chin, but the cheekbones being so far down don't jut out and draw attention to themselves, which is the issue I was seeing all over the place in your comic.

Again, I wanna reiterate, I'm not telling you to change your style or make your art more realistic, but as I've told so many people in this thread, you've got to know the rules before you can break them. Practicing realism and life drawing is useful for EVERY artist at ALL TIMES, even if your art is super simplified and exaggerated.

Speaking of exaggeration, you simply aren't using it enough.
For a more realistic style, you might be able to get away with more minimal movements, but one of the greatest strengths of such cartoony art is the ability to exaggerate and go over-the-top to really sell your reader on the movements.
Remember that in comics, you're working with static images that are meant to trick the reader into thinking they're actually moving, so if you draw an exact snapshot of what something in motion would look like, it's going to look very simple and flat compared to actually being able to watch the movement happen with your own eyes, which are capturing the before and after moments and putting them all together seamlessly in your head.
So when you draw a character running...

You have to REALLY draw them running. Push those action lines, have the characters lean into movements, go further than what they might look like in real life (again, KNOWING what it would look like in real life helps you do this better. Hence, knowing realism is still a good tool even for very cartoony artwork)

Same goes here: I recommend not going for the full spike-tooth mouth unless you want a character to REALLY look evil, so instead I just exaggerated the canines in her mouth to look like fangs. The mouth shape, however, can be larger, and more angular (again, knowing how different types of loud vocalizations look in real life when doing them helps this tremendously), and I added the little wrinkles under the corners of her mouth which technically probably wouldn't be there realistically, but they help sell the idea that her face is deforming in 3 dimensions, making it a lot easier to read the anger quickly and effectively.

cryptoverse2021 2021-08-03 07:08:12 UTC #196

DNoble 2021-08-03 07:09:37 UTC #197

Overall you've got some good stuff here. Nice sense of style, good use of line weight and form, decent, if simple, coloring. Generally pretty easy on the eyes.

I'mma give you the exact same critique I gave the last one, though: when your pretty anime boys look like this

but your MC looks like this:

it doesn't feel like her face is stylized, it feels like her cheekbone is melting.
it's definitely possible to have extremely simple/cartoony characters in conjunction with much more realistic ones, but that typically works with a stronger contrast, like in Bone:

In this comic, The Bone Brothers are weird blob creatures, and they exist alongside normal, exquisitely-drawn human beings, and it doesn't feel unnatural. You can definitely do this, but that cheekbone on your MC is the ONLY detail I noticed about her that's abstracted in this way, so it doesn't feel like she's a more simplistic character design in general, it feels like you just got the anatomy wrong.

I know you mentioned in another thread that you don't like drawing backgrounds, and I can see that in some places, but the real issue is, in fact, that you seem to be focused on drawing backgrounds.
Don't do that.
Backgrounds exist behind your characters. You don't want that.
You want environments, because they exist above, below, behind, beside, and in front of your characters. You've got some nice shots from the latest episode with the whole beach-and-forest setup, but there's never anything that the characters are interacting with, only standing in front of. No foreground elements, no footprints in the sand...

Why are there no blades of grass sticking up in front of their shoes here?
It's all the little details like this that really sell your comic on being a real place filled with real people, so pay attention to making your environments more fleshed out.

noenoh 2021-08-03 07:52:43 UTC #198

Thank you so much for the critique!

She's not the MC xD the bishonens are xDDDD yet you are right, I didn't have the right to melt her cheeckbone xDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

I wholeheartedly agree with all about the backgrounds / enviroment thing (Im avoiding drawing the footprints on purpose tho-because them have no bodies- but I did really forgot the footprints for the other people in the beach!! ;o; woah)

one of the best advices Ive received in ages. Deeply inside I was really afraid to "cover" the characters in certain panels even if I knew there was idk some folliage or a fence corner but with this advice will not be afraid anymore

THANK YOU!!!