Hannahcomb's Comic Art Workshop! (Submissions Open)

[novembersilence33]

cover art

link to comic

http://tapastic.com/episode/163409

[hannahmcgill]

Reus

@Cielle

Hi there! It's good of you to seek out feedback. I believe I reviewed another comic earlier in the thread that was a self-admitted first-steps type of work (39 Days of Summer by @susanbehrends), maybe you could guys could be friends and help each other improve : ).

Layout
The comic starts out with some rough layout choices -- lots of empty space, and tons of typefaces. Later pages have more panels that are closer together. Sometimes the narrative is difficult to follow because characters are in front of pulsing, abstract backgrounds.

I think you should work on this comic for as long as it is fun to work on. On the side, practice smaller elements of making a comic. These elements are:

Draftsmanship
Draw a lot! Draw from life! Draw things that are fun to draw. Draw things that aren't fun and are difficult too. Start with simple shapes and work up to human forms and architecture.

Narrative
Okay, now, step away from Reus for a second. Make an entire, self-contained story using only one panel. Show it to people and ask them what the story is. Do this many times, until people are able to recognize your stories consistently. They can be really dumb stories, they just each have to be different, with an entirely new cast of characters, setting, and circumstance for each one.

Next, tell self-contained stories using only two panels. Use the first panel to set up an action, and the second to resolve it. Ask readers what they think is happening. Do this until people can understand what is happening, again the subject matter can be pretty minor, like a person punching another person, a monkey stealing an apple, whatever you wish (just make sure it's all different stories about a wide range of characters!)

Finally, I'll recommend the Santoro comics method, which involves using nine uniform panels on a page to tell a story. Here's what it sorta looks like.

...and if you watch this Tumblr, it will reblog other fine examples of the nine-panel method, from which I hope you can find inspiration! The point is mostly to get a solid sense of how stories progress and what takes a reader from one panel to the next in a meaningful way.

Go non-digital
Try working with different media, especially messy and unruly media, to capture rendering techniques that you can bring back to the computer. Charcoal's a great, cheap start.

Typography
It's difficult to explain the principles of good typography in one post (and in this instance I felt like practicing narrative and drawing were more important than typography). However, if I had to nudge you in a direction, I'd suggest focusing on legible typography over fancy typography.

Anyway, you've got a lot of drawing to do, whether you take my suggestions or continue on your own way! Hope it stays fun and keeps you happy.

[Cielle]

thank you for your feedback! It was very honest and clear. Looks like I have some homework ^.^ but anywho, thanks for the tips and for taking the time to read and reflect on my comic. You're awesome!

[hannahmcgill]

The Old House on Lewis Street

@Mrion

I think Pixar and Disney are overrated and a animators with gumption like yourself are totally capable of outpacing them. ; ) Your style makes me wonder if you went to RISD since a lot of RISD grads I know have this kinda...I guess, flavor? To their work? A really approachable and tactile flavor. It was difficult for me to figure out where to suggest you improve because I adored this comic. Hope you don't mind me rambling off some praise, I think the only thing to do with it is continue the story.

Drawing
I dunno your first pages are pretty delightful even though the style changes a bit.

What's neat about your comic is that I followed the conversation, found each story reveal, and felt encouraged to go back immediately and re-read -- I found details like -which- statue your main character made, and which his rival made, which is a fun thing to see carried consistently. Especially since the distasteful subject matter that your main character created was rendered with an over-the-top horrifying expression, it really made me laugh since it showed off his self-centeredness so perfectly. NO ONE would ever want a statue like that! I hardly ever see something this consistent in storytelling.

I'm also really enjoying the art history research you obviously did. Rare are those who get the 20's right...even rarer are those who get the current art/culture history right as well, incorporating Greek influences and the popular interest in contacting the dead.

Style
The style is really cute and on-point in terms of artistic trends. I'm sensing a lot of Kate Beaton in the whimsicality of the lines, but you've put your own spin on how anatomy has been stylized and how much depth and detailed is rendered in the environment. The pacing is also really good, I feel like nothing's introduced in an overwhelming way and little plot carrots and setting are spaced out so that there's always something neat going on.

The style also gets really distinct in the later parts of Chapter 2, I don't think I've ever seen something like it and I definitely want to see more.

Oh and for some reason the owner of the occult shop strongly reminds me of Nigel Thornberry, but that's neither here nor there hehe.

Typography
I have to admit it's really rough at first glance to get through some of the earlier the speech bubbles. I don't think I'd change the drawings too much but the typography could use some reworking. Many of the bubbles are very skinny and use hyphenated words in order to get all the letters to fit...They're just blocks and they're hard to read through. Luckily the strength of the dialogue and the interesting story perspective drew me through! I'm really glad that later pages have more sensible typography choices, incorporating more white space and allowing the paragraphs to breathe a little.

Thanks for submitting your comic! I know being an animator must use a lot of your day so hopefully this encourages you to keep going.

[Mrion]

Whoa, thank you so much . Such a glowing review almost leaves me speechless. Thank you for liking it and letting me know.

Concerning typography, you are absolutely right. I've started reworking the speech balloons up to eight pages or so, but I always get sidetracked in redrawing the oldest pages. I should get my priorities straight and just do them before thinking about redoings.

I didn't go to RISD! In fact I had to google it, since I am actually French and don't know that much about schools in the US. I guess your mistake flatters my translation (for chapter 2, I didn't had any help with that).

Anyway. Thanks again for all the love. I've had a hard time finding my audience here on Tapastic (oddly enough my following almost doubled since I went on a hyatus), and was kinda discouraged at first. But I have other incentives to go on with the story and I'll be happy to keep on working on TOHOLS.

[hannahmcgill]

Yes, it's a very nice comic and I hope you continue, don't let social media stats get you down! : )

[hannahmcgill]

Domestic Dragon

@ORO8ORO

Hello! You probably aren't that new anymore, but congrats on getting featured in the mobile app! Cute comic, well-deserved.

Character Design
I think your dragon character is an especially nice example of a charming, gag-a-day character style. It's extremely legible, has some unique features, and is a little more playful than merely rendering a human being. There's definitely an evolution in how the character is drawn, going from lighter, wispier lines to more solid and bold ink application. I can't really pick on anything even in the earlier drawings, because they're all nice and the character's design remains consistent throughout you finding your stride.

I also like supporting characters when they pop up, like the sabertooth tiger. In terms of character design I see a lot of adorable ideas and that's the main thing that's interesting about your comic.

Setting
It seems to me like you're pulling inspiration from your own home for the character's setting. I like the details when they're present, such as the make and model of the vehicles, and the heavy jackfruit dropping from out of nowhere. It's all done in a very low-key, subtle way. I could do with some more embellishment of the dragon's environment. I think Shade does the best in terms of making your dragon look like he belongs in a world.

Drawing Style
It seems like every comic has its own style, which is great. Of the styles, I think these are the most successful:

A fight or something
Sometimes I feel like...
Switch
Shade ...which reminds me positively of Bill Watterson's work, good stuff.

Of course I think experimenting around is awesome so you should do as much as you want!

Technology
Maybe it's just me but sometimes the animations don't load very quickly, so I scroll past without realizing they're there. I wonder if there's a way to compress the animations more, or submit a bug report to Tapastic, or I just need to fix my computer or something. Probably something outside of our control!

Thank you for submitting your comic! You have a lot to be proud of with this one. Hope you continue drawing and writing.

[chiharu_j]

Whoa, you give really amazing reviews. I just want to thank you for taking your time review comic from members, you're doing a really great job. I checked out your comic, it's really adorable with some dark humour, I like that.

I don't have much for my comic in terms of storyline I guess since it is the first chapter, just to kind of introduce some of the more major characters in the story. Beware, it starts off very shoujo-ey, lol maybe that's one of the things that turns people off even though I say it's an action comic lol The first couple of pages are a bit...meh in terms of art style and you'll find that it's changed by the time I get to the more recent pages. I'm only starting to find something I'm a lot more comfortable with and improve on that overall. It would be nice to get a review for comic.

Kami ELement - READS RIGHT-TO-LEFT:
Mitsuki is one of the youngest priestesses to join the ranks of mediums keeping the world in order. As if her infamous priestess ranking was not bad enough, she finds herself and her shikigami Yuki, getting deeper into the politics of the Worlds than they ever thought they would find themselves.

[wangsamax]

Please review my comic
http://tapastic.com/series/TheOrigins

[hannahmcgill]

The Green-Eyed Sniper

@infectedbloodcomics

Thank you for submitting your comic! And also for your patience. I had to take care of a contract that wound up being more stress than it was worth, and am slowly ramping back up into reviewing and comics outreach.

Overall, I'm not able to follow this comic well for a few reasons. I can tell that you have skill with drawing and creativity when it comes to diverse characters and panel layouts, but things aren't coming together just yet. There are a few concepts you can work on to bring legibility to your comic and make your skills more appreciable.

Character Consistency
My biggest hurdle with attempting to read this comic was that the characters have facial and body features that shift from panel to panel. Review your character designs with some turnarounds (like these!) so that you can decide who has the biggest nose, whose eyes are almond-shaped and whose are more round, and who has a petite build vs. who has a muscular one. Use a ruler to ensure that the proportions of a character's face and body features stay the same from panel to panel.

Some more study into your character designs and differentiating the designs more clearly will especially help when you need to crop a character's face and can't rely on, for instance, their hairstyle.

Create the Location
I'm also lacking a sense of time and place for this story. Not every panel needs to feature a face, or even a human character. Some more storytelling to embellish the setting would help me get a sense of whether the characters are at home, or in a lab, or in a medical facility. Part of the reason we read science fiction is to be transported outside of reality.

Spend some panels establishing the sizes of the room, or showing a facility that a character is visiting from a bird's vantage point. Even something as simple as peering through the eyes of a character who needs to read a map to get around some futuristic government facility would give us a sense of whether they're in a huge place or a small place. Look for more opportunities to tell the story that don't necessarily spotlight the characters.

Some more context to the robot would also be nice.

Confusing NSFW Tags
I know it varies from reader to reader, but I found the NSFW fairly unnecessary for the level of squick depicted. There's a trickle of blood running down a person's arm. Is there something else more disturbing I'm missing? Anyway, it might help your presentation to upload multiple pages of what you consider to be NSFW content into a single episode so that readers don't have to un-hide every single page as they scroll down.

And thanks again! Let me know if you have any questions and keep creating. : )

[infectedbloodcomics]

Ouch, I nearly missed this! Thanks a lot for the thorough review

Just a couple of points as a response.

I am redoing the very first three pages because I am aware that they are confusing for a variety of reasons. The entire story is a pilot comic, so I never intended to reveal much about the characters or settings. Plus, I drew the very first part for a comics class, where I was given a size limit was exactly 3 pages. I then continued the story with (hopefully) better art and at a different pace, and never had time to clean up the first part until now. So, I'm trying to clean up a bit of everything (I may even redraw other pages) at this moment. If you wish, you can check out my redone first pages - they have been expanded from 3 to 6 and will be published, two at the time, starting next Monday for the next three weeks.

Being this a pilot comic, I didn't want to spend too much time on establishing an exact place. I may have exaggerated, though. Fair enough I'll see if I can add some panels up to help with that.

As for the inconsistency of the characters, I am starting an intermediate human figure course in late January - that should help improve my grasp on anatomy. I will definitely try several turnarounds as you suggested!

Finally, the NSFW tags: well, Tapastic is a very puzzling place to me where pretty much I have no target audience. Incredibly politically correct and mightily focused on mangas/feel-good/cutesy comics. Nothing wrong with it, but I find its policy on NSFW (and its forum censorship) extremely odd and nearly impossible to understand, so I'd rather place too many tags than too few. I am mostly using this site as a mirror, as the sheer number of readers may still gain me subscribers, but I truly don't jive with it (I've even stopped interacting in the forum because of that).

Again, thanks much!

[hannahmcgill]

Vatican Assassins

@mjmassey

Hello hello, I recognize you from the Webcomic Underdogs forums. Thanks for popping in and offering your comic for review. I'll do my best to help you. : )

Cool Concept
I just wanted to mention that I love your source material and think it's immediately an interesting hook for a comic book. Assassins working for the pope who wear Catholicism-themed secret agent outfits and talk to nuns? Sign me up.

Underdrawings (2D stylization vs. the illusion of depth)
I'm getting the sense that you'd like your characters to occupy a believable 3D volume of space, based on the panels where you utilize forced perspective as well as the attention to the human figure. Something you can do to help with this illusion is to spend more time constructing your underdrawings, and to not be afraid of re-doing artwork to make your proportions and angles line up more believably.

Alternatively you may feel like you'd rather enhance some of your more 2D-looking stylizations, particularly faces, in which case toning down some of the detail in the artwork would also work. The flat-looking angle of the faces reminds me a lot of Nimona and you really can't go wrong pulling a few pages from that book. Try simplifying your settings so that when perspective in the buildings goes 'off', it looks intentional, if you're not going to go all-out with to-the-dot technical rendering. Whatever you do, make it look like you did it on purpose.

In either case more life drawing should be on your list of things to do -- particularly if you're able to sketch on-location in some of these cool settings. Observing people and cathedrals can give you insight as to what makes a setting or character read distinctly, even when boiled down to the simplest possible parts.

Noses
Although there are several areas where your anatomy can be improved, I'm opting to go in detail about noses for this review. I'm trying to spread body canons bit-by-bit over reviews and your noses are a little bit distracting compared to the other body parts you draw. Characters seem to all have the same nose, which is composed of two squiggly lines that never change no matter the angle.

So here's some cool stuff I found about drawing noses. Some major takeaways to consider are the HUGE variety of nose shapes that humans have, and how noses volumetrically project from the face depending on the angle of the head. Nose angles conveniently line up with chin angles and eye angles. Noses are surprisingly complex structures with anatomical names. Go on, give your noses a little more love. : )

And keep drawing!

[mjmassey]

Thank you so much for the review. I never would have guessed noses were holding me back so much! I've been doodling noses while in meetings, looking at my coworkers and using the basic shapes of their faces to help inspire variation.

I'm always worried about if the concept scars people off or not. Sometimes religion is a heavy subject that also turns readers off, so to hear that you think it's an interesting hook is reassurance for me.

Thank you so much for such a thorough and well thought out critique! I will use your advice to help me practice and improve my art. See you around the Underdogs!

[hannahmcgill]

Fugitive

@Cairas

First impressions, I'm seeing some lively poses for your characters, some interesting design motifs in regards to the characters (love the wrinkly bat faces!) and also an intriguing opening sequence. I also like how the characters have been set up in a way that makes me feel empathy for their plight.

Textures
Wait for it! Really, wait for it...So, the first chapter has a few problems with textures, which you're most likely aware of, in that they look like Photoshop brushes that are too detailed for the style of your characters and settings. They also tile in a way that's kinda blocky...keep waiting for it...By the third chapter, you've transitioned into more appropriate patterns that complement your art well!

They look like pen hatchings or screen tones, very pen-n-ink, really well applied and keep value scales in mind so that I can always see the focal point. You've also got some very nice balance between the textural areas and areas that are clean. It's incredibly cool to see your skills progressing within the comic.

Layout
Just some general tips~

1. Don't let your text touch the edges of your speech bubbles...Not sure if you're translating from another language or something like that, but try to give your letters a little more breathing room! You could bump the text size down a notch and maybe consider a font with higher legibility, but it seems like a margin bump would work as well.

2. Your direction towards more storytelling without a narrator is really good. Keep drifting further away from the text overlays in your first chapter, and more towards the panel-by-panel poses and storytelling in your third chapter.

3. I like your experimentation in Chapter 2 with timing and sectioning out moments in time according to irregular panel shapes, but don't forget shots where you establish character positions in relation to each other and their surroundings! I lost track of where people were in the scene and wasn't able to follow it well.

Angles and Perspective
The AWESOME thing that you are doing is putting characters in weird positions and tilting the camera angles all crazy.

Some stuff that might help with that is to make sure angles are lining up on parts of the human body according to the perspective in which they are drawn. One of my favorite blogs that does a lot of different character poses with contour lines and angles is this one right here. Maybe you'll find some inspiration there : )

Thank you for submitting your comic for a review! Sorry it took so long for me to get around to it, but I enjoyed your batties and hope you keep drawing.

[CaptainUfo]

Why not? Here's my comic, Captain Ufo. It's a sci-fi comedy adventure series. We're releasing our oldest pages here on Tapastic, but we'll catch up with our current releases in a couple of months. If you wish to check out the newest stuff, you can take a look at our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CapitanUfoWebcomic

Thanks for your time and effort anyway!

[avalonmao]

Hey, if you have time, please look at Motsuro Project? Thanks so much!!

[henry_]

Just found this thread. Awesome stuff! I'd love it if you could look at my comic strip as well:

http://tapastic.com/series/MaxAndMaury

I know the strip needs a lot of work to look professional, but I'm wondering which areas should I work on first to give me the most bang for the buck?

Thanks!

[hannahmcgill]

Mighty Glad

@ragraphx

First impression:
The art is cute and looks like it came out of a higher-end mobile game. I could easily see your work translate to something like Kingdom Rush, one of my favorite tablet games ever.

Mood
The style of artwork matches the dialogue really well. This appears to be a world of good-natured, goofy, slightly dark fun, like a rousing game of Dungeons and Dragons with friends.

Platform Compatibility:
Kind of a choppy presentation for Tapastic! I understand that updating multiple times will bump your comic and gain more readers, but the individual updates are smaller than Tapastic's surrounding UI. I have to keep each episode in mind as I scroll past comments, adspace, and more, which is causing me to have trouble following the plot. This comic would benefit from either episodic updates containing more than one panel, or a homepage layout like Ava's Demon where navigation pages between individual scenes with no distractions in between.

As I read, the updates do get longer (the opening sequence was kind of a challenge for me to get through without being distracted) and I have to admit I'm impressed by the optimization for mobile. You kept the size of the characters and font in mind for small screens. I think the only thing I'd nitpick is getting the contrast of each composition more stark and clear, because for mobile, readers are in weird lighting situations (outside in the sun for instance) and often can't discern elements with low contrast on their screens.

Lineart
The lineart starts out a little crude but improves bit by bit through the story. I see you incorporating more interesting line weights on the characters and pushing their volume bit by bit.

Panel compositions
The thorny organic borders are a nice touch, I don't think I've ever seen someone get away with every panel being an organic shape before. I really like them.

You're really good at medium and close-up shots, but try to mix in more long shots too. The setting is kind of murky so I'd like to get a better sense of where characters have been and where they are going. I'd be interested to see how your great sense of mobile design might play into environment drawings.

Anyway, please continue making fun, cute comics, and let me know if you branch into games for sure : D

[hannahmcgill]

Death Prince

@MylCreates

You gave me the option of reviewing either Hacheeachkee or Death Prince, and I opted for Death Prince because the theme was more easily accessible for me.

Comic Flow
I'm glad you kept the vignette of two characters talking short and sweet. I disliked having an art process sequence in the intro of the comic, but otherwise I'm able to follow the story well and haven't hit any roadblocks in reading.

I really like how you explain where your inspirations for the character of Sage came from. Your personal experience adds a lot to the comic.

I would prefer it if the extraneous reader reaction stuff was removed from the main comic, perhaps relocated to a reader-response comic on the side so that people still get all the nice excitement from a shoutout but old reader updates don't impact a new reader going through your comic story. I think they're really fun and you should keep engaging your audience with them within the post of each new comic, but they are interrupting my long read-through of your past updates.

Style
This might seem a little heavy, but there are a few discrepancies between your drawing style and some of the texturing and coloring. I would reconsider using lineless elements such as grass, flowers, etc. when your hand-drawn art relies on lineart.

I'm honestly surprised the squirrel was not drawn yourself in league with all your nice character drawings. You've got a really good handle on drawing people, I think you can draw a squirrel well too.

You have well-developed skills cartooning as well as photobashing. I wish the comic would use either one technique or the other, but not both at once. Hope that makes sense!

Lighting
Something you might want to experiment with in the future is more complex lighting. In each panel, consider which parts of a character you want to highlight, what mood you want for an overall scene, and how each lighting decision impacts the mood and impact of each plot point in the story.

I did a quickie Google search and here's a nice scrolling read to start (you don't have to buy anything to scroll through and read it in spite of that weird 'purchase' button): https://www.sophia.org/tutorials/elements-of-art-light

It would be nice if I could find a more itemized list of the types of lighting that artists use, but the article I linked to above has a nice roundup of lighting ideas in regards to evoking certain moods and details in art.

Thank you for submitting your comics for review! I hope you keep on keeping on! : )

[MylCreates]

Thanks! I found this very informative, and thank you for the link! I tend to be really lazy with DeathPrince (not as passionate) in comparison to Hacheeachkee (hence all the photo-backgrounds lol) (and I don't have a tablet so I can't digitally draw my characters ) But yeah I'd definitely look into lighting techniques and probably making a side comic to put the responses in