Hannahcomb's Comic Art Workshop! (Submissions Open)

[hannahmcgill]

Right! Above all, I hope you keep going. I can see improvement through the pages and I'm certain you'll pick more and more skills up as you go along, possibly even stuff I didn't even think of. Thanks again for putting your comic up!

[Jrej]

My pleasure. I've been drawing it for a few years now. I hope to finish this first story soon so I can move on to the next one.
Time will tell...

[hannahmcgill]

Demon King
@maelstrom51210

Are you deliberately going for a low-fidelity look with this comic, like Homestuck? If I didn't know any better, it looks like you're scanning in paper drawings, ramping up the levels in Photoshop, and using the Fill tool on the lines from there. There's other ways to do this, even in something free like GIMP. I'm just going to go in detail for anyone who wants to know, this may or may not be something you wish to incorporate into your comic!

The chop-shop way to get cleaner lines is to put the scan on a new layer and set it on Multiply, or a program's equivalent of Multiply (ie whatever makes white transparent). This isn't foolproof because imperfections in the lineart can show up, and it's not possible to color the lineart, either.

Actually getting the lineart on its own layer, without anti-aliasing problems, with true transparency is a little different. It's an important distinction from setting the layer to multiply because you can mask layers on top to do fancy stuff like recoloration. Check out this tutorial if you're using Photoshop. In GIMP you can do this by following these steps.

Anatomy:
I'm seeing a lot of common problems with the body canons, even with made-up characters like demons it seems like you could do with more practice drawing believable bodies accurately. I've already gone over some canons in my reviews of similar comics like 39 Days of Summer, Very Randdenly and Shades of Men.

I'll leave an extra canon here: I notice that when characters are in profile in your comic, their eyes are butted up right against the sides of their faces. In this photograph you see the bridge of the nose extending past the eye, as well as an eyebrow. Even in anime the nose bridge is still visible.

Typography:
Try centering your text so that it sits in the middle of each speech bubble. Usually you do want flush left, ragged right for paragraphs (easier to read), but that format doesn't play well with round forms. Flush-left, ragged right is great for narrative boxes since it's rectangular.

That said, I'm digging how gangly and slightly-inhuman your demon character's design is. Looks like a little bit of Jamie Hewlett influence. I think if you keep drawing you'll find it easier to render clean lines and give the impression of volume.

[maelstrom51210]

Thank you so much for the review!

The sad truth about why the fills are so crappy is that I didn't even use Photoshop. I scanned it, resized it in Paint, and then colored and lettered using Autodesk Sketch book ): . I'm doing the current chapter digitally on Manga Studio, so that should fix that problem.

[hannahmcgill]

Manga Studio is a huge step up. I'm not as experienced with it but I hear that you can make lines look mega smooth, very fast and easy. I'm glad you upgraded and hope you do more work : D

[MylCreates]

I'd love one, but please be gentle, I don't mind as long as you offer a solution to a major criticism.
(Just keep in mind all the coloring and shading is done by mouse so painting without ink lines are kind of impossible ^_^')
You can choose any of the 2:

Hacheeachkee:

or

Death Prince:

[hannahmcgill]

Angry & Happ
@Yoshi_Is_Here

Props for using a nice color scheme. The characters are super, mega yellow, and the entire color scheme revolves around that, using a wide variety of bright hues that give it a springy, hyper, bubblegum feel. A lot of heavily stylized humor comics get colors completely wrong, but it is a really nice way to wow the reader from the get-go.

So, some notes on layout:

1. I'm confused when characters slip into English sentences with Spanish punctuation (?). Forgive me if I've guessed your native language incorrectly. Is this to indicate they're speaking in Spanish to each other? I like the stylistic idea of using that punctuation to indicate they're not speaking English, just not certain if that was intended.

2. Speech bubble placement. You've got a lot of bottom-aligned speech bubbles. Since comics are generally laid out with speech bubbles on top of panels, sometimes I think a speech bubble belongs to the panel below it and that slows up my reading.

3. Character silhouette -- This was a toughie for me because I liked the consistency and concept about your characterizations. However, it becomes tough to differentiate the two characters based on color of shirt alone, especially in the grayscale comic. It would help if either Happ was ALWAYS grinning and Angry was ALWAYS scowling, or their heads had different shapes from each other. Anything to make them distinguishable with half a glance would do.

4. Layout flow -- Some issues with layout, it's not always apparent which panel comes next! Remember to understand reader eye movements -- they start at the top of the page, scan right, then move down and scan right some more. I get what you're doing with the narrower gutters for horizontally-split panels, but I think they are over-used, especially in Little Blue Riding Hood and Black and What The... Try to think about what relates two panels in a split panel and why they should be crushed together, as opposed to laid out with even gutter spaces. I tried but couldn't find a pattern or reason behind that particular layout choice, and it not only hurts my ability to understand the comic, but also makes it less mobile-friendly.

All in all that was a fun little read. It was entertaining even when I didn't understand the jokes, so well done. : )

[hannahmcgill]

Commander Princess Maisie
@abigailkbacilla

Hello! We have a bit of a similar background so I took a shine to this comic. I went to school for graphic design and taught myself comics independently. The design skills that helped me make good comics were eye flow on layouts, contrast, and typography.

To begin with you have a very appealing style and I like how you're setting up the various characters.

Tangents
On some of the earlier pages, right away there's some tangents in many of the panels. Tangents are when overlapping or close proximity causes the eye to be unable to differentiate between the elements of a layout. In the prologue, second page third panel, where the dog is overlapping the bed as well as an extremely detailed dress on the wall, theres a lot of curly black lines and bright colors so it looks like everything's crammed into the composition on the right side.

Next page down, your character is about to be stabbed in the head by the corner of the panel above, and if you're going to have the dog overlap her dress, do it more deliberately so it doesn't look like a mistake. Sorry if this text-only description is confusing at all, but if it is here's a guide on tangents : D http://artofvisualthinking.blogspot.com/2012/10/those-pesky-tangents.html Try to make your compositions look more deliberate, while keeping the spontaneity of your artwork, and this is going to look super pro.

Environment
This clashes so much with your loose organic characters. I'm confused as to why everything's so harshly geometric. That said, I can sense a little bit of Mary Blair with the color choices, naieve stylization, and textures. While I do not think your backgrounds need the same swooping brush strokes as your characters, I think some more playfulness to the lines and greater attention to blending textures into the scenery would make the setting look more lush and believable. C'mon, surely you can make Maisie's castle more ridiculous than being giant and pink : )

I enjoyed the layout flow of your panels and didn't have any problems getting through the story, except a couple points where I paused to try and make sense of where objects were overlapping, or making sense of the setting's stylized perspective. The stylization reminds me of Kate Beaton or Nimona, with a little bit of Rebecca Sugar's bubbly roundness. The gestural lines suggest you're dashing the ideas off as you're thinking about them and make the humor spot-on. Not easy to do! It lends the work a breezy, friendly feel and I think you'll have an easy time gaining readers as you update.

[hannahmcgill]

Silversong

@elixiadragmire

Looks like your comic has a good following! Easy to see why. Consistent characters, nice colors, lots of updates, a neat style that carries resourcefully through the comic. : )

Since you mentioned you'd addressed some art critiques in the first chapter, I hopped into later chapters and checked things out. I like what I see! You're leaping into the fray with environments and weird angles, all without losing track of the story or where the reader should look.

I have a couple of suggestions you might want to try out, or not, depending on if you want to keep your comic as stylized as it is.

Perspective and Contrast
The angles and shapes on a lot of your buildings seem a little organic which may be stylistically what you're looking for (?). I think a little more care and study into how angles and shapes line up in perspective would help to differentiate your architectural backgrounds from organic stuff like characters and foliage. Ruler tools are great for cheating as long as you mix in your sense of lively artwork and story direction.

Horse Anatomy
Your horses are kind of Disneyish, which could be a good thing or a bad thing (dunno if you like Disney!). I like their overall shape, especially how you've constructed their faces, but the upper leg musculature is a little different from the way they're drawn in the comic.

(Image credit to Laura Bevon)

Unfortunately I don't know that much horse vocabulary or else I'd be able to give you a more specific critique, but one of the things I noticed were that horses have giant shoulder muscles that reach to their backs. In the comic they are drawn with their legs kinda popping out of fleshy bits on their chests. The horses get cut off in panels a lot, at odd places like joints. I rarely see an entire horse when there's one involved in the story.

Sometimes the characters seem huge in proportion to the horses. I think this is because of some of the shots where they're cropped. I don't think an underdrawing has been done past the panel's comp on some of those to figure out where the rider is really sitting, and where the horse is really walking.

Horses are freakin' weird though, so mad props for including so many in your comic! I get them wrong all the time, and I wish I knew more about rendering them.

Textures
There are times when character faces are covered with gritty brush strokes, leaving me to believe they are dirty. The markmaking of brush strokes, particularly in panels with abstract backgrounds, could have a little more thought to their direction and fidelity. They point all over the place and can be a little distracting, especially when they have a texture that competes with my expectations (grittiness on human skin, for example). Maybe have some of those scrubby strokes angle towards focal points if you want to keep that nice liveliness going on, or uniformly line up in only one direction? Either that or keep the gritty texture uniform across the entire comic so that it looks like it was rendered in pastel on sandpaper, which is a nice look.

Thank you for submitting your comic! It's a fun read and I think you're making a lot of people happy by making it. Keep it up. : D

[nunomiguelleal1]

Say some bad things about my comic!
I want to hear them all !
Ive recently finished the 2nd chapter so if something bad is going to be said let it be now.
LUN

Its a mute comic.(as in i avoid as much as i can any sort of dialogue and the few lines that exist are incomprehensible)
The style i use is a black and white. but recently ive haded some color, to make something special.

So hmm... Have at it.

[PocketFloral]

I would be really thankful to get a review for my comic Glamour
It's about monsters living everyday lives disguised as humans in a small North California mountain town. At the moment the story is focused on Howie, a former human who's having a hard time adjusting.

I haven't had any formal training outside some Drawing 1 and figure classes. I don't consider myself a strong colorist in the least so the coloring is very experimental. Also I'm still feeling out how to draw some characters so they may not come off consistently drawn? Those are just my own critiques though. This'll be the first critique I've gotten from another person so Im excited to hear your thoughts!

(Also off subject I think I remember you/RAWR! from last years APE?? I have your business card around here somewhere, glad to find it on Tap though, it'll be easier to keep up with considering the notifications )

[elixiadragmire]

awesome awesome awesome!

Trying to pin that horse pic but taps forums wont let me, I'll download it instead, I have gathered quite a collection of horse pics so far.

Yeah a lot of things you're mentioning I'm aware of but need constant nudging on checking,and keeping an eye on it and working on it! I've picked up some perspective maps to help balance out scenes, heights etc etc, they're super handy, as well as building a tidy little resource of buildings and lanscapes to help out with how it looks in real life XD
I might go drawing at the weekends in the local area to warm up my perspectives or buildings and such.

Horses really are the bane of my life, in fact all animals are. maybe a trip to the zoo! (seriously that image you've posted it so good, its perfect!)

the textures .. yeah I went overboard, I will admit! I think i'll 'calm down' once the excitement of these new brushes wears off! (and I stop using all the things!) but yeah, my backgrounds perspective wise and animal anatomy are key points to improve on at the mo.

[hannahmcgill]

Yes I was at APE! Happy you remembered me. I'm going again this year. If you say hi again and mention you're from Tapastic, I'll give you something off my table (probably a button).

[hannahmcgill]

Oculta

@shade277

The first drawing I see has excellent underdrawing and interesting finish. As I read, the drawing style changes -- from flat shading that looks like it was inked and filled in with marker, to sketchy crosshatching. The fidelity of the crosshatching changes as the comic continues, with smaller marks as the comic goes on, as if you decided to work bigger and then port the scan down in order to make the detailing more smooth. Sometimes the background is a mix of what appears to be digital/marker coloring with inked crosshatching on foreground characters. I'm not sure exactly what you're doing but it seems like you're stabbing for a style in the first part of the comic, and it starts resolving into a consistent method of drawing around page 5.

The blending of computer effects and inkwork starts working around page 13, and some of the murkiness that I feared was obliterating your underdrawing work clears up, leaving some nice panels and interesting angles on human characters. If I had to nitpick it would be the fabric of the clothing -- a little too round, clothing tends to hang and wrinkle in straight angles. That would be a personal preference if you wanted to keep things round as they are.

I also wanted to add I liked the body language of the characters as they interact with each other. The faces are very charming, and I get the sense that when they touch, or fight, that they're all in the same world and that their limbs have varying weights and that they inhabit their environment. A little less intense focus on the characters would help flesh out the world a little bit more, but other than a few odd wonky angles in the earlier pages, I'm enjoying their construction and execution a lot.

The pages start gaining sepia tones but I'm getting the sense that you're experimenting a little bit with color and aren't 100% sure what to highlight all the time. I'll admit that sometimes when a story opens with blood and gore I don't read the dialogue (I enjoy horror but have some anxieties about dismemberment and harm to human beings) so there's a lot of symbolism I'm probably missing about the sepia washes, just because I scanned and skipped the pages with a lot of blood (a personal thing, nothing against bloody media!)

I immediately started paying attention when the horse demon appeared, found it well-designed and the right kind of horrifying/awesome to get back into the story.

Typography-wise, I guess I'll just note that centering the text is only necessary in speech bubbles, in narrator squares it should be flush-left, ragged right for easier reading. I also disliked the typeface choice and I think you could find something that's a little more sinister or at least easier to read, maybe something that's not all in caps.

Overall the comic develops into a set of genuinely interesting-looking characters who are distinguishable from each other. Just get more demons in and you should be set!

[shade277]

Thank you very much for your opinion! I will create a "to do list" to fix those bugs!
And I may assure you - there will be a lot more demons further!

[whydocowsfall]

It would be really great if you could look at my comic, I'm sure you'll notice a lot that needs improving! d:

Polyphemus is a retelling of Greek mythology from the monsters' point of view. Have you ever wondered what really happened in Ancient Greece?

I think my pages are getting better, so if you want to see it in its most updated form you can go here. (EDIT: this link may not be ahead of tapastic anymore)

It's so cool that you're doing this! ^-^

[hannahmcgill]

Jonny Comic
@aspiderjonny

---

As requested I've skipped over the first chapter and my observations will be directed towards the latest pages.

So, one thing about webcomics that I really love is this explosion of comics with immensely personal creator styles. Jonny Comic's art style reminds me of some other comics that I enjoy such as Girl Genius and Shadowbinders. Sometimes I'm wary of suggesting pushes towards anything specific since it'd be a shame to lose the feel of you, as a cartoonist, doing what you love and doing things your own way.

One thing you might want to try is to really solidify whether your characters live in a 3D universe or a 2D universe. I see a lot of effort put into making environments volumetric and bodies, but then the faces are a little at odds with the world since they're primarily 2D. Hopefully you can do this while still keeping the nice elasticity of their expressions and readability.

Color theory -- Maybe you could look into color palettes that work more harmoniously with that bright, main green color. Not every single hue has to be at 100% saturation. I see you pulling more desaturated colors in to the comic later on, but there are many tones that could be stylized further. Let's see, when I'm thinking about your main character's green, I'm either thinking about cool night scenes with blues and purples, or daytime scenes that are mostly yellow and orange to play off its warmth. For intense fights, a red and green palette would look great, as long as one shade is desaturated so it doesn't look too Christmassy. : D Also also the green doesn't always have to persist as the exact same shade, it can draw on other colors depending on the environment it's inhabiting.

The line quality could have more consistency. I see confident swooshes and sketchy strokes existing in the same world -- either can work, but both together drag each other down. I also don't think every single outline needs to be black, particularly for background objects. I see you getting more heavily into crosshatching and shading in the later pages, and yet some surfaces have cel shading. I think being more aware of which choices you're making and why would help solidify your style (?) but it's really up to you, since the different types of markmaking make me think of this comic's style as more off-the-cuff (which is also appealing).

So yeah, if you're looking for directions to go in search of improving according to your own tastes, you've got a lot of options, and it looks like you're having fun, too! Hope you continue creating your comics. Thanks for submitting your work.

[DynamoToon]

My comic is Room for Improvement. Its a comic about colors in the Nothingness, a strange and random place where anything can happen. Im a COMPLETELY amateur artist and i only have a vague understanding of what Im doing. (Not something Id want to hear my driver say). Hope ya like it.

[TrustyShamrock]

IM ALL ABOUT REVIEWS AND STUFF!
so heres my comic Robo Hole.
its about a black hole that gets mysteriously turned into a boy who crashlands in an earth suburb called Freefar. there he meets a grumpy girl named Parsnip who is having none of his falling out of the sky business, but before she knows it shes sucked into his world of fighting robots and alternate universes while dealing with suburban life

thanks if ya decide to review it! C:

[aspiderjonny]

Thank you so much for the review. And thank you for comparing my style to Shadowbinders (I love that comic).

Color has always been my weakest aspect. I'll try to study color theory more. As for shading, I usually save different colors for specific dramatic scenes, but I could do more of it if it'll look better.

I actually wasn't aware of the line quality issue. I'll try to work on these problems for Book 4.