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Mar 2017

Yeah! The costs we pay for self improvement! Hahaha, but seriously though, a good way to get good feedback on your work is by joining art groups if you have any in your local area. I don't know much about online groups, you have to get a group of people you trust and won't get butthurt at comments.

I'm not satisfied with mine. I want it to look better just not sure what direction to take. There are so many things and no time to really hard core work on them for me.

I have always been pretty confident in my writing. I also have a friend who I call my "concept teammate" because she asks tons of questions about my story that I never would have thought of and has added a depth to my story just by having conversations about it.
My art is alright. I stopped drawing a ton since my freshman year of college so my skills have dwindled. I don't have a specific style so from panel to panel my style changes - my characters don't have consistent proportions either. I am working on it though. I figured that it would be best to get my webcomic posted story wise and maybe one day I'll go back and re-draw panels or whole pages if I'm not happy with them. I use a lot of pinterest pages for pose references and my concept teammate friend is always sending me video tutorials about animation, and concept art.

Well, my comic strip is patterned after the ones in newspapers, so what I do most of all is read the funny pages every day. I've picked up many different ideas by studying line art, and hope to be that good one day. Secondly, I draw comic strips nonstop. As I once read, it's hard to get worse at something you do everyday! :smiley:

I'm personally ok with it, but it doesn't mean I think my work is perfect. I'm always trying to improve how my work looks. I mean I look back on my older strips all the time and compare it to my new work all the time to remind myself I am slowly improving. I want to improve my comics look for the sake of my readers and future readers, and until I feel especially confident I can't get to work on my other project ideas. This month ironically is a month of me making remakes of my first comics which I include my new ones compared to my old ones.

I'm never fully satisfied with my art or writing. But I always try to stay positive with my improvements through each piece of art or script I complete. I'm always trying to improve and I spend time everyday practicing, especially with the art side. Even if its just for 5 minutes I make sure to sketch something little everyday. I find it good practice to observe surrondings on a daily basis too. Focus on the lighting where ever I am and how its effecting objects and people within the room, different architecture and textures too.
I don't believe there is a way to become 'perfect' with art, but that helps me stay on the positive note that even if I'm not fully satisfied with my art, I am getting better and will continue to approve with time :smile:

How satisfied are you with your art/writing?

But seriously, I think I've improved more at writing than at art. (Except when it comes to literal writing, like a novel. I found out I'm apparently very n00b at that. XD) Though even when it comes to writing I vary on how well I do.

Looking back at my early chapters of Daniel, I suppose my art's gotten better, little by little, but I do wish I had more time to really buckle down and improve on certain things, like anatomy, perspective, coloring/shading and just overall design for random pictures. I just do my best to experiment and improve on things I'm bad at as I go along.

Writing I have a ton of confidence in. I've done a lot of writing in my life (more scientific than creative), however, that's only because I have never decided to actually put my creative writing to good use. I only wish that my artistic skill could even be half as good as my writing is (though obviously that's not perfect either).

Having never drawn before at the age of 34, I've really struggled to start. I have purchased a couple of books by Christopher Hart. Those have helped to try and grasp some of the fundamentals. I also subscribed to a course on Udemy to help learn the fundamentals. YouTube has been helpful to a certain degree. Having gone through this thread however I've found quite a few new things to help me on my quest to improve my artwork. Thank you all for sharing, and if there are any other beginners out there I'd recommend the Christopher Hart books.

I tend to procrastinate because I'm lazy and depressed. When I finally drag myself into a drawing or writing session I always feel fulfilled by the writing and disappointed with the drawing. I think it's because drawing is visual so it's a lot easier to see the flaws in a drawing than a piece of writing. I also set my expectations too high.

I find my comic bland colouring wise. Facial expression I also make too mild and when I try to make them more exaggerated it'll look like uncanny valley. I also find my character designs quite eh. They all have almost exactly the same shape. I think I'm though okay with my lineart and lettering at the moment. But having to write my comic in English makes me quite sad because Finnish is the original language of my comic. Nobody would read it if I made it in Finnish though so it is what it is.

I'm okay with my stuff in most zones...I guess I would like my lines to be a little more steady, ink wise. I want my colors to be better; I guess that's why sometimes I go nutso about trying to get better at coloring.

Writing wise, I think I do okay. I try to keep all the bases covered on my plots, so that way I can tell a more complete story.

The only way I get better at [digital] inking is to keep putting in the work...as for coloring, I'm gonna have to find some sort of color/theory & digital painting/coloring class to take to help execute better and get the color scenes that I want.

Well now with a full time job that is art, that's where all my time goes and some of my learning. I took cartooning classes in highschool and took art in college along with storytelling classes which counts. Sometimes I draw from life or practice or experiment. Mostly I don't have time or not in the mood. My practice comes from my work alone mostly. The only time I would really be willing to practice my art is on the train ride home but I know everyone's gonna be gawking at me.

I am fairly competent in my writing skills, my art skills are fairly professional though I have to be in the right mood and mindest to draw or it's just garbage doodles. When I'm given a motivation to do something then I want to do it, especially something like having a job or project from an outside source, it makes me pressured to put out good work and concentrate. Personal work is just a mess in quality.

I have yet to reach the skill of being able to draw a masterpiece despite having a high fever, mad and vomiting. That is when true skill has been reached.

I realise I need to improve in so many different areas, especially getting some better perspective work in. However, as arrogant as it may sound, I think relatively to my contemporaries I'm doing an okay job.

I'm happy with my art and writing! Like every other artist in the universe I hit points where I feel like "THIS IS IT!!!!! I'm getting worse now, I've used up all my talent and now its all gone!!! I'm becoming imperceptibly more mediocre with every page!!!!" but I'm still really proud of the comic overall!

I think I prefer "proud of" to "satisfied with." Like, even the very beginning of my comic, I look back and think "wow heavens I could've done that So Much Better if I knew then the things I know now" but I still feel like, at the time, I did a real good job, and I'm proud of what I did. I think, it's not like I look at my work and go "yup, this is good, I'm content, this is where I wanna be," it's more of a continual process of "I think I'm doing pretty well so far!"

Right now I'm trying to improve by spending more time on planning -- both in the sense of art and writing. Taking more time to think through a scene and plan out a chapter and design a space before I get there. Planning ahead more with my writing is helping me to see just how many different threads I'm juggling at once, and to try not to forget important ideas and have to cram them in right before they're needed. I'm also trying to pay more attention to colour, and think about making pages aesthetically striking and distinct, rather than just "convincingly in the place/time of day that they're meant to be."

Writing, I think? It's tough, because if art wasn't extremely important to me I sure wouldn't spend 15 hours on a page, but at the same time, I'd rather readers tell me I've messed up some anatomy than have readers admit that an emotional moment didn't land for them.
Though slotting "story" as a part of writing makes this tough to answer too, because story is 100% the most important thing to me, but so many art elements matter to me because they're part of story-telling -- expressions that read well, a sense of space that doesn't become confusing as characters move through the environment, the design of an area that makes the world less generic, the pacing that comes from the composition of a page, the mood that comes from the colouring of a scene. So I'm not sure. I can say "story matters most" with certainty, but that could mean all kinds of things.

This is definitely the phase where I'm at with my colors. I want my colors to define that I can convincingly set the mood, as opposed to "he's trying to do something, but hasnt quite got it yet".

Writing-wise I'm quite happy with where I am. I know I'm not releasing lighting bolts of clarity, or shaking the ground with deep truths about the nature of life, but I can turn out a pretty affecting passage and I think my dialogue is pretty natural (I read it out loud to myself, I can't recommend this enough as a way to quickly bug-fix a wonky script).

Art-wise I am only improving when I motivate myself not to be lazy. I can go back to things I did years ago and feel they're better than what I can put out now, but then it was always a simple "effort = result" equation. These days it's hard to muster the time that I used to have in order to make the art as good as it can be. I'm getting better as a whole though, especially in pose and expression.

1 year later

I am slowly improving my art by making new panels/art for my comic. And as i find myself getting more comfortable with drawing my characters i also find my writing has improved a little bit maybe.

I'm the type who usually likes to burn through a bunch of styles and try new things to try and improve my art, but this can backfire leaving me frustrated trying to push my time and limits to create better art in an art style im not used to. The slow/gradual improvement is much better i think as it hasn't caused me to quit or give up due to frustration.

While i will probably never be satisfied with my art skill or writing. Improvement is the goal. I'm not trying to actively improve as much as i used to.

I love my art. Regardless of if it's perfect every time I enjoy doing it and I am proud of the things I get right. I learned to focus on the growth aspect of being an artist and it basically means I don't compare myself to others anymore.
Then again, a lot of change has happened in my life that's forced me to stop focusing so hard on others and learn to appreciate myself. It ain't an easy thing to do but if you don't care about being perfect "NOW NOW NOW" then you'll realise that nobody has achieved perfect art and never will because that's the entire point of art. It's supposed to be imperfect. People can make their art more appealing, more detailed and more accurate but it takes years and years of intensive learning, studying and practice.
Expecting your art to just "be better" isn't realistic. I think there's a lot I can improve but I also think there's a lot I HAVE improved.

My writing is pretty impeccable. I have always been good at it and probably always will be. My english teacher in high school legit thanked me for picking creative writing as a college course. I'm extremely good at writing prose and script, because I've worked hard on it. I used to not know where to start but now I'm genuinely really good at it. I don't have a lot of time to get all my work written and therefore it's a slow crawl but my stuff is well-received and I'm proud of it. I know my strengths are dialogue and fight scenes, and I'm also getting really good at characterisation and generally realistic characters. I need to work a bit on setting and lore but that's a skill I can build on. Obviously I'll never be satisfied though - I want to be better than I am and crawl closer to being truly great at it.

TL;DR I have a big ego but it's probably a good thing.

i'm proud that i actually got started, how im improving is just pressing on, bugs get ironed out in time

In terms of narrative skills, I’m overconfident but in terms of art, I’m insecure on whether or not my style is recognizable/unique enough. That’s really my goal- if someone can point at my art and say “THAT’S dawg’s work” I’ll be happy :slight_smile: