How to stop worry about tangents?

[KennethLopezJr921]

2 years ago, I learned tangents were a thing and honestly, I feel like its ruined my drawing experience in a way. Because once you become aware of something, you can never un see. And sometimes I wish I was still blissfully ignorant about it, all because of perfectionism. Something as small as a tangent really triggers my perfectionism because apparently, having any sort of tangent in your work is a "cardinal sin" and I dont want my art being ruled terrible all because of one tiny tangent. Recently I've been running into two types of tangents, ones caused by downsizing a page, and one caused by drawings being on separate layers. The latter of which I've run into the most, as I've been drawing elements of a scene on separate layers since 2022, and while that has made drawing elaborate scenes less of a headache, it does lead to more unintentional tangents that only seem to pop up when Im inking oddly enough. Sometimes they just seem inevitable, there's nothing you can do to fix it no matter how much you try to move the character or background. Getting rid of one tangent leads to another and makes drawing less fun. Heres an example for a page Im working on and put on hold because of how much of a nightmare not causing a tangent is....

Its gotten to where I feel like I should draw everything on the same layer again, just to avoid this nitpicking nightmare. This is a fault of mine where I'll nitpick every single piece of my artwork due to perfectionism which is possibly fueled by unconscious insecurity so I wanna know if there's a way to not notice these things. Or at least, some impossible way of drawing on separate layers and not having tangents?

[kalmia]

I think you probably just need to focus on finishing the piece instead of worrying about the tangents at this point. When you’re pushing out weekly, or even bi weekly, episodes you’ve got to let some of that perfectionism go haha, i’ve had to learn that the hard way. There’s going to be mistakes and issues you come across, like tangents or weird perspective, but focusing on those too much will only slow your process down.
I suggest taking some time to practice composition and clear silhouettes in your free time so that when you draw your comic, the ability to avoid them comes more naturally to you and without much thought so you won’t have to stress over them. A lot of issues with tangents happen because an artist doesn’t understand how to create clear silhouettes of their characters/objects. Because your character closest to the camera is covering a large portion of the farthest character (including portions of his face), their silhouettes mesh and it would probably be pretty hard to tell what was happening if you were to take the bucket tool and fill in both characters with black completely. But luckily you have line art and colors, so it can be looked past. But that’s just something to think about in the future.

As for your current piece, I think moving the character in the back upwards on the canvas could help a lot, moving the character closest to the camera to the left so we’re looking over their shoulder, or changing the camera angle itself as well. Either of these will free the character in the back, allow for a clearer silhouette, and you’ll most likely have less lines to worry about for tangents. But I can almost guarantee none of your readers are going to notice a tangent here or there unless they’re like, seriously critiquing your panels lol. Readers look at a panel from probably like 2-10 seconds TOPS unless the panel is like some gorgeous work of art- so just enough to get an idea of what’s going on.
I think your fear of tangents is something you’ll probably have to overcome on your own. Just let go some of that perfectionism, or practice your composition a bit more and work on it at the core.

[thepenmonster]

Tangents only matter when it leads to one element blending into another and making it unclear what is what.

A pectoral peeking out wont do that. But you do have an unnecessary line there and the best thing would have been to simply not draw it instead of moving your foreground layer around.

Erase that tiny line. No one will know.

[konori]

I'm not sure if it helps, but the way I avoid tangents between background and foreground elements is by simply "erasing" a small area of the background around the foreground element.

What I mean by that is, I draw (complete) background and foreground elements on separate layers, and after I've drawn the foreground element, I just paint/fill in a solid white (that's just slightly larger than the foreground element) in between the background and foreground layers. This has enabled me to just draw the background and foreground stuff without worrying about tangents that may arise between the two.

So, from the panel I've shown above, the outstretched arms are the foreground elements, and you can see a bit of white/empty space separating the hands from the table of food below. So, if you take away that layer of white surrounding the arms...

You can see that there are a lot of tangents between the hands and the food, which looks absolutely hideous, but I didn't have to care about that because these tangents will be hidden by that layer of white I added in between the hands (foreground) and the table of food (background).

But of course, I should add that you should also not neglect things like composition and clear silhouettes like @hadleestt mentioned above, as these will greatly benefit any comic overall.

[Lensing]

I do it pretty much like @konori
It´s important to be aware of tangents but I don´t worry about them
when I´m drawing, just trying to be aware of them while composing
the panel just like I´m aware of leaving enough space on top for
the text and leaving too much space on the bottom.

Then I check the panel and I leave empty space between the characters
and the background and elminate all tangents that way. It also looks better
in my opinion

[KennethLopezJr921]

Is there a way I can make it work when it comes to flatting and coloring?

[KSlinger]

For anyone else who didn't know what a tangent in drawing is.

[Lensing]

best picture explaining tangents imo

[konori]

It basically comes down to the style of your drawing/comic. I can give you an example of how I block out tangents/backgrounds in my comics:

Methods no. 1 & 4 are how I do it for my black & white comics, but for my coloured comics I mainly use no. 2.

I use method no.3 when I really want to emphasise whatever's in the foreground.

In the example below, I used method no.2 all around the people and stuff in the foreground. (As indicated by the red arrows.) This works well with backgrounds that are mostly monochromatic.

But for backgrounds that are fully coloured, I don't use method no.2 too much because I found it could be distracting, so I use it in places that really matter, like the guy's head below. (Circled in red.)

I also erased the outlines around the spoon and part of the girl's hand behind her head to make them stand out.

You may notice that there are other tangents and mistakes left in place. That's because I was working under a deadline and in my hurry to move onto the next panel, I missed those. I'm a pretty detailed-oriented person, but if I did not notice those mistakes at first glance, it's likely that readers would not notice it either.

[KennethLopezJr921]

I've seen the blog that image come from and I gotta say, there were like one or two images that I legit could not find where the tangent was until someone pointed it out for me. That's how subtle it was and it got me thinking that if something as miniscule as that is on par with glaring errors like the obvious ones in the blog, any form of tangent can make an art piece instantly bad and thats why I've kinda been obsessing over them lately XD

[KennethLopezJr921]

The third image kind of confuses me tbh. Like the circled area on the top left corner I get but the other two Im confused how those could count as tangents :/.

Wow I really am sounding like Im a total armature who doesn't know what hes doing dont I?

[konori]

No, don't worry! I should have marked those two other spots with a different marker! They're not tangents, but what I wanted to show with the other two is that I also erase parts of a background to make certain things stand out. And because of that, I can't always rely on the blanket-erase method (like what I did with the kitchen/dining table image) to avoid tangents. If I did that with the characters in that bedroom image, then the spoon may not stand out as much compared to the characters. So, it's still good practice to avoid tangents while drawing, and if I spot any tangents after drawing everything, I'll just erase the part of the background where the tangents happen.

If this is sounding a bit too complicated, don't stress over it too much, as these are things that you may become more aware of as you gain more experience with drawing comics.