I'll review your comic [5/5]

[LostKelp]

Thanks Man! good to know that I'm doing pretty ok. In future comics I'll probably switch to handlettering and personalised fonts but for now I'm gonna stick with the artificial stuff for consistency - though I'll try to put more effort in with the speech bubbles in the future.

[ccmatta]

I'll try the new speech bubbles and look for a new font for the new chapter then oh and thank you very much! That's something people don't point out a lot, and I never tought about either hahaha

[AutumnAdmiral]

If you're still taking series for review, I'm curious what a new reader would think of it.

Read Godchain | Tapas Web Comics

[DualDragons]

Alright let's see who was next again...

[DualDragons]

Okay, it is time for a bunch of love stories!

So looking at your most recent update I will say your panels and speech bubbles are good. They aren't crammed on one another and read very well to me while not being spaced out too much.

That said, there are three issues I have with your comic and they all have to do with the art. I think I can pick out a single panel where this is present. The issues can be seen as my nitpicks but I do advise to look into them

So the three issues I have are: the backgrounds, the shading consistency and the different colours for the lineart.
They do connect with each other and my main issue is that some areas of your art are more polished than others. You put a lot of effort in character heads, faces and their hair but this effort seems to be lacking in the rest of the body, clothing and backgrounds. Heck, some backgrounds are straight up photos with a overlay to colour it differently. Or the bed in the most recent episode that you did draw but has nearly no polish compared to the characters.

Which brings me to the clothes. They have no shading unlike the rest of the characters, which makes me raise my eyebrow a bit. Why not? I get not doing shading on a dark colour because it would be hard to see anyways but the characters in the example panel have both relatively light colour clothes so why not shade them?

Lastly, the red parts of lineart on the faces is rather odd to me. I cannot tell what you'd use it for other than maybe for the blushes which you did use them for in the panel. It kinda makes the characters look ill to me as if their noses and rest of their faces are red.

I hope the points I made serve well as eye openers! I think if you distribute effort amongst all parts of your art it will look more consistent.

[DualDragons]

Also you are always welcome to leave a review on my comic too

(If anyone is interested in that I will leave a link above)

[PapaDom]

Okay. I'll bite. If you're too busy, that's totally fine. No stress.^^
But I'm telling you I won't like it.
(You can ignore my whining. Been a bit touchy lately regarding criticism. )

Read Story of Olivia | Tapas Web Comics

[bronte448]

I won't lie - I see these comics that are so much better than mine being hammered, and I get really intimidated.

[Azifri]

Alright, if @PapaDom is on this, then I'll give it a try too xD

I know you read my comic and have probably noticed that the art changes a lot, so comments on the newest chapters are most appreciated. Other than that, rip it apart! (if you feel like it)

Read Terra Prima | Tapas Web Comics

[PapaDom]

Yeah, nice! xD

[SoulSean]

It's been a month since release, if this do to your liking, please do let me know what you think.
PS: I am well aware of my English proverb having a serious problem, hope you can put that aside.

Read Final Realms - The Twin Diary's | Tapas Web Comics

[dsptss78]

Wow, thank you for the breakdown and constructive criticism. This will be helpful for my future episodes.

[XiuLyn_12]

You put a lot of effort into character heads, faces, and their hair, but this effort seems to be lacking in the rest of the body, clothing, and backgrounds.

I totally get this and agree with you. Before starting my comic, due to my slow ass, I had to find a way to finish a chapter faster, which leads to me not shading the clothes and background. I asked my Instagram followers whether they were okay with it or bothered by the lack of shading, and they said it's okay to publish without shaded clothes and background.
I sometimes did think it looked too plain if I didn't shade them. Thank you for telling that it would look better if I shaded more evenly. Maybe I'll start shading when I can work faster.

Heck, some backgrounds are straight-up photos with an overlay to color them differently.

I'm definitely to blame for this one. I suck at drawing backgrounds, and I'm too afraid to try cuz readers might think it doesn't look right/ wrong angles. I should start drawing my backgrounds, maybe making references from apps. Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate it a lot.

[DualDragons]

Alrighty here we go!

So I have to commend you for doing a fully traditional webcomic, I initially started out purely traditional as well. There are reasons why I switched to (partially) digital though. I will go over these later.

So the biggest flaw I will point out is the flow of the panels in your pages. They seem to follow a traditional comic flow from left to right and from top to bottom. Which is good! But combined with the (unscanned) colourless traditional pages it becomes really hard to follow.

Now normally I would suggest to just space out the panels and draw them more apart from each other vertically. But I know that would waste a lot of space on your paper that you currently use more efficiently. So to fix this, I recommend you scan in your pages and move the panels around digitally to space them out.
The scanning solution ties in with another problem I have, the readability of the comic.

The pages are black and white and that is not a bad thing but the contrast between the black and white is not as good as it could be. By scanning them in as b&w images that could be optimalised

Take this for example, I grabbed some panels from your episode and tweaked them.
Original

Tweaked version

This instantly looks a lot more readable in my opinion! And it is pretty simple, even if you don't have a scanner you can just google "grayscale to b&w" like I did here.

Now there are other nitpicks I have, like you could improve your anatomy with construction lines and outline the bodies of characters more to separate them from the background but I think readability comes first. Hope this is useful!

[DualDragons]

Okay, it is time for age of darkness! I subbed because I still need to read it sometime

So the first thing I want to point out are the cliffhangers in speech bubbles.
It be-
comes re-
ally hard to re-
ad with all the
words sepa-
rated from each
other.

See what I did there? You have a tendency to break apart words like that and it reads rather difficult in my opinion. Don't feel afraid of relocating entire words to a different sentence or adding a extra speech bubble to move the words to.

Now as for other gripes, I have to point out anatomy. Looking at your first and latest pages you have come a long way, but I still think you can work on defining your character's faces and bodies more. I'll share this part once again because it applies here too.

Lastly, the faces feel quite warped from time to time. Take Lyza here for example

Her face doesn't feel quite right in this drawing and angle. I'm not sure if you are using construction lines or not but I will share this anyways

image.png720x724 483 KB

If you use construction lines and shapes like this you can keep control over your character's heads and faces. This also applies to noses and other face elements. In the panel Lyza's face is seen from below and her nose should be protruding from her face. But instead it is facing downwards almost. I think if you construct your faces you can avoid them warping out of control.

I especially think this is useful to you because your style leans a little more into realism so it is not as forgiving as simpler styles. But if you practice and improve then you have the potential to draw truly impressive characters. Jojo is a great example of this.

Last thing I want to point out (and this is really a nitpick from me) are all the haphazard lines in the character's hair. Which can make the hair look dirty and messy and overall pretty incomplete. There are several ways to do this. One way would be to really dive into giving the hair texture like in the Jojo example below. It is very impressive but also really time consuming to do all that inking especially if you stick to a posting schedule.

Another option would be to just use a flat colour. You used it for the black haired character so why not try it here?
I hope my viewpoints are useful to you!

[DualDragons]

Okay, here we go

I am not going to lie to you. This is perhaps the most inconsistent comic I have ever read.
It starts off pretty neat with a art style that reminds me of eastern drawings/paintings. Then there is a guest comic before it resumes in the third episode, and this is were things get really messy.

The third episode looks like it has parts that are all drawn by different people. The fact that it is in black and white only makes it harder to follow. I will say this:

These do not look like they are drawn by the same person. The quality between these examples varies greatly to the point where I have to ask if you have a partner that does part of the drawing or if you got the art from somewhere else?
Because while I don't want to accuse you of stealing art, it did pop up in my mind while reviewing this. This thought is bolstered by the fact the later panels in episode three get really blurry and bad in quality.

I think the biggest goal for you is to keep a consistent style that has a quality level good enough to be read on both desktop and the app. There are other things that you can also improve on but the aforementioned problem is by far the biggest one you need to tackle.
(excuse my harsher review)

[SargentAlchemist]

WOW WHAT AN INCREDIBKE ANALISYS!!! REALKY LOVED IT! Much apreciatable that you actually take your time to do this and read my webcomic, most if the things that you told me about it are fixed in most recent chaoters, for example, here you got a page from my another webcomic, GRUNGE, on his chapter 50.

Cover Art:

But even with this, I didnt know that tool for scaled colors from B&W so with this I will be able to make it better!!! Those chapters are from 2020 and beginings of 2021 so my stile and anatomy have change a lot for the good!! BUT THANK YOU SOO SOOO MUCH!!

[TheDoublekey]

Thank you so much for the review! I agree with the lettering not being the best, as I usually just type things in without adjusting anything. This is a bad habit of mine I need to fix, since I want the story to be as fluid and as readable as possible.

I also agree on the anatomy part. As much as I think I improved, I still find it to be kinda off and a bit wonky at times, so I'll make sure to thoroughly read your previous advice. Character hair is another problem of mine. I still need to practice it a bit and I'm not a huge fan of how I used to draw it, because it looked like some sort of hat instead of actual hair.

Thank you again for your feedback and thanks for subbing! Hope you'll enjoy the story

[Chocolate]

Yeah I’m working on the comic with several partners, in fact.

[system]

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