I haven't finished the archive yet but you've got a sub from me. I really love the colors and the art overall and the story is interesting so far.

I don't really have much I'd critique at this point. The action generally makes sense and is easy to follow. I guess at the very beginning some things seemed kind of glossed over but I suspect you're planning to come back to that. Like I know if when I was a kid someone found a mysterious kid in a bag it would have been the mystery of the danged century.

I feel like you have achieved your drawing skills in the academic way.
Since you're not a beginner and your comic isn't low quality, I will try my best with my constructive criticism.

Your art style is good, I have nothing to say about it.

About the color, the way you use your color pencil isn't bad, good for key artwork but isn't good enough to be used in your comic. The greatest strength in traditional drawing and painting is paper and pen (brush/ink/charcoal/...) textures, you kind of ignore it (not all) while coloring your artwork and comic.

Suggestion: Change the medium, use Copic marker, or Arcrylic, or Water color instead.

About the comic layout, your art details is kind of overdone at some point. You don't have to draw background in every panel. You should only use the background when you need to tell readers where is your character right now. Your background and foreground aren't separated, you should do something to separate your character and backround.

Suggestion: reduce your background detail and add some highlight around your character.

About the storyline and character, I'm not from the western country and none of anything in your comic happened to me, beside the depression, so it's hard for me to feel related, that's why I can't give you any detail criticism about the storyline. But based on story construction, I think your comic is good in the way it is, but would be hard to attract more readers.

I don't know if you're trying to be professional or not, 122 pages for 3 years isn't a good way to sell your comic. So I'm not comment on how to attract viewers.

That's all, I hope my comment can help you at something.

Hi there! I've read first 30 pages and liked it. Your comics is original and stands out from the rest. Keep this going! The only thing I didn't like is that it is that the plot develops too leisurely... but maybe it's just my perception

This is what I feel like when reading the comic, too leisurely. I was unsure about this but since I can't related to any of their characters, so I avoided to mention this problem.

Here's my criticism about the storyline:

I think this comic would work better with about 20 pages per chapter instead of 40 pages. Each chapter has to be something to be concluded. But what I got after read a chapter is, "they are miserable". And what did they do? They did nothing or even trying to resolve their problem. Drama is there to be resolved by the character, even when they failed to do so. In this comic, nothing is resolved in the first 3 chapter.

Suggestion: Only do this type of storyline if you don't care about your viewcount.

But hey, I could be wrong, don't worry much about my criticism.
I mean, you have a lot of views and subscribers. So feel free to ignore everything I said.

You can keep all the detail as you want, but you need to add some focus point with dark-light into the panel to ease reader's eyes, and use the digital font if you can spent more time.

That's why I suggess you should change the medium, colored pencils are kind of hard to create a good dynamic dark-light area, and too many colored layers would create a mess. The liquid permeation of the painting paper will create better textures and tones for your dark tone artwork. Or you can use your colored pencils on black paper if you want to learn a new drawing technique, better dynamic but required higher skill.

Here's my example:

fix daniboy.png640x872 860 KB

I didn't spend much time on this, but I hope you will understand what I was trying to say.

Is that details would help to build up anything?
The point of story is to focusing and screening the important moments to the plot, and good moments to help the reader understand your characters. For example, if a conversation or an interaction does not serve any purpose beside "they have met", remove it. This is the kind of knowledge that can not be taught, but the experience and awareness itself. Just trying to pay attention to your story detail and study more, you will know it better.

Honestly I like the colored pencils? They have a sort of grit to them that I think matches a gritty story.

I can see the issue with characters not always standing out as well from backgrounds as they could. For me it didn't cause any huge issues but I think a good solution might be to color backgrounds in a different pallet. Lighter or less saturated or in a different color temperature. You seem to be pretty good with pallets overall.

Also I guess as just kind of an aside, I really could have done without Apollo using a transphobic slur near the end of the second chapter. I hadn't gotten to this scene yet when I commented earlier. I get why you might have included it but it caught me off guard and really made me dislike him and by extension it made me like the comic less. Prior to that I had found him somewhat sympathetic despite all his other bad decisions, but after that he's the kind of person who calls people slurs to their face for basically no reason.
I'm not trying to tell you to change it, it's your story. I'm just trying to describe how it made me feel.

I don't think "I'm just bad at this" is what anyone wants you to take away from their critique. The purpose of new eyes on a story/comic is that they have the distance to see things you don't. It doesn't mean what you're already doing is bad, and it doesn't mean you're lacking in skills for happening to not see it. Some of this develops over time, and some of it can be chalked up to the difficulty of the story you're trying to tell.

Give yourself some credit for tackling difficult subjects in a difficult medium. Heck, writing a character driven story where the main character starts out with some pretty unlikable traits is a huge undertaking. So rather than say anything about your skills are unsalvageable, recognize that you're a skilled creator undertaking a highly challenging story, and that's perfectly fine.

On a seperate note, the art is beautiful, and the story is intriguing. White outline might help- it doesn't hurt to try. And keeping an editing eye to unnecessary scenes or scenes going on to long is something most of us have to work on. But like you said, your comic is a character driven slow burn so, it's really not terrible if it reads slowly. It's just something to keep weighing in your mind as you go. I sort of imagine now that Julian is involved it won't feel as slow, anyway, but I don't think the pacing is a turn off overall.

After reading the tropes page I don't really think this counts as a Drama Bomb. It doesn't really add any drama.

I should probably preface this by mentioning that I'm trans myself. I'm kind of sensitive and think about these kinds of things a lot. That said, if he'd called her a racial slur instead I think I would have had a similar reaction. I feel like it would have blindsided me less if the terminology were less harsh or if he'd done some more casually transphobic stuff earlier. I think the suddenness was a lot of the issue for me.

Anyway. Narratively it mostly does two things: it reinforces that our main character is kind of a shitty inconsiderate person, which we already knew, and it outs a trans character to the audience.

And that second part does need to be done. If you have a trans character the audience will assume they're cis until you make it explicit, which sucks. I have a similar problem with my own comic the main character is trans and trying to make it both clear to the audience and not a big deal in the context of the fantasy world the comic is set in is really difficult.

As for the camera thing, you'd need a pretty high end camera and lighting setup to rival the image quality of a scanner. Natural media that doesn't scan well often doesn't photograph well either. You can get a lot out of digital touchups for a lot cheaper.

Also for a slow burn slice of life type story your pacing is really pretty standard? It is going to come off slow to people who want faster paced stories and that's fine. You can bake a perfect pie and people who only want cake still aren't going to like it.

Sorry for the doublepost but I thought I'd take a crack at demonstrating the separating characters from detailed backgrounds thing. I probably spent way too long on this for what is honestly a pretty minor issue. I used the same panel as Draconic for consistency. I don't think the original is bad.

bgdemo.png381x1332 836 KB

First is the original with no changes.

Second has a white halo around the characters, it wouldn't work for all scenes but I think it looks okay here.

Third has a bolder outline around the characters. I personally use this one pretty often but I think it looks best on art styles that are more cartoony and line focused. I don't think it works great here but it might look good in other scenes.

Next is one with the background colors adjusted to be more blueish, I did kind of a sloppy job here but if it had been colored that way from the start it could look very nice.

And the last one I made the background lighter and less saturated. Again I did it sloppily but the characters stand out very strongly. You could do either of these last two with the medium you're already using.

I guess my main point is that you have options, and some options might work better in some situations than in others.

XD Okay, I just wanted to make sure you didn't feel discouraged!

And I can totally understand processing information differently/slowly. I'm dyslexic, and several family members are dyslexic and ADD. No judgement hear, regardless. ^^

@kytri @DaniBoy Separate note, I don't know if either of you have read Knights Errant, but it might be a useful example of Trans/NB characters in a fantasy setting? Though they want farther into the identities of the characters in the original version, the reboot hasn't gone as in depth yet. (Feel free to ignore if you already know about it or otherwise don't find it helpful!)

I know of Knights Errant but to be honest I haven't kept up with it. Last I looked at it was well before the reboot.
I remember a male presenting character being revealed to be AFAB, but I don't remember if at the time it was clear that he was trans and not that it was a woman crossdressing to do man stuff situation. I remember it being a sort of big reveal kind of moment though which is something I'm specifically trying to avoid doing.

The current iteration is pretty different from the original. There is still kind of a reveal for one character, and while not subtle, it's less clothes-taking-off-y. I think the over all tone and thought going into the story is better worked out this time around, though. And it's still really early as far as addressing the identities of the characters. So might be useful to check out, but I can't say it'd be quite what you're looking for. There's two characters handled two different ways though.

I'll probably give it a second look eventually. I liked it well enough.
And I should probably make a thread for my own comic so I don't take this one too far off topic.

I disagree that it's not quality enough. I've seen plenty of worse comics that people are able to monetize, they may just be better at selling their work. It's not a judgement on quality.

Also you've got a story featuring angsty characters and beautiful art, both of which are very marketable.

Okay, well I wish you the best! Try to just do what's right for you. I just know my own comic is far from perfect, but I try to just be honest about what I have to offer to my patrons.

I would draw characters and write sentences going in whatever direction their mouth was facing. Mirror writing at its finest. XD

Unfortunately schools test for IQ, then use a high result as "evidence" there's no learning disability. Even though it's well known dyslexics often test with high IQs. Its done on purpose to avoid diagnoses and save money.

Work on your comic! If you're writing the story for yourself that's what matters, especially if it's important to you. Part of writing a comic is being embarrassed at old pages, I only started about a year ago and when I look at my old pages I cringe a bit.
As for technique, are you using blending tools. There's quite a lot of white which normally comes from using a toothy paper but with bristol board it should be smoother. One of the reasons coloured pencils aren't a great comic tool is that they take such a long time to do! If you don't have a blending pencil you should get a few of those for small areas, they're amazing.
For larger areas (and if you're not too bothered about keeping your pages forever) you can use baby oil to blend them too. Here's the first result that I googled. https://www.carrie-lewis.com/blending-with-baby-oil/3
My other suggestion would be layering a light colour wash with watercolours first but obviously then you need to buy and learn to use watercolours too!

You post page by page on webtoons? That's...unusual.
Anyways, I think your comics are overrated, that's my 2 cents...

Yeah hard pencils over a large area will be quite difficult! I'm really surprised you can produce pages like that, it must take a long time!
The pencils you're talking about I think are oil based instead of the wax based ones like prismas so they blend better but I think the pigments are usually a little duller, and they cost a lot more! I use the regular prismas but they're quite bad for breaking.
The reason I suggested the blending pencil or baby oil is because they're both not very expensive. You'll be able to get both for $5-6 probably so if you don't like them it's no big loss. You should look up some coloured pencil techniques online and just try some out on a new piece of paper, Bristol board doesn't hold water amazingly well so if you're using it a cotton swab with a tiny bit of water is probably the best way to go.

Dynamic range is the ratio between the largest and smallest values that a certain quantity can assume (wiki).
In artwork, dynamic range is the color range that you use to create your art, from the darkest color to the lightest color.

All the colors have to be mixed together to make your artwork more vibriant, and the colored pencils are really hard to be mixed and blended together to create better color dynamic range.

For example, in this colored drawing below (Art by me btw), the color is simple: dark blue (cool) - purple (warm) - cyan (cool) - white (neutral). Those colors are mixed together to create the dynamic range that make you feel the gradient from cool to warm.

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I should called this problem the Color Theory instead. It would be easier to help you google.
Color theory are all the same in every medium. It's an interest topic to study and practice, you should dig it when you can.

I guess I like it! Thanks for sharing it!