Talk to me about your influences.

[Phact0rri]

how to draw webcomics the goku way.

[McDuffies]

You take the pencil in your hand, and yell: "Pencil, draw!!!"

[Bustertheclown]

First you have to power up for three episodes. It involves making scrunchy faces and lots of loud grunting.

[Phact0rri]

You take the pencil in your hand, and yell: "Pencil, draw!!!"

said pencil actually weights four million tons too. thats the most important part about the goku drawing training.

[Industrialpowersart]

So that's what I've been doing for the last couple months. . . powering up! My writer's been bailing me out and it shows. Ah well that ends this coming update.

My earliest art influences were widespread. As a kid I loved Edward Hopper. I loved how everything he did told a story in a picture and you didn't need a title or word bubbles. But I learned more of my color theory from the brothers Hildebrandt, best known for putting out incessant Tolkien calendars. Silly illustrators my art teachers might have dismissed them but by god, those men can paint!

I first started to get a feeling for how ink OUGHT to look from when i worked at an art gallery in college and it had a lovely collection of Japanese Ukio-e prints.

I first started to maybe sorta kinda want to do comics when i read Sandman. I dont know how I feel about all of Gaiman's work since, but that stuff was pure gold. But. . . it was better written than drawn. I must confess that the first inked comic that actaully impressed me was the Pinis' Elfquest, BEFORE it went to marvel and got colored. That was some brilliant linework right there. I have gone scrounging and dug out all my dad's old comics and developed a strong fondness for the older Conan comics- the magazine sized ones in black and white, and Creepy and Eerie.

I don't draw manga style, but it has influenced me as well. I owe some stylistic choices to The Antique Gift Shop. I owe my goals in life to Lone Wolf and Cub. . . because just . . . damn.
Kari

http://industrialpowers.comicgenesis.com/

[Maker]

You're not alone in finding Neil Gaiman inspiring. So much of what he writes is about writing . . . Sandman is a story about stories. Sure I realized I wanted to write comics upon reading his.

Though it was when I read It Never Rains I first thought of drawing them.

I could also mention David Mack as the writer/artist who brings together these two sides of comics better than anyone I know. He's more like a God than an inspiration, but still.

[Industrialpowersart]

I was actually going to mention David Mack as well but didn't get round to it. Honestly if I mentioned EVERYONE who's inspired me- have you seen the recent Kabuki stuff though? Guys a genius, but is kind of slacking off. Like I should talk.

[Levi-chan]

Makoto Shinkai inspired me first with backgrounds, before I noticed the other things in his work - mood, lighting, framing, his preoccupation with the mundane. I recommend watching the movies he made. Here is a short he created: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=wBD5D040D44

Yoshitoshi Abe has amazing colour palettes. Hair rendering, expressions, inking, I got (stole) that from him. Same goes for Range Murata.

As for writing, well. Fuck. I guess I read a bit too much of Raymond Chandler.

[Wendybird]

The original question was skewed towards art, but a lot of people are adding their writing influences. I'd have to say first of all, my mom. She's a poet, a columnist, an editor, and a novelist (as yet unpublished; I take after her in that regard also). She read aloud to us excessively. Her house is full of all kinds of books, especially science fiction, fantasy and nonfiction. The majority of our conversations over the last ten years have been about the merits and weaknesses of various pieces of writing, and more recently, the problems I've encountered myself when writing. So yeah, that's been awesome. Harry Potter is also a favorite subject of ours.

Besides that, one of my biggest influences is Sherlock Holmes. I like to surprise my readers.

[Warofwinds]

....I...don't think I have artistic influences, not in form at least. I have been unable to pin down any stylistic choices or changes of mine based on what I see drawn by others, anyone. The only artistic motivation I have is in the effort to draw what I see and how I see the world, and that motivation is the result of others doing the same in their own styles that I don't emulate.

I am artistically confused. If anyone could tell me what the hell style I use, I'd really appreciate it.

My writing influences are Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Melanie Rawn, Mickey Zucker Reichert (Renshai stuff, not the newer books...), Simon Green and Emerson. The only thing I want to do is tell a story of some personal import to me, that others can enjoy, and is occasionally funny, mostly serious, a long journey (for characters and the reader) and worthwhile.

[LukeSimm]

No one here talked about webcomics that influenced them?

For me, my biggest influence has to be Questionable Content. Having characters so well defined and being able to just let them loose and see what happens is a dream goal of mine.

I too am influenced by Neil Gaiman. Not sure how it comes out in the comics so far, but I'm sure there's a driving force there somewhere because of all of the comics of his I read.

I find movies have also influenced me as well in the set up of scenes, the creation of dialouge, and general poses.

--- Luke

[McDuffies]

It appears that all my webcomic influences were of short breath. I guess they appeared too late in my life to be thoroughly influential. I do sometimes do by webcomic standards, like, daily gags that connect to a long story etc, but those are strictly formal stuff. I guess more than webcomics, being on this forum, picking up useful stuff and spotting which kind of art of mine gets best reactions, was more influential than any actual webcomic.

Now I remembered Sergio Aragones. People always say that my drawings resemble his, and true enough, I've read him as a child and sometimes even copied his drawings with hundreds of characters, but I'd never think of him as influence if people haven't pointed it to me.
I also forgot to mention Monty Python's influence on my sence of humor. And then there was a cheap merchandising "ALF" comic which I read passionately as a kid, and copied it a lot, although in retrospect, it wasn't any good.

[Fishies]

University classes and the books I ended up reading through my library job for most of the recent ones. Way way back, I don't know fantasy novels and anime I guess. I read too many fantasy novels and ghost story books as a kid.

I don't know what my drawing look like, other than "really really simple."

[Spaceprincess]

One of my biggest influence as a child was a book called How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way. I think I was about ten or eleven when I got it. It had a major impact on how I drew. It was the first time I had any real instruction on how to draw. I must have read that book and copied the drawings in there a million times. I still use a lot of what I learned from that book still to this day.
A latter important influence was Masamune Shirow. When I read Ghost In The Shell that changed how I looked at drawing comics. Up till then I was a Jim Lee/ marvel clone. He added a heavy Japanese influence into how I draw characters that I still have today. I loved his overly stylized way of drawing and story telling. I love the fantasy/sci fi pin up aspect of his art(even though I think he's a pervert.)
I've found that when I've gotten to a stagnate point in the development is when I find some new artist who inspires me to keep drawing.

[Meghasissues]

inside webcomics my biggest influence is and always will be jennie breeden of the devil's panties
if i hadn't met her in highschool i would have had no direction in my life and no webcomic

outside of webcomics when i do my personal work my biggest influences are ted naifeh (courtney crumrin, gloom cookie vol 1, etc), Fsc, and gabriel ba. yeah... i do alot of weird stuff

[Deathbringer]

Intially my comic influence was the only one i regularly read - The Beano. The 90's were a very bad time for "proper" British comics, with many of them being cancelled, the adventure genre vanishing entirely, and the apperance of heaps of politically correct, wanky titles like Deadline and Crisis. Luckily the nation treated such monstrosities with the contempt they deserve and the only thing people remember from them is Tank Girl, who was very un-PC and non-wanky. Sooo only the Beano, Dandy and Commando were left by the time i started reading them (i had before then had Thunderbirds and Turtles comics but can't remember very much about them). And Commando could mainly only be bought at the seaside. A love of racing and all things on wheels led me to do a humour comic in the style of the Beano called "Cart Wars", which starred me and my friends, and we wanted to do it for real. I also did one called "Battles" which was about wars fought with tomatoes, eggs, water pistols etc.

Around 1997 i started to do action comics with war and stuff, called The Gun. I had done one before called "Urban Assault" which was based on "Streets of Rage" in Sonic The Comic (a videogame based title of the 90's) but it was awful. The Gun was not really much better, but at the time i thought it was amazing. It was sort of in between the style of traditional British adventure comics, which i don't think i had actually seen very much of at that time, and 2000AD, which my brother was getting for a brief time. Gradually i started getting Commando comics a lot during a short period when we were flush and went on holiday to Weymouth a lot.

I stopped getting comics entirely around 1998, and even the drawing of them slowed (looking back now, i must have crammed all 9 "books" of The Gun into two years!, now i'm going well if i draw 9 pages of comic in the same period). At the end of 1999, however, i discovered Webcomics, my first discovery being SSDD. At first i made animated gifs based on Final Fantasy 6 and 7 crossed over, and this was then turned into a webcomic. Then i got into Anarchy so started another one called Felney. By this time other webcomics, especially SSDD and Boy Meets Boy "influenced" me, though my art was far worse than both!

One day i discovered High Maintenance, whilst angry at the world, and i produced a rip-off of it called Scum Slaughter, with all the sickness and offensiveness my mind could conjure up. I put it into "print" (on cheap photocopiers) and sold it alongside High Maintenance at the third UK Webcomix Thing. However shortly after that time i began to mature, and started to get into the traditional old Boys' Own adventure comics (through reading an article on Sexton Blake in the Judge Dredd Megazine). Many, MANY scummy filth like to produce "hye-larious" parodies of them, recycling 30-year old jokes that the Pythons first used in thier "Ripping Yarns" TV series. However the state of Britian's chattering classes means that anything that 'sticks the boot into' better times, when this nation was a proud leader of the world with an empire, means that such awful parodies are constantly applauded.

However i actually appreciate the Boys' Own stories properly, and began to produce one of my own called Eugene Manx, which was at first inspired by Modesty Blaise. I later re-started it, with the intention of producing my own printed boys' own adventure comic called The Red, White & Blue, which also features new Sexton Blake stories! The infleunce for these is the old Union Jack story-paper from the 20's, which was amazing. The comic parts of the RWB are influenced more by titles such as Victor, Valiant, Action, Hotspur &c &c. Issue 3 will also feature colour strips on the cover, influenced by The Eagle, which was one of the best British comics ever, i have one single issue and just can't beleive something of that quality used to be produced every week. Truly they were better times.

[Prettysenshi]

[VinnieD]

Ah, Sailor Moon. The gateway drug of anime.

[McDuffies]

I'm game:


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