Pushing yourself to be better?

[Bobadventures]

"The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!" started as a print comic in a club newsletter. I deliberately kept the character designs fairly simple so that I could produce it on time every week, and I didn't worry too much about it being high art, as long as I thought the writing was good.

When I re-launched it on the web, I started out with a similar "just get it done and posted" attitude toward the artwork. But it has become clear to me now that I'm up against an almost limitless group of competitors for readers' attention, and so I have to start putting more time in on the artwork. And it is frustrating to me to see the final product up on-line now twice a week, and know perfectly well that I'm capable of much better work, but that I don't have time to do much more than I'm doing. Ultimately I suppose, my goal has to be to learn to produce good work faster.

I know that I'm handicapping myself somewhat by leaving the strip black and white, in a medium where most comics are color, but there is simply no way I could color it, let alone color it well, in the time I have available. So I just have to make my monochrome images the best I possibly can. Ideally, I should shoot for a more graphic design-y style that takes best advantage of the black and white presentation, but I know I haven't achieved that yet.

[McDuffies]

I hate everything I do five seconds after I’ve finished it too, I think that’s pretty normal for an artist (or whatever I am).

When drawing, you kinda get sucked into a drawing, you don't notice flaws because you get used to them from watching them constantly... you have to take a break from the drawing to realise that, for instance, proportions are all wrong, or the image is slanted or whatever. One trick that I was taught was to look at the drawing in the mirror, then you see all it's problems.
I compare it to when you hang out with someone over the years, and in your mind's eye this person haven't changed a bit, but when you look at the photos from when you two started hanging out, you realise that the change is huge.

That being said, it got me to thinking…

There are many cartoonists whose earlier work I prefer to their later work. The reasons vary from artist to artist; maybe their later work is too polished, or maybe their later work is sloppy because they got lazy, or maybe their style, which was fine to begin with, just morphed into something i don’t like as much. I wonder, in these cases, if these guys ever look back at their older stuff and think, “man, that was when I knew how to draw—my newer stuff sucks!”

Probably not.

I find that sometimes artists accept some mannerisms as they go along, and that leads to less interesting. Mezzieres on the other hand got more sloppy as he went on, but on albums 2 to, say, 7 or 8 of Valerian, he's the god among comic artists for me.

[Wendybird]

This is a really interesting discussion.

With Dragon's Fall, I'm always pushing myself to make a page better, more interesting, more dynamic. I am nowhere near where I want to be with that art, but I find what I've done acceptable because I know I did my best with each of them at the time I drew it.

With LleuGarnock, I definitely appreciate my improvement, but style is more of an element in this project. I am constantly remembering how I used to draw when I first started doodling fairies and elves in classes and during D&D games, and using the elements I appreciated most about those drawings. Developing a style based on these and sticking to it has been my goal since the beginning.

The thing I really struggle with in terms of the art in LG is drawing backgrounds that work with the style, don't look flat, and don't take forever. It's hard to tell whether I'm improving because I'm always trying different approaches.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

The thing I really struggle with in terms of the art in LG is drawing backgrounds that work with the style, don't look flat, and don't take forever. It's hard to tell whether I'm improving because I'm always trying different approaches.

I hear you. Backgrounds are the bane of my existence.