action scenes, wheeee

Phalanx · Post by **Phalanx** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 2:02 am

You know, the trick to making pencilled work look good in colour is to know when to colour OVER the pencil lines.

Otherwise the shading overpowers the highlights, if you get what I mean.

Steve Bryant · Post by **Steve Bryant** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 3:37 am

faub wrote:Magic is all about smoke and mirrors. Those are the bits that make it exciting. So you happen to know a couple tricks that give your work a professional look. That doesn't make you a hack. In fact, a lot of artists would love to be where you are. You've been doing this for how many years? That experience must count for something. You're still doing it.

Oh, believe me, I'm happier with my development than I ever have been. I feel like after years of stumbling around, I'm starting to put it all together.

I've never felt like a hack, though. By my definition, a hack puts the deadline, and the accompanying rewards (financial, praise from an anticipated audience, etc), far ahead of the end result. There will always be compromises, but sometimes it's better to be a day late and have work that you can live with rather than crank out crap in order to maintain a spotless update record. That's just my opinion...

However, sometimes I feel like a fraud. I have a friend who can identify the 32 planes of the face. He has anatomical structure <i>down</i>! He has a formal training that I envy. By my "smoke and mirrors" comment, I was lamenting not having had the structure of a rigid art education way back when. I'm the artistic equivilent of a monkey at a typewriter; I haven't banged out Shakespeare* yet, but I've stumbled across some <i>Clifford the Big Red Dog</i> books...

* Refering, of course, to the classic theory that if you had an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite number of years typing at random then it could be accepted as a probability that one would eventually type the entire works of
Shakespeare.

faub wrote:The only serious flaw I see is the bottom-left panel of the color image. Bad punch. No follow through. The rest of the page is well composed. I don't need to read the dialogue to know what happens. (You can't do that with my comic.) Your artwork colors very well and it doesn't rely on color to work.

Thanks for the kind words. My colorist and I work hard to complement one another's work, rather than compete. You're right about the punch. All the figure work (and the inking) in the color strip looks stiff to me. Like I said, it's about two years old now.

faub wrote:I still haven't reached the point where I'm comfortable erasing the pencil lines because they're SO much more expressive than ink. I find it hard to believe how many nice pencil drawings I've ruined over the last 4 months trying to learn to ink. It's best not to think about these things and look at the results.

Just out of curiosity, do you have a particular ink approach in mind that you're trying to incorporate into your work? Are you penciling with that ink approach in mind? Inking is hard, it took me years to get mine where I feel it's on par with my penciling.

--Steve

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 1:26 pm

My pencil drawings are very heavily shaded. Compared to the pencil drawing you posted a while ago, my pencils are a sloppy mess of lines and grays, next to impossible to ink. The problem is I like the way the pencils look so I've been trying to emulate that a bit with the ink.

As you can see in the drawing above, there are several different values of shading corresponding to the different values of the penciled drawing. You B&W drawing has a medium dark shadow under the tail of the plane that is drawn as flat black. Your characters' faces have depth even though they're composed of maybe a dozen lines. In my drawing, Sam's face is mostly shading. It wouldn't have the same quality if I just tried to outline the eyes, mouth, nose and the jawline.

In some ways, it's easier for me to learn this way. If I do the thing I can find out what parts work and what doesn't. It also means I get to reinvent the wheel every time I draw something new.

DemonLamma · Post by **DemonLamma** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 8:57 pm

ugh... need help.... working on another page and this just looks crappy. never doen a shot like this before.

shot of a character coming at screen

please help me

Wp · Post by Wp » Fri Sep 17, 2004 3:19 pm

Alright, here's my crappy interpretation of the situation, done in MSPaint. You will probably notice a couple of things wrong about this pic: 1) I drew the stick figure *after* I drew the actual pose. BAD 2) it's a guy instead of a girl. I'm assuming your character is a girl. Unfortunately, I can't draw females using only a mouse. I need a pencil and lots of eraser.