Cool ideas and atmosphere with the comics, and I get a real sense of space with the compositions!
Nice dryad too! I think she could use a bit more definition in places, like (re)defining a bit of anatomy in the outlines at the end, and also enhancing the forms with big shapes, then gradually smaller shapes, like the top left (above the arms) and bottom right dryads have a nice impression of forms, and hints at details even though there isn't much or any detail yet, so they read very nicely. The others look very nice as well though, great start with painting again!
Glad I handpicked comics that you will want to read. Not sure if the mask is ripoff or homage, anyway please read it from the beginning to not spoil yourself ;) Tapas.io will always show the last chapter first :(
The Osara ecosystems are very diverse and I have some written descriptions of some organisms and systems but the illustrations I made don't match their peculiarities unfortunately. The most puzzling organism though is the ground itself, and the air is alive too, the suns too (there are no solar systems as you can guess). I can't find any reference to The 100th, do you mean The 100, the TV show?
I did consider at some point making the dryad a bit less human, like the triton, but one thing held me back: I wanted to play with the mythology cliche of the beauty nymphs, only this nymph is nothing like them, she eats snakes alive and fights wolfs barehanded, and can be very bad tempered. Making her human looking enforced the play. However, I made a joking attempt below. By the way the 'fire pit' is actually a badly botched glow-in-the-dark termite hill.
Man, you arm pain must have been such a terrible time, I do hope you take better care now and hold your pen like a feather. Yes, progress is a funny thing, and my eye is always more advanced than my hand so I never like what I do... except when I tell a story and I consider the story redeems the art.
The photo study actually calls for geometry and anatomy breakdown, you're right. What I attempted instead is looking at the patches of values without making any lines, as a vague memory of my speed painting period. I wasn't good at speed painting.
Thank you so much for taking the time to comment so in depth!
@Jephyr:
Very monochromatic indeed. The amount of trouble I'm getting into figuring how a green ambient light works on a green skin, argh!
I concur, when one can't help it, one should keep doing art or face the consequences. A decade without art has not made me sad, because I have other interests (too many probably), but now that I come back to it I feel an intense retrospective sadness of sorts, it's hard to describe.
Thank you for passing by!
@Ash:
Wow, I'm so glad you mention the sense of space! I love making my characters hike in the wilderness.
Your advice about focus detail is so very true and is something I used to forget regularly at the time, and forgot again now that I'm back at it. The new version below is still terrible at that but I'll make an effort for the next version.
Thank you thank you!
So, this week is a horror, my day job is hectic and leaving me exhausted and I fall asleep on my tablet. I still managed to continue the attitude/painting research and I clearly don't know what I'm doing as you can see.
And the study. I fixed one hundred mistakes and some more and I'm still far from the goal. No method, you say?...
I like this one the most but maybe adding a bit more blues or something could give it more life. Before I get bitched at again for my poor paint over skills idk what to help with via text so maybe seeing it in a slightly different light helps at least a little.
Hey Leo, first of all. Thanks for commenting in my thread. It's much appreciated.
You've got some really good ideas floating about in here. Your figure study is really coming along. Looking forward to seeing that finished. It would help to do tons of these.
Glad I handpicked comics that you will want to read. Not sure if the mask is ripoff or homage, anyway please read it from the beginning to not spoil yourself ;) Tapas.io will always show the last chapter first :(
The Osara ecosystems are very diverse and I have some written descriptions of some organisms and systems but the illustrations I made don't match their peculiarities unfortunately. The most puzzling organism though is the ground itself, and the air is alive too, the suns too (there are no solar systems as you can guess). I can't find any reference to The 100th, do you mean The 100, the TV show?
I did consider at some point making the dryad a bit less human, like the triton, but one thing held me back: I wanted to play with the mythology cliche of the beauty nymphs, only this nymph is nothing like them, she eats snakes alive and fights wolfs barehanded, and can be very bad tempered. Making her human looking enforced the play. However, I made a joking attempt below. By the way the 'fire pit' is actually a badly botched glow-in-the-dark termite hill.
Man, you arm pain must have been such a terrible time, I do hope you take better care now and hold your pen like a feather. Yes, progress is a funny thing, and my eye is always more advanced than my hand so I never like what I do... except when I tell a story and I consider the story redeems the art.
The photo study actually calls for geometry and anatomy breakdown, you're right. What I attempted instead is looking at the patches of values without making any lines, as a vague memory of my speed painting period. I wasn't good at speed painting.
Thank you so much for taking the time to comment so in depth!
Ha, it's probably the later, I was joking! Maybe.. hee.
Oh it has 21!? I had not noticed, alright, gonna go from the first one.
Yup! That show, sorry my bad I should had given you better directions.
Well you don't have to make her a monster or not-human / not-relatable. But she should be unique and identifiable beyond just green color I feel. And again, you should brainstorm in what way early because it can inform later on how she would act, or others would towards her, and their reactions or interactions.
Ha! Well actually that last one was spooky but also kind of funny! Reminds me a bit of ghibli stuff, but it's a fine line... ha. (also has that Scream mask vibe to it, spooky!).
Well it was more annoying than troubling most of the time, but yeah I had two days where it was like on fire back in 2013-2014, I can't remember exactly the year but I was scared. Luckily since picking back bike riding I'm good! Must be all the vibrations lol. I think I get what you mean about your eye being further ahead than your hand, I had that same feeling at times, I think it goes with the territory. They will eventually pick up.
Hmm, I don't think I ever paid much attention to speed painting, I would say take your time, maybe track time to not slack off much or get stuck (that's what I do) but if you have to stop and think what strokes you want the best (I keep telling myself this but sometimes I don't have the patience and then things go way wrong, that's when I force myself to stop), thinking ahead I feel will make you do faster eventually than just moving faster. If that makes sense.
What would you like to change about those paintings or what makes you say you don't know what you are doing?
Very monochromatic indeed. The amount of trouble I'm getting into figuring how a green ambient light works on a green skin, argh!
I concur, when one can't help it, one should keep doing art or face the consequences. A decade without art has not made me sad, because I have other interests (too many probably), but now that I come back to it I feel an intense retrospective sadness of sorts, it's hard to describe.
Thank you for passing by!
☺ Yeah I get that. Sorting out lighting is always a big issue for me too.
I also understand about those mixed feelings. I was a professional musician for a years and walked away from that for a lot of reasons. Now I've lost so much time and technique—and a lot of my old recordings have been lost and sometimes I look back on it and wonder....
Still, I've now spent a lot of time on art—so there's been a trade-off that's been good too—and I'm happy about that aspect.
You're right, everything is too green. I was discussing the difficulty of a green skin in a green forest with Jephyr and honestly I don't see any other way out than cheating with added colors. The blue you added does create some variation and a change in the mood. I was planning to add some more yellow patches from the sun through the foliage, this would contrast well with the blue hues. I haven't continued this sketch yet though.
On the topic of comments and being bitched at, don't worry too much. If you're referring to the "bolt" episode, to your defense you didn't have the original image at the time and maybe failed to realize it was a low angle shot. Critique is difficult but don't ever stop, it serves both ends in the dialog.
@Damien:
Thank you! I should do many more of these studies indeed but I'm stuck right now.
I don't use references in my imagination sketches. I know I should, everybody seems to do that, but I doubt I would ever find the right reference in the short amount of time I have to do a comic panel, the postures are often very specific but also very clear in my mind, in an "inner feeling" kind of way rather than visually, so I tweak my lines or colors toward this feeling. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a mess.
@Rotohail:
I see what you mean with the character's design strategy. I've been oscillating between two opposites: Making her totally bark-and-leaf, or totally human just like the traditional depiction of nymphs - not even a green skin. I'm still not sold on any of these directions or a middle ground...
What shows that I don't know what I'm doing? There is no plan, no direction. I started scribbling and I keep changing stuff, all the worse that I flattened the layers to force me to hold off but it didn't work, lol. To my defense I'm just going back to colors after a decade and I'm like a kid with a crayon box - well, a box of green crayons. (Not doing speed painting though, that's out of my league.)
@Jephyr:
You're a versatile polymath, that's good, there are so many bridges between the various means of expression, it builds a more complete picture!
---
OK, I know I haven't been updating here for long. Life has been conspiring against my time off, plus I've become obsessed with my comic projects that are surfacing back, which means that I spend more time stitching together the lost threads, reading documentation about old empires (for the immortals' project) or nanotechnology (for the SF project), and playing whole scenes in my mind over and over again, than drawing anything.
In a moment of distraction though, I caught myself drawing a wonky cube. This should be much easier than a nymph in the forest, but I'm still stuck trying to determine the color of the cast shadows and occlusion shadows, not to mention the reflected light...
I took some time to go through you sketchbook and man... I'm struck by how many interesting ideas and directions you have going on. I really admire that. The skill will come with time if you put in some delibrate practice, you needn't have any doubt of that.
That said, i'm a bit stuck on what specific guidance I can give you at the moment because I'm not sure which direction you're trying to head in right now. So for lack of something better I took a stab at your floating cube.
The first thing I did was sure up the perspective a bit. For the sake of clarity I made it just 2 point perspective instead of 3 point.
Then I got rid of some of the edge highlights you had going on. They wouldn't really be seen from the viewers angle so they don't make sense and hurt the depth in the image.
After that I had to think about the lightsources. There's the warm main light and there's the fill light. In this case the fill light from the sky is pretty much an omni directional light since the sky is all around the cube but I went along with what you had established in your inital study and left the underside of the cube untouched by the fill. This helps bring out the form.
There's an interesting corner (circled in orange) where you can't see the change from one side to the other. That's because of the omni-directional nature of the fill light coming from both sides at once. This wouldn't happen in most lighting situations.
Now I added the reflected light. It's a pretty safe bet to pick a darker, more saturated version of the main light to creat the reflected light.
At the end I added some ambient occlusion to the inner corners.
This excercise was pretty tough to think through. I'm pretty sure I didn't do it perfectly either but maybe you could get something out of what I made and my haphazard explanation. I'm looking forward to what you do next!
Thanks for the visit! My last few posts were a reckless attempt (or rather temptation) to do color again without a plan, as you noted (and I noted it too as a poor disclaimer). I should go back to drawing indeed, especially that I don't have much time for my comics.
@jondawo:
You are right, I'm all over the place and it's hard to tell a direction. The only firm direction I have is storytelling but it's not obvious. So, thank you so much for the kind words and also picking a topic to help me out.
I think you nailed it with the occlusions and reflections, it looks much more real now!
The botched bright lines were my attempt at edge scattering, but looking back at it this would probably happen only if the light source was almost opposite to the eye.
I had painted the bottom faces the same color as the front faces initially but the shape didn't read well so I decided that the cube was floating not far from a dark ground and there was some occlusion going on.
Thank you again for taking all the time to pick this study!
Update:
I am still in a non-visual period, munching my stories mostly in my head, living the lives of the characters in my flesh and heart. At some point things will pop and turn into images.
Leo Ki! Dude, you are a fountain of ideas - I love that!
Really interesting how you're trying out the traditional comic panel layout and the mobile device vertical scroll layout. Which one do you prefer?
I'm personally edging towards the traditional panel layout since it would transfer nicely if I wanted to print my comics at some point.
Also there was an interesting discussion early in your thread about monotonous panel layouts? I personally am a fan of monotonous layouts as they allow the reader to really be absorbed into the story instead of them having to workout which panel to read next. Have you ever read "The Watchmen" by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons? It contains mainly a 3 x 3 panel layout - it felt like reading a novel instead of a comic - I was so absorbed into the story flow.
Also I think it's great that you've come back into art after a long break - it feels like you're strolling around stretching out of use muscles before getting back into your stride. That's cool man, keep playing and practicing.
Good luck with the journey dude - enjoy it :).
“Today, give a stranger one of your smiles. It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.” -- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
So I wanted to give some input on that cube you were going for but jondawo did so already ha. I would add that the fill light and other bounce light you might have, occlusion, it really is up to you, depending on what you want, if you are recreating reality it depends on the time of day, position on earth even the season! but if you are making it up as you go then is really up to you. You can blow it out or not. Scott says to keep the "halfway to black thing", basically if your light tone or local tone is 30% black then your dark side should be 30% + (100%-30%/2) = 65%, so long my math is sound ha. But that's just a rule of thumb. Materials also influence those things (if there's translucency/scattering), so just copy stuff and then do what feels right.
About the light coming from the top edges that won't be seen, it actually depends, if the sides have some beveling you will have a highlight there, probably, so don't cross them out yet.
About your stories, well that's fantastic, are you able to keep them on your head tho? Have you tried writing things down? It might be faster to have a written storyboard, then do the drawings. I tried that a few times for shorter panels but, I never really do anything with my stories, always hit a hiccup. My stories are not so good right now, a big weakness. Anyhow I hope I see you get back soon enough!
Waking up from this anti-visual streak... Sorry for the huge delay in replying.
@Artloader:
Thank you! Maybe too many ideas at once, which doesn't help focusing...
The layouts in my order of preference:
1. Slide show format. The monotonous panel sizes were an effect of showing the panels one below the previous instead of as a slide show. But this format is widely ignored :(
2. Traditional page layout. I started with it and have it ingrained.
3. Vertical scroll. Impossible to make landscape-oriented panels with it. But widely used.
I see what you mean with fixed grid layouts, they do have a strength of their own when used wisely.
@Rotohail:
I'll try to make cube frames in various materials and lighting, it's going to be fun - or not, we'll see :D
I do have a lot of written stuff, bits of novels, scripts, mini-encyclopedias, notes, but these never capture the whole that is in the head. One can forget things, especially after a decade away, but a story or a world are a dense interconnected network, once you pull a string you get a thousand back, this is how memory works.
If you post some of your panels we can discuss and try to find what is blocking you?
------------------
During the last few months I've been revisiting my old stories in a very non-visual way, focusing on ideas and emotions, and I'm still somewhat in that mind mode because the panels below were done without really looking at what I was drawing. Okay, my excuse is that this is just a draft until I can collaborate with a real artist :)
This is the continuation of the last panels of this story that I posted before. The narration is so condensed that the notion of a scene has lost its meaning. This scroll covers several separate, longer scenes, in the actual version. The dialogs are also so condensed that they lose the spirit :(
What are you doing hanging on the ceiling, spider!? Ha, a follow up of your comment on my SB.
Ugh, I prefer to keep my panels buried for now ha ha, I read Framed ink a month ago and spot some issues, although it left me with more questions than answers ha ha. Gonna have to go over it again.
Suggestions. When they come in I'm guessing one character overpowers the other with the "Yes, please!", put more emphasis on that, make it bigger, bolder or make the other smaller or cut it earlier, else seems like they are contradicting each other with equal weight, so you left the reader wondering who is leading who where. (you could resolve that on a follow up panel I guess if it's meaningful for the characters arc, if they are at odds or not working as a group).
"I'm hungry" / "May I help...?" Those point to two different personalities, archetypes, the humble and the impatient. Either you do the hungry bit as an sfx or inner thought, or change the may to an imperative, " let me help you." (That probably fits better seeing the next follow up panel with the character complaining/whining).
On another matter, I don't think that they are their guest fits with being a slave, since a slave doesn't owns the house, so getting rid of that dear guest could make the slave more meek, and using the sir or master or what other title fit better with the slave being a property, not a host. Else feels too friendly? It could be the character is okay being a slave too tho. But then next they are scared of getting in trouble so again, complex acting undercurrents ha ha.
Since I read Framed ink I would point that the panel with the carrot mincing and the next makes me spin a little since the view angle rotates, and on framed ink they mention that you should keep constant as much as possible between actions your focal points, so that one can be confusing. You could just change the viewpoint to the same side as we are on the full shot, but while still keeping it a close up.
Phew, sorry if I'm being a bother with the pointers ha ha, I must say I don't know barely anything about this so I can be very wrong, still useful as a mental exercise.
So, did you manage to defeat those nasty cubes!? ha.
Hi! On the first post of this page, take a look at images one, three and five.
What you'll notice (and what might be helpful in future once you notice your tendency) is that when you put in random specks (like the flowers and leaves) you put all of them in at an equal distance from one another. Try randomising them so that they end up clumped up in places, missing from others, and every clump looks different to any other. This goes for making a starry sky from scratch for instance.
@cgmythology - Thank you! But you are now officially the Thread Necromancer in Chief! :) This is a very old thread.
Let me take this opportunity to reply to the old comments.
@Rotohail - I know that you don't hang around here any more, but a belated thank you for all your comments. It wasn't clear from the dialogue but Bu is actually very critical of slavery and wants Blitz to stand up some more, she perceives it and fears it gets heard.
@Fickleflame - Belatedly, thank you! I see exactly what you mean and I plead guilty!
@graphicnovelist - Yes, or rather I was. You too disappeared?
Are you planning to continue developing your comic skills? Looks like you were going for a manhwa format. This has been increasingly popular online as webtoons grabs more people's attention.
@OG-SAN - I jumped onto the vertical comic bandwagon because the format is much easier to read online. I prefer the landscape slideshow format though, it allows for cool visual pile-ups, but no major hosting platforms support it.
So I've come to terms with the realization that I'm more of an explorer than a creator and I abandoned my huge world building and story telling endeavors. But a few days ago, while commenting here, especially about the image generator AIs, a tiny project for a short story that happens in the near future started to grow its tentacles. Here are some of the first sketches toward it:
