/loomis/ - Art Gains

If you haven't got this yet I just uploaded it to MEGA here: https://mega.nz/#!nLgXHQ4J!a_g5rmFcoa1sU5rmTn43ik-IX3n8kormQD4OZZI5MGk

Another good source of knowledge is to watch interviews of people who are important in the medium. If possible avoid people making highlight reels and watch the entire thing. Also go ahead and write what you've figured out, it's not like this board is going to dislike the activity

Thanks lads.

Heres a few techniques I found so far from comics i've recently read or re-read.

I think ill use a little film terminology, because theres a bit of overlap, and if there are comic specific terms I don't know them.

Tintin is an old favorite of mine, and going through it again, Herge has a pretty simple and practical style. All his panels are roughly square, and are rarely arranged in an unusual way. The top part of the panel is dedicated to text, and the characters are always in the lower half. This way you never have to worry about fitting text into some situation. The composition is fairly standard, medium shots with the characters occupying the center stage. This only really changes for scenes of vehicles (Herge clearly likes to draw vehicles), landscapes, or action.

Often, like in pic related, Herge will include some backround story going on while the characters talk. I suppose having two stories at once is uniqueness of the cartoon medium, as you cant really do it in a written book, and in a film it would be too confusing. But in a comic, the reader has enough time to pick out the details in each scene.

Tintin is also a really great example of simple yet very effective character designs, that lend themselves to being easily drawn, while also being highly unique and emotive. Simplicity is definitely especially a factor to consider when one artist does everything.

Also Tintin just has great caricatures in general, and comic artist should probably practice caricature art.

Watchmen is obscenely good, and I can't really pin down a particular style besides really good.

The art is very cinematic, using unusual angles, lighting and perspectives that bring to mind an edgy art film. Birds eye views looking straight down is fairly common. One of the most compelling aspects of Watchmen as a story is that the it essentially begins at the end, and tells a lot of it through sudden flashbacks. Sometimes the flashbacks are just a single panel. However, flashbacks are often clearly marked by having a contrasting color palette. Of course the coloring of Watchmen is amazing, using strange clashing faded colors in bold ways, or seemingly randomly alternating the palette to add sense of rhythm.

Also included are "match cuts" like in pic related, where visually similar panels are used to bridge times/locations.

One other clever technique shown here is having several panels breaking up one continues image. This creates a sort of panning effect, leading the readers eyes across the landscape to end on a specific spot, for a very dramatic effect.

It also encourages us to inspect the reactions of each character in detail.

This makes me consider how the artist in a comic controls the flow of time. The more panels you use the faster time moves. Like in pic related, if it was all one panel, Capitan Metropolis's expression wouldn't make sense with the first thing he says. However, if Gibbons wanted show us all of the characters reacting to The Comedian, then having one panel would be very useful. Again the comic medium is very useful for showing multiple things happening at once.

Im only just now now noticing the clock on the wall, at 11:50, of course.

I recently read through MTMTE, and while it is brilliant, I think the story is better than the art.

There are a few cool things they do though. The most obvious is in pic related, where several very similar panels create a palpable sense of time and tension. After all, in a medium mostly told through dialogue, a silent moment can be fairly powerful. Personally I think four panels is pushing is about the limit. Theres a lot of close ups in general, and are often highly expressive. One of their greatest triumphs is getting so much personality out of characters without eyes or mouthes, and body language is a huge factor here. I guess the unfortunate reality of being an artist is that you actually have to go interact with other people so you can study how they move and all.

MTMTE also uses a ton of wacky panel shapes, sometimes slanted, sometimes overlapping, sometimes characters will burst out of the panels. Personally I think its kind of gimmicky, but worth playing with. They also use the fairly novel idea of just using a very small font to get a lot of words in one image. Conversations are sometimes streamlined by using one large panel then having a bunch of dialogue (literally) in between the two characters.

>>13741

What about "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way"?

>>13748

Watchmen is one of my favorites, and its method of only slightly straying from a 3x3 panel layout always stuck out to me as being one of its strengths to make it able to show a character's mood and keep it in the vein of classic superhero comics. That being said on the other side of the spectrum there's things like Todd Mcfarlane's work and while it doesn't work the best for character driven stuff, it's visually exciting and is great for showing action. It's hard to pin down exactly why this works in my mind, but I think it's mostly getting the eye to follow along with the motion of the action on the page. It doesn't work as well when you want to slow down but for a fast-paced action scene it's great for putting emphasis on certain actions. Things like "Spider-man" amd "Spawn" are his best work in this regard imo.

Another one that has a good use of panel layout is "Sin City", which uses large panels to keep it fast paced as well as the obvious harsh black and white contrast. Whenever it slows down he uses full pages that are just one image with a monologue on the side, that force you to stay on one image for a while, or he uses a more normal panel layout, with a couple more panels than normal and less motion. Frank Miller's other stuff like "300" and "Ronin" are also good examples of panel layout but "Sin City" really sticks out to me.

reposting because I screwed up the file upload, no flood here

I hath returned, and i've gotten some more. The latest comic I read was The Eternaut, a very excellent book, and as far as I can tell one of the first entries in the post apocalpytic/survival horror genres.

Now compositionally The Eternaut is not all that complex. The panels are square and there are rarely more than 3 per page. Now many artists would want to make the character designs simplistic and easy to draw as in Tintin, López uses an unusual amount of detail and lines to make the characters stand out. This works really well, as by the end of story the characters are exhausted, beaten, and shellshocked, and the gritty line work emphasizes this. There are often pages of characters talking, and López simply shifts the viewpoint around slightly. I find that when illustrating long conversations, it seems tedious to draw the characters over and over in basically the same place. If you alter the angle a bit, zoom in or out, and make sure the characters expression changes appropriately, it should be interesting enough. If that fails you could just draw a silhouette, or zoom way out and show text bubbles coming from the building the characters are in.

Drawing in black and white can be a difficult challenge so that the characters dont get lost in the back round. It is especially impressive how detailed the back rounds are in The Eternaut, yet it always felt clear. It appears the best way to do this is to make sure the focus of the panel is much brighter or darker than everything else. In The Eternaut, a detailed back round might appear only 2-3 times per page, and I think this saves time, but also makes the page seem less cluttered as a whole.

Now because of this fairly standard layout, there are a few pages that break the pattern as in the second image, giving a very strong effect.

Ive also been considering that when reading a comic, the reader cannot stop himself from seeing the who page at once. Therefore, an artist should give thought of each page as a whole, and think what exactly the goal of that page is. Special consideration should be given to resolving issues on page, or leaving them to the next. A reader might be tempted to skip panels if he sees the resolution on the bottom of the page, but i'm sure it would feel artificial if you did this too often.

Another thought i've had, and this is a bit of a non-sequiter, but I was noticing how in The Eternaut all the females were drawn fucking hot. Now this might have been because the artist was also, according to the credits, an award winning erotic artist (research to come). I was reminded of a youtube video I saw asking why so many cartoons had the trope of hot big tiddy goth GFs. The guy who made the video offered the explanation that cartoonists and animators are generally lonely nerds who wish they had a quirky art hoe GF. I guess, after I guess nearly 6 months of comic development I can pretty much relate. 2 out of 3 female characters in my story are basically waifubait, although one started as a joke, but kind of grew on me, and I think im doing well enough to expand them at least. Maybe we can call this rule 34- C: No matter the work the artist will always find a way to include his fetish.

We are back at again, now with content.

This is an exercise I did recently; I took a scene from Blade Runner: 2049 and decided to adapt it into a comic form. The idea here was to practice utilizing panels creatively to communicate the story, then use the film as reference for everything else so I could focus on design. I really like this scene because how many significant emotional beats it crams into a small series of events. I think a good comic should have 1 beat per 1-3 panels. Tell me if you think I communicated the story well enough, and what techniques you liked or abhorred. Here is the original scene: https://youtu.be/3TjyGmvNBfM

I think any artist can learn a lot from film cinematography, but film has many things in common with comics, but for two major differences. Film has control over sound, a which is a big loss for drawn mediums. We try to fix this with sound boxes, but I have mixed feelings on them. I like them more as visual representations of a sound, than the effect of reading specific sound effect. The biggest is control of time. In comics, we are limited to showing very specific moments of time. Film communicates a vast amount of information in a few seconds. Comics main advantage is the reader can spend as much time looking at any given panel, meaning you can add as much information as you want the reader to discover without being cluttered. The hard part is you have to be extra judicious when choosing what moments you want to show. Its also tempting to copy "shot reverse shot", which is good in film because the viewer needs to quickly tell who is who through many quick cuts. But in a comic, I think its best to avoid showing the same angle more than once if you can help it.

In my continuing comic "homework" I read V for Vendetta. One thing that stands out about it is the total lack of sound FX or internal thought bubbles, that helps with the gritty feel of the story. The horrible dreary coloring really adds to the atmosphere, with almost every page uses just 1-2 colors, a very effective technique. Helps differentiate from very colorful superhero comics. On a meta level, I think its a interesting example of how you CAN write a story about Mary Sue protagonist who exists only to parrot the authors' political beliefs and still have it be good. I think this relies on the strong surrounding characters, quality satire, and compelling mystery. Ill probably take another look at it soon.

Also been reading the first three Sin City books, more to come on that.