Looking for tips.....

[patrickg]

Hey guys, I've been a member of the board for a while now, but only have posted stuff a few times. i'm now getting around to posting stuff on a regular basis, and it will be through a blog. I'd appreciate it if any of you fine folks would check it out, and give me tips and critiques.

thanks in advance

http://patrickgray.blogspot.com

[jimmymcwicked]

it will be nicer for you to post the image here rather than a link.

if i can comment on your turnaround i will mention a couple of items. first, you should probably work on defining the drawings more. some lines are vague and incomplete. a turnaround needs to communicate details to someone else.

second, you have done something specific which drives me crazy when i encounter it. if i meander on a tangent, forgive me - i don't mean to project other peoples faults onto your image, but i see a trait on your image which is becoming a very bad and common habit in character design. define in your mind the difference between an illustrator and a designer. an illustrator can tweak and cheat attributes to fit a scene, mood, attitude. a designer needs to stay clear of attitude and simply create the physical character. the little trait on your character which bothers me is the mouth. it may work as an illustrator to have a skewed mouth (front view) in a comic panel, but in the design sense it comes off as irresponsible once we look over at the 3/4 view. if the character is meant to have a skewed mouth, then solve the visual problem of defining how it looks from different angles rather than leaving it for the next stage of (a theoretical) production to battle with... i have encountered and was required to fix new-type comic book style of character turnarounds where the initial 'designer' could do one angle seeped in coolness and attitude while the other views fell apart - mouths especially keep moving to sides of heads, change in size, go from an underbite to an overbite etc... take the role of 'designer' rather than 'illustrator' when doing turnarounds - you aren't drawing pictures, you are creating definitions for the next stage.

[patrickg]

Actually, I don't take offense to that at all. That's the kind of stuff I'm looking for. I tend to do that alot, the stuff with the mouth and things like that, and now that I think about it, it's definitely because I want to have a cool looking (at least to me) drawing, and maybe not a competent design.

I hope you'll keep checking my blog though, I'm sort of feeling my way through different drawing styles, so some of my other stuff might address the points you brought up.

Thanks again

Patrick

[spacesick]

That's some great information that seems like it should have been obvious after you hear it. Thanks jimmymcwicked.

patrickg - cool looking character. It seems to me that it would be better to have all the corresponding features match up horizontally across the sheet. I guess that's something that could be quickly taken care of in Photoshop by blowing up the middle image a little. Then again, I may have no idea what I'm talking about.