X-Men Sequentials

[Darkchild]

What's up? I'm new to this forum and I've been looking around quite a bit and decided to join. They're just so much talent here I couldn't resist. Anyways, this is my first post and I wanted to start things off with some sequential work. It's a 19 page X-men story that I am working on for a portffolio review. Please feel free to comment on it. It's one of the only ways I can become a better artist. Thanks in advance.:)

http://www.artofficialstudios.com/x01.html

[jeremy dale]

Reference, reference, reference-- backgrounds, human figures, and perspective. There's promise here, and I'm impressed that you have drawn so MANY sequential pages to show, but my advice is to practice, learn anatomy and perspective, and work on your backgrounds. Everything here looks two dimensional-- flat.

Fun style, though. Hope to see more from you soon!

Jeremy

[MightyMatt]

I really can't aid you in any way, since this does not show any storytelling and/or sequential art....it's a splash page. It doesn't make me excited and want to flip to the next page.
I think it has been 2 years since I last did a splash page....they are totally worthless IMHO.
Otherwise the pencils show know depth and you really cannot tell what is going on, nor the dimensions of where they are at because there is no depth shown.
I'm a jerk, I know. But at least I have the guts to say something, unlike most ppl who look and say this is crap, but I won't say anything.

matt

[Darkchild]

I'm already working on adding more backgrounds. I should've changed some of the perspectives, someone else told me that the camera angles seem to be straight on and that gets a little boring at times and I agree. Thanks for the comments. Like I said it's one of the only ways that I can become a better artist.

MightyMatt, I think you only viewed the first page of the nineteen pages that I have done. There should be a link to page 2 above and below the image and so forth. Look agian as I am lookind forward to see what you have to say.

[Cuddly]

Hi Darkchild,

You've been hard at work on those 19 pages for sure and that's commendable. Thanks for showing them to us. As thincage and MightyMatt have pointed out, and as you probably already know, there's room for improvement.

What you need to do now I think is perhaps pick 3 consecutive pages (MUST be consecutive pages, because we should still end up with readable sequential pages) out of those 19 and work on improving them. And here's a couple of areas you should look at:

1) Anatomy. Having a cartoony style is fine. But don't let that be a crutch for not knowing correct anatomy. From what I can see of your work, you're well on your way as you already have an idea of how the muscles look and interact. Work on fine-tuning and refining proportions and poses. Use reference for poses if need be. Search Google Images and Corbis.com for some good reference poses.

2) Work on tightening up your backgrounds. The background provides the setting, the mood, the atmosphere and the environment for a scene. Without a background, it becomes that much harder to relate to your characters and the story you are trying to tell becomes unclear. It's also likely to confuse and frustrate a reader. Storytelling in part involves immersing the reader in your story world. If the reader goes "HUH?" and has to think really hard to figure out where a character is or what he's doing, then the illusion is spoiled and the storytelling has been interrupted.

3) Perspective. It's a real struggle to learn (I know - I struggle with it constantly), but it's worth it. This goes to creating the illusion of a 3D world within the panels of your 2D comic page. And don't just concentrate on the perspective of your backgrounds, but your characters as well. Drawing figures in perspective, when done right, makes them leap off the page.

4) Storytelling.

Finally, a word about the splash page. I would tend to disagree with MightyMatt's opinion that splash pages are worthless. I can think of at least one legitimate use for them - as establishing shots. Which I think is what your first page could be, if re-done to add in all the stuff I talked about above. It could tell us where our characters are, who they are and what's happened to them. All critical to storytelling. It's the pinup-style splash pages that usually have no real storytelling value.

Definite room for improvement. But also definitely see a lot of potential. Focus on a smaller number of pages and work on getting the basics up to snuff. Hope to see those pages soon! :)

PS: Sorry for sounding preachy or rambling, it's past 2AM and I need sleep.

[MightyMatt]

Okay I just did see the splash page....oops my bad....
I don't think I can really say much still...
I guess the one thing I can say is quality before quantity.
It looks like you took some time on the pages, but I don't believe that this is the best you can do. Please study from photo-reference for buildings and backgrounds...there is so much more you could add to these pages.
Give it some life, instead of lack of everything.

matt

[EddieChingLives]

Nice work. If only they had word balloons so I could figure out whats going on.

[Darkchild]

If it was inked I would toss in the word ballons but here's a brief paragraph or two of what's going on.

http://www.artofficialstudios.com/synopsis.html

[fleshpool]

I'm guessing your just starting to pull your talent into the comic world. You have a love of drawing and you know your charcters. They all have a personality diffrent from the next. You can tell who is wolverine and who id rouge by looking, so your using your own style. That's important. My suggestion is to build on a few areas at a time. Start with anatomy, get familiarized with the human form enough to where you can manipulate it to your will, then use refrence to fill in the areas that your not sure of. Next I'd say work on perspective, try designing a house or a car or something intricate using perspective, look at some architecture books. Lastly I'd say work on story telling and interprtation of scripts. Movies are the best source of story telling material today, when you watch a movie try taking snapshots in your head of the images that would best relay the story in a picture by picture format. If you can get any DVD's with the extra stuff like story boards then look at those. I'm sure the matrix has alot of those. Keep working hard but never lose the passion.

[Uzumaki Naruto]

Ah, the artist's biggest bug has caught you too.....

[Family Guy]

You guy in this thread are certainy long winded.
But there r a few errors but its still good.

[tomek]

i think it would be better for you to do short scripts, maximum of five or six pages. short stories need to be told more carefully, that means you have to concertrate more on storytelling, things like smart placement of establishing shots, close up shots etc. i see a lot of gigantic panels with no backgrounds... using mangas as reference is not good at all...
by the way: your style displays a lot of potential, just work on basics like storytelling and anatomy.

thomas