Night of the Living Dead and Captain America

**VOGLER** · 04-22-2006, 02:56 PM

Greetings...

**Yunni** · 04-22-2006, 03:37 PM

Wow, I am realy liking the ridged and sharp style! Nice flat colours, particulary on the 1st and 3rd. Captine America is looking good, I like the bold eye-catching colour choices, although I think the composition is a little too open? Or maybe it's the horrizon in the background is too distracting?

Defintly very cool, however : D

**DrVictorVonDoom** · 04-23-2006, 02:10 AM

I'm not a big fan of the way you're stylizing cloth - it just doesn't seem convincing to me. But aside from that, since it could be a "personal preference" thing, the main problem - and the main thing I think you need to work on - with these is composition.

Pic 1: The zombies would be much more threatening (and much more engaging) facing toward the right. That's the way the eye reads as "forward" in western culture, traditionally, so it would seem like they were coming "toward" us, rather than looking "away." The piece would also work better, I think, if you got rid of the clichéd white circle and just had the jagged dark-grey lines conveying movement. Doing this would also allow you to change the vertical ray, which is currently confining the zombie girl, making her figure very static. If you want, I can make a quick Photoshop re-do to give you an idea of what I mean, since I'm not sure how clear this is.

Pic 2: The tangents between the jagged background pieces and the border are visually distracting, and the upright posture of the figure doesn't read as "zombie" - shouldn't he be hunched over, gorging, instead of poised like that? This is the weakest of the three, since the figure's posture really doesn't sell the piece at all.

Pic 3: Yunni is right - the composition here is far too open. Move the star down so it overlaps with Cap's figure, I think, and increase the size of the blue bar to match. Maybe get rid of the gradient, too; another solid bar (or even a gradient in a non-grey color) would work better. Cutting the figure off at the knees is a weak choice, too, though you do it better here than in many pics that make the same mistake. Also, I may be having a geek moment here, but isn't part of the point of Captain America's shield that it doesn't chip/break? Maybe I'm wrong; I haven't bought a Captain America comic in a while. It works fine as a visual, at least. One final point on the visuals, though: the wavy, lumpy smoke doesn't work at all with the angularity of the rest of the image. Either redo it in a more jagged manner, or get rid of it.

Nice work overall though, you've just got to tweak these to make them very strong pieces.