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Woodruff is probably the weakest CVision sierra adventure game. Gobliiiins is probably still the strongest. It's interesting to me that nobody has done an ags game in the vein of the goblins so far.

hehe I forgot I put the hat on. It gave me amazing laser eyes superpowers!

what you have right now is quite enough, go ahead with rendering.

right off the bat for me that is more interesting and dynamic to look at.

Thanks, Dan Clarke.

I really have no clue where that came from.

It comes from the charity line. I don't think I'm doing charity here for example, by trying to help Squinky because I'm becoming better just by putting ideas into words. Not just drawing shit for my own fun, letting it go it's own way, but wanting and achieving to illustrate an exact point of view. I gain a lot from that. I think you do too. The charity parallel is very bad to explain the relationship. Critique is an interactive thing.

As critical as I am of other's work, it doesn't even begin to match my scrutinization of my own.

I think that's good.

I'm getting tired of the claim that I demand people to follow my preferences.

The underlying point here is not that what you like or do not influence what happens. We know that's true. You know it, I know it, you know that I know it and I know that you know it. That's not what I'm talking about. It's the reasoning behind what you find unpleasant that in this case if faulty, so if you're going to not like it, go ahead. You were wrong to lash out to eric in my opinion, that's why I repeated the 'don't like it, deal with it' thing.

I'm just sick of people criticising people trying to help instead of helping themselves

Dunno how much that occurs generally. You might be right. Just this situation here that I am following, it didn't happen. Eric has helped Squinky a lot in the past, he didn't just pop up to attack you.

this is how you ink. no straight lines, no contra curves, one width, shaky, somewhat. What you call dead lines.



this is how you might wanna try to ink. smaller lines for smaller details, stronger lines for contours, widths that follow volume and curve. The idea is, if you're inking a curve, on the most extreme bit of the curve, you'd need the most width, and the more like a straight line it becomes, the smaller the width should be. But there's other things you'll learn about this intuitively. Use a 0.1 pen of good make to do these, or if you're feeling extra awesome, you might want to try a brush with ink. I can't do this. Eric can. Ask him for specifics.



A more complete render.

this thread is wonderful. everything just keeps getting worse!

Yes, if the criticism have anything to do with taste. Whether mr Colossal likes her face or not is pointless knowledge as far as I'm concerned, since it's Squinky's taste that matters. For all we know he might've aimed exactly at the style I presented - though I doubt it - and he is in a position to dismiss suggestions as easily as embracing them.

When eric, or myself, or anybody say 'I don't like the face in loominous' edit' we're not talking to you, at least not only to you. There's things you can pick up from this sort of contra-critique, and you should, but we're mainly talking to squinky. We're saying, 'squinky, a part of your audience believes that direction to not be fitting to the type of work we believe you're trying to create. It might not be to your advantage to follow that critique.' Do you understand why this is important, and why it really has little to do with you directly? As you say below and as I explained in my other post, it should be useful to you, being such a prolific editor around here, to know when other people think your edits go south too, but if you don't like hearing that, ok, you don't like it. Won't stop it from happening.

However, I do think there are limits here. I see critique in the form they're available here as charity. Any charitable activity is good, as long as it doesn't harm anyone.

There's fault in your charity analogy. Critique isn't charity. It is offered as such, but it's not ment as such. When someone like you edits something, there's a specific weight attached to your opinion that may steer someone in a specific direction just because you are you and not flukeblake. There's responsibility in an edit, and that's why I rushed to tell squinky to not take the face edit too much into account, to counter-act a bit. Of course the artist should always be presupposedly able to filter the critique he gets and select only the stuff he finds useful from there, but let's not kid ourselves, when someone really good critiques you, you listen, you take freakin' notes. And it's a dissapointment when I for one can spot a great artist giving critique with which I don't agree to a lesser artist. I've been to art school. What we're discussing here has happened numerous times. I've had to argue with teachers that what they're saying to other artists might be wrong, for the sake of the other artists. This is neither special nor a big deal, regardless of the huge posts about it.

A problem arises when people not contributing starts wasting their energy to criticise the work of the charity workers, instead of spending it on contributing themselves and setting an example. Not only doesn't it aid the person who asked for help, it irritates the charity workers.

Drop the charity analogy. We're all learning here. Me here talking to you, I'm learning, you're learning. We're all getting critiqued, even if the critique is about the critique. You're not a magnificent benevolent benefactor of all.

While I agree on the uselessness of total revamps in many cases, they serve an important purpose in situations like these, where parts of the original is too far from what the editor thinks of as proper, considering  the overall style and skill level of the rest of the image. Minor modification won't do well in these cases and the point is to illustrate what area/s can be improved with some briefer studies, which will lift the image radically. It's like the pose issues, major rework would be required, but instead of making a rough sketch like Igor's, I made it in detail.

Just a difference of opinion here, because I found the face to be rocking, even if it's not 'correct' and that's what drew me to the piece anyway, to edit the leg and give it a bit of gravital center. When I saw your edit I went 'no. nope. no no no.' instinctively. You have an opinion, you edited, I have an opinion, I edited, we discussed opinions, it's all good.

And while one can argue that comic book anatomy/poses/lighting differs from more realistic style, they're simply stretches, and someone who has mastered the former can, with some minor practise, handle the latter, but not vice versa. I don't mean that Squinky should spend years studying anatomy, just spend half an hour or so studying how eyes, for instance, are constructed, and incorporate the knowledge in whatever style he choose to use.

Okay.

The whole "it fits his/her style" argument is flawed imo. While great originality can come out of shortcomings, I think the person should choose a style, not settle with it because the lack of ability to do "better". If I knew that Squinky could draw like, I dunno, Marvel Comic artists, then I'd see no point in my edit, since he had obviously choosen not to go with more conventional faces. But the whole "your style is cool, just go with it" argument only makes sense if "higher" aspirations don't exist, which I doubt is the case.

I don't disagree here. I find squinky's art to benefit from smaller scaled steps and critique first, before he's ready to entertain the notion of expanding, style-wise. He's consistently posted cyberpunk pictures, in an - I suspect - comic world of his own, all of which leads me to believe this is his baby, for now. This is what he wants to do. I try to help on this end, not expand and illuminate his mind. I am no art teacher, I've only got humble critique about how to shade, how to structure and the like. Won't be telling anybody to go style-fishing just yet.

Hello. Here's ideas and stuff.

Before I talk about inking and edits, a few thoughts. This is comic art. Squinky doesn't need fine art critique. It's good to read loomis, but the skills you'll get there do not have to directly do with the art in this thread. This is comic art, and you should recieve comic art themed critique. Your anatomy isn't that lacking that you need to turn to books to get better at it. Perspective, maybe, but your anatomy will get better by sticking at it. Hell, it's gotten better in this here thread. Your poses DO need to become less wooden and more natural, though, but that has to do with studying reality and then studying exaggeration of reality, not loomis.

loominous, I find your edit basically useless in this case, which is uncharacteristic of you because it is not an awesome version ( if, your version ) of the art edited, as you usually do. I have lots of bones to pick with people who edit and awesomify radically, because, as cool as it is to see it happen, it doesn't help the person being edited. An edit should be one, two steps ahead of the person's skill, otherwise you're just discouraging them and going 'this is how good you'll never be.' However, this is not what you did in this thread. You simply turned an idiosynchartic face, very very fitting to the setting, to a pretty face that is fitting to other things. Is it bad to outline that your edit might not be good? Does it not help you to get that feedback so you can help people with your edits rather than lead them on potentially irrelevant paths?

now, edits about inking. These were done in photoshop, so they're not as good as they would be if they were done in hand. But they serve their purpose. I've blown up a detail to 200% to get finer brushes. Here's what happens:



This is the base image.



This is basic outlining. For some of your work, this might really be enough. notice the variable line widths, NOT too much though, following curves and folds accordingly. You could stop here and I'd be happy. Notice inside curves against straight lines, outside curves against contra curves, contrapost. Your ink work tends to be too 'rounded' not dynamic and edgy enough. Don't be afraid of corners and straight lines, they suit your subject matter. Be VERY wary of a boring curve against the same curve mirrored. Contropost curves. The tattoo is shakily done, but I'm not paying much attention to that for the purposes of the edit.




This is minimal rendering. I'd call this underrendered, personally, but it's a good place to start. There's LITTLE lightining here, but not too much. For quick styles, this is enough. There's more importance placed of developing volume here than on realistic lighting. Generally, for comic art, forget PURE realistic lightning. Leave that to the fine art boys. This is cyberpunk, dude. Stylise, don't get hung up on representing reality.




And there's such a thing as overrendering, as you see. This is too much for me, but others might go up to this, or even further. This is when inkwork begins to resemble charcoal work, where you really block out volume from light and darkness.



Then, don't forget you can also use rasters, or fake rasters, whatever, to pronounce your work. I like doing this after I'm done with inking, because as you'll see on the next step, it gives you the change to rub out speculars and lights with the eraser.



This is what I'm talking about. This is really really too much, but you can see how we got from stage 1 to stage 6, right? Here's the psd if you find it useful to turn layers on and off or whatever. Hope I helped.


http://www.locustleaves.com/render.psd

Don't get hung up on making stuff pretty. This is cyberpunk. You can, and you should work on making a cohesive style that can hold whatever you want to show in your stories. Comic art is not about pretty pictures, it's about cohesive storytelling and good flow and a transparent style that holds everything together.

mind if I ink parts of this to show you a different way to ink?

Stitches, relax. Andail's post offered critique. If your brother didn't feel insulted to the point of complainage, why did you feel the urge to post in his defense? There's nothing to defend, this is critique and that's how it goes.

hope this helps a bit. It's about center of gravity and character placement and perspective and I hope the image clears more things up than I could with words. Try to not start with a character in limbospace. Try to make a good perspective scheme for him, try to think where the camera is looking from, what height, eye hight? knee height? bird's eye? remembeing the horison is on eye level ( when the camera also is on eye level) helps establish some rules about all of that stuff. The leg as I edited it is now properly grounded, and provides support. The sorta perspective you were using for the background was very very off.

the anatomy here otherwise is pretty sold, although I moved the head in closer to the torso. I like this piece a lot.

Try to distribute your detail less evenly. Don't fear white space. Things that are detailed catch the eye more and that's a useful tool. Try to vary your line widths according to the curve you're following in the inking.

Strapping Young Lad - Goat

(upgradable to 640KB!)

640k were going to be enough for everybody

cardboard urinal

lockthread

I'm not sure that will help anything. Although I do get how you post and people go 'flukeblake! let's kill him!' but maybe not as much as you'd think.

Yeah, maybe that is a good idea.