Constructive criticism!

[Ratty]

Okay, I like Charby the Vampirate. It's one of my favorite webcomics and it's has an awesome story, cool characters and it's very well drawn. But after reading through some of the newer Charby comic, I've found some stuff that could be improved. I thought "Hey, maybe I should tell Amelius about this" and then started looking through the comic for other things I could give some tips about. So after looking through it for a while, I've found things that can be improved.
As I said, I like this comic, I'm not bashing it or flaming or whatever you crazy kids call it these days. These are just some tips to help Amelius (and maybe the others who read this) to improve.

A lot of the time, especially in action scenes and stuff, the characters and poses look stiff and sort of... not alive. I dunno. Hard to explain. Here's an example.

See what I mean yet? That doesn't really look like a shove, more like he's just holding his hand there. They look sorta like... posed action figures. This is a pretty common thing that lots of people do, heck, I still do that sometimes.

The solution: Lines of action!
The line of action usually follows the spine and curves in a C or a S shape, depending on the pose. It's useful since it makes the picture a lot more flowy and less stiff.
I'm... really bad at explaining so here's an example.



How to fix it: Watch Disney movies. No, I'm serious. Animators are experts at making drawings flowy and alive looking. I recommend Tarzan if you're working on drawing people. Pause the movie, try find where the line of action is, and copy the pic. Unpause, pause again, draw, and so on.

Another common problem I've seen: Shading with black and white, or just a shade darker than the main color. This works if you're drawing a character reference or something without a background, but not really in a comic.
Shadows have different colors depending on the light and background and what color the objects they're close to is. In other words, if the background is blue-ish, shade with dark blue or something. If the background is red, shade with a red-ish color...you get the point.
Here are some things I noticed with the newest comic.


I'm assuming the bug is the main light source here. In that case the white highlighting should be green.


If the background is green, the reflected light there should be green too, not white.

Lesse... How to fix it... Well, there's the easy way or the hard way. The hard way is to study how light and shadows and stuff work, and practice a lot.

The easy way is to use Photoshop. Pick the color the light is supposed to have, make a new layer over it and flood fill the panel with that color. Then set the layer to Overlay and adjust opacity until it looks good.

Tadaaa!


And because getting nothing but critique is boring, have some praise.
Charby the Vampirate is awesome, the story is good and all the characters are cool. ^^ And I love the expressions look. You can really see what the characters are thinking or saying and it's way better than anything I could do. Keep it up! ^^

...I think I forgot something here but bleh.

[Amelius]

Ooo, I really appreciate the feedback! May I offer a little bit of my reasoning for some of this though? (hope it doesn't sound excuse-y!)
While I agree completely with the first part with Zerlocke getting shoved, I didn't do much with action in the part where the dude is getting gutted because of a few things. One, I wanted to show the fact that he did it so fast the guy hardly had time to react and I wanted it to look a little less violent, I suppose (which is odd for me!) It also has a lot to do with a stupid in-joke between me and Nick, but I really should have considered how that looked. To be bluntly honest I just wanted the party to end, and though I admit I wasn't happy with the panel with Zerlocke getting shoved either, I just was too disheartened to draw it again (I messed up the inking TT_TT)

Also, since I never use any reference at all (Nick thinks this is insane too) it makes things hard to picture sometimes, particularly the movement of spines in the body. I'll try and consider this also.

(letting you in on the joke too, we were listening to the Dark Tower series on CD in the car and the main character Roland remarks on how "modern" city-people look "soft", and would stare in stupid awe at you as you disemboweled them instead of fighting back. I based the posture on what came to mind when I heard that of course, and in order to portray the "stupid awe" of the guy I couldn't have him moving around too much. However where Zerlocke's involved, that's just my stupid drawing being crappy! Haha!)

In defense of the coloring though I'm still trying to sort out things with my new monitor, all the colors are different from the previous one I'd been working with all year so I'm still working things out. Blues have turned purple, browns have turned reds...it's a nightmare! I tried adjusting it as best I could to get back in the groove but I kept making it worse. Stupid monitor, why did you have to break!
(Actually the highlighting is green in the one where he's in the cabin, by the way! It's just a really really light green) I should fix up Kavonn's panel when he's in the woods though. I never use the colors black or white for shading though, I do use different colors...but I tend to chicken out about getting too colorful with it.
I'll try experimenting with that a little now though! ^_^

I did actually have Cyril's panel looking like that for a while, but for some reason I undid it (Oh! because I saw a mistake and had to go back a buncha steps, now that I recall) but I stupidly forgot to put the coloration back after I finished fixing things up.

I really appreciated this! I'll be more aware of these things in the future then, thanks a bunch! I hope the things I have coming up won't disappoint ^_^

[Ratty]

Yay. Experimenting is good. ^^ Will be interesting to see if anything will change in the newer comics.

I figured that, but I decided to change the pose for the heck of it, shows the line of action thing a little better. Also I think Zerlocke should still lean a little more forward and the spine should bend a little more, I tried to do the same pose myself and it's sort of difficult lunge forward like that with a straight back without almost falling over. But it's definitely not crappy.
Oh, and another thing to fix the stiffness I've seen if some of the panels besides the Disney thing: Gesture drawing. I started doing this a while ago and it's really helped me improve real fast. This site is good for that but drawing from life is important too. And you should definitely start using reference.

Ack, monitor troubles suck. I know a similar thing happened with my laptop. I managed to change the colors but they still don't look exactly right, I have to move my pictures to the other computer to check, but I've pretty much given up by now.
Yeah, I was using black and white as an example, I meant more that fact that you seem to shade a lot of things with a darker color than the base color, for example Kavonn's shirt there is shaded with dark blue, and it looks like every part is shaded with a different color (The book has yellowish shading, his hair has black shading and so on). This is fine though, and most people don't really notice or care. While shading with the same color for everything might make the drawing blend in more with the rest of the picture, it's okay to shade like that. ^^

But anyways, no chickening out. Try new things, don't be afraid to make the shading and stuff more colorful than usual. Doesn't matter if it doesn't turn out that good at some parts, just keep trying stuff until you find something that works.

Also, if the bug is the only light source there, it should still be a lot stronger even if it's very light green. It might look like that if the door's open though, since there are two light sources then.

Also I recommend doing the overlay thing for most, if not all the panels. It blends the colors together and just makes it look a lot nicer. It doesn't have to be as bright as the Cyril panel though, heck, you can adjust the opacity until it's hardly noticeable if you want, it'll still make it look a lot better.

And note that I'm no expert at colors and shading and stuff, I only know the basics. Read this tutorial if you want to know more stuff about light and shadows, this person actually knows what they're talking about.

Anyways, thanks for responding and doing this awesome comic, and keep up the good work. ^^

[Ratty]

Sorry for the double post.
Anyways, I've noticed the changes in the comic, and it really made it look a lot better! The lighting and shadows look a lot better now and it looks more realistic. ^^ I've also noticed a lot of the stiffness I've seen in the poses is gone now, which is great. ^^

And here's some more critique. I could probably do this every time there's a new comic page, but that might get annoying so tell me if you don't want me to.
Well here's one for the newest ones anyways. I've noticed that while all the colors blend together better now, and the characters look like they belong in the rest of the picture.
But the more colorful characters, like Phineas and Yiska still stick out. Everything that's black, white and grey looks great though. As I said before, I'm not expert about colors and shading and stuff, so I read through that tutorial thing I linked to before, trying to figure what was wrong.
After a while I figured it out. Shadows are less saturated than the main colors, so to make the colorful characters blend with the rest of the picture you might want to mix a little grey into the the shadows to make it look more realistic.
I think this depends on the lighting though, so you might want to look it up because I'm not 100% sure in which lighting you're not supposed to do that.


While the pose isn't exactly stiff here, it doesn't really look like he's using a lot of force. If he's hitting him real hard then you might want to move the arm a little, right now he's holding it like it's just a light whack on the head. If it really is just a light whack on on the head, you just need to tone down the swooshy lines a little, since they make it look like he's supposed to be hitting him real fast. I'm a little confused which one it's supposed to be. ^^;


Nothing real big here, but tony's hat would probably leave a shadow on Kavonn's hat there. Also you might want to add some yellow reflected light on the hat too, since it's so close to it.

That's all the critique I have for now.
Only thing I have left to say is that this is the awesomest face ever: