28 – The truth comes out
Huh, and I thought this page would be late.
Shows what I know.
I’ve been avoiding mentioning particular things that I have not thought came out right. Whenever another artist mentions how he/she thought that such-and-such element looked wrong in such-and-such way, I’d always go back and look, and then I could see this glaring fault that I never noticed before, but now cannot un-see. And so even though I find a list of various things that I just did wrong, I don’t like to mention them just in case the reader didn’t notice it or didn’t think it was worth caring about.
So if you don’t want to be unable to un-see a few faults in my artwork, just stop reading now.
Ever since I’ve been a little kid I’ve always been having trouble getting scale and proportions right. I have pictures I drew as a kid where someone is sitting at a desk and the desk is huge or they are tiny, or I just have gobs of wasted space. Now maybe nothing I’ve done in this comic isn’t quite that bad, but it still gets pretty bad. You might notice how today and last week feature Victoria standing at some mammoth six-feet tall, instead of the 5’6.5” she’s supposed to be. Plus an untold number of images where heads and/or bodies don’t match proper proportions.
Now to solve this I’ve been using a system of checking scales and references that I have spent a fair amount of time producing, and then measuring and checking my sketches. A number of my panels have had the background completed before any of the character sketching was made, with these backgrounds printed onto paper along with calculated measurements which I draw over. (Used int he final panel of this page.) But you can’t learn to ride a bike without taking off the training wheels, right? So I keep trying to just eyeball things and doing everything freehand on my paper. And then it looks like crap.
So again I’m thinking I need to keep to my system so I can get everything to match and look right. But does doing this help or hurt in the long run? If I keep using this system, will I gain a better understanding of spaces, or will I lose my chance to practice and get better?