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Radium

JCF Éminence Grise

Joined: Jul 2002

Posts: 12,275

Radium is an asset to this forum

Jul 20, 2007, 03:14 PM
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Like I mentioned earlier, I really like the composition on "Alien World". The way you took one picture and divided it into frames is pretty creative, especially the way the order the frames are placed in matches the text (Planet, Monster, Man). And the panel with the alien's head turned out really nice.

One thing that stands out about it is that space is white. It's understandable that it could be day, except I don't think a moon could be shadowed like that in day. A gradient, white near the surface and gray towards the moon, might look better anyway. When I was talking to Stato, we also talked about how something might look neat in the background behind the panels, like a faint image of the side of a planet, but I'd definitely keep it white/very light gray.

As for anatomy, the guy's arms are too far down on his body. Remember that they need to attach at the shoulders. Also, make sure the length of the arms is appropriate; when standing and with your arms out, the distance from fingertip to fingertip is generally equal to your height.

The biggest thing you need to work on, though, is aliasing. If you can avoid aliased lines, do! If you don't know the difference between alised and anti-aliased, look at this thing:

Anti-aliased lines are smoother; they lack the "jagged edges" people associate with MS Paint. There's three ways to avoid aliased lines:
-Work big. People that work with raster art draw things 2-4 times their final size, then shrink them. Most advanced art programs, when scaling things down, will average pixels in a way that will make the lines look smoother.
-Work vector. Vector lines are made of math, not pixels, and will look fine no matter their size. Consider programs like Inkscape, or try out the trial version of industry-standard software like Illustrator and Flash.
-Work real. Try either inking your sketch with an inking pen and then erasing the initial sketch, inking your sketch with a pen on a piece of tracing paper, or sketching with one of those special blue pencils and then inking, so the sketch won't show up when you scan. A scanned image will usually be anti-aliased.

This is a way NOT to avoid aliased lines:
-Blurring. Blurring does NOT make lines look smoother, just blurrier! I know on some old artwork I used blur filters to "make my lines smoother", but that was because I was like 12 and couldn't draw (see sig).
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Last edited by Radium; Jul 20, 2007 at 07:33 PM. Reason: Got aliased and anti-aliased mixed up in a spot. Anti-Aliased is the good one, FYI.