hullo...
i'm looking for someone who's struggling with their art, trying to get from where they currently are now to where they envision themselves being. i'm far from having arrived, but if you see qualities in my work you'd like to emulate, i want to work with you on developing this skills you need to do so.
i'm motivated to help you along because i find that when i throw my mind at someone's work, figure out what works and what doesn't work, and write out that thorough critique, i tend to benefit more from the thought i put into it than you might.
additionally, we're an army on the front lines of a culture war that has permanent eternal ramifications. if you succeed in saving souls or helping someone along in their sanctification process, we've all succeeded, and the glory goes to God.
/strikes a cool pose
initially, send me work if you'd like me to critique it, and we'll see what happens from there!
plz to email me images or links to the work you'd like me to review, and we'll get started.
Replies
I love it. Thankyou for your help...I see what you mean. I can email you more stuff if you want...my address is danielchuter@hotmail.com.
McKenzie R Clark said:
i put this together in a few hours this morning, was super easy with your source material. there's things i'd like to have done better, like showing a bit of atmospheric depth around the planet in panel one, showing some distant horizon or dunes in the background of the last panel to really push the depth, put in a few more narration bubbles that say nothing important, use a dry brush in photoshop to punch out some sandy holes in the sound effects etc, but i think this communicates the idea of what i'm getting at.
daniel chuter said:
looked through your work again before i get started, i seriously love the gestures in your multi-figure scenes.
LETS THE ROCKING NAO.
daniel chuter said:
Thank you for your help. that would be kind of you...it would be very useful
If you don't mind, I'd like to do some photo manipulation with your work and see if i can demonstrate the potential direction i envision you going.
daniel chuter said:
Thank you for looking through my work...I do need to work further on these. I think it's because I am a painter who has merely 'added' a comic style because it explains the ideas a bit.....I am still experimenting with these works..thanks again for your obvious time and thought....I am really in the process of realising how my work seems to work best....in the long term I would love to make it sellable as attractive images.
McKenzie R Clark said:
i'd love to review your rough draft, i can relate to the way you feel, one of my friends in my tiny art group acts the exact same way: like a wounded bird you have to coax out of a hole to aide. you don't need to give me the entire draft, choose a small part you think you're most capable of accepting a critique on, and after you've tested the temperature of these critiquey waters, we can go from there.
Paula Richey said:
i looked thru your paintings online, and i really like your work. i personally really devalue abstract art, i'm very focused on representational illustration, because i feel the highest purpose art has is to communicate clearly, so my review will be influenced by that.
i'm not sure which came first, your paintings or the narrative they fit in. i could see it happening both ways, or maybe half and half, but either way, i believe you work, (what i've seen of it so far) has a lot of potential for what you're doing with it, but doesn't yet hit the nail squarely on the head, and i hope to explain the deficit i perceive and offer solutions for it.
first and indelicately, your text needs more experimentation. i strongly feel the traditional word bubbles and clean edged clipart style sound effects clash with your awesome traditionally painted/digitally edited work. i suggest you hand letter your word bubbles and hand paint your sound effects, then clean them up and insert them digitally. having your work's abstract elements and the digital super clean bubbles and effects emphasize each other's presence negatively by contrasting each other.
the text bubbles also are currently poorly using their space, there exists a great deal of negative space in each of the three on the page. the backgrounds to the bubbles should be centered around the text, equal on each side, otherwise it's distracting to the image, it tell's me that you're unfamiliar with the process of creating and placing them.
the process i'd suggest, (and i really hope you do it as i really like the potential this work has) would be to letter out all your text bubbles on the same piece of paper in their separate blocks and then to create the background borders around them after their done in a uniformal fashion, scan, crop, and insert at about 90-95% opacity into your images. same thing with sound effects, but at 75-85% opacity, (or whatever looks good after it's in there).
moving on to content: i don't know if you've ever read a gospel tract you've found on the street, but they have a hokey unappealing sense about them as they, a piece of paper, try to interact with you by asking you questions. you've done this on page 1 with the question "have you ever felt alone?". you don't want to ask the reader questions, you want to lead them to ask themselves questions if that's actually necessary to what you're trying to communicate. the appeal of the comic book format is that a person reading one can project themselves into the situations the characters are faced with and experience the fantastic situations vicariously. if you ask your reader a question directly, you break the 4th wall, shattering their ability to suspend disbelief. ask questions of your reader by having characters in the story ask other characters, or themselves, those questions through dialogue. this will make the reader answer those questions of themselves and come up with their answers for what you're posing to them, and you'll contrast and defend the responses you're communicating through your work with the responses of the characters involved in the dialogue.
::phew::
moving on to art content: your work, i'll again reiterate, is good. you are, however, accurate in your statement that it lends itself to comic books, it is not, stand alone, completely appropriate as sequential art. so far. here there are specific and solvable deficits in the work. initially, your images are communicating heavy atmosphere, but very, very few specifics. we lack context, your first splash page had me thinking your story was about firefighters rescuing persons from a fire, which is what i projected onto your second page until i read through the text. that's a bad shift, you want the reader to know the context of your story on page 1 without having to read anything.
page 2 is nearly empty of content, in that you're showing one panel and a background that lacks any specifics. if your BG had a city scape or something else visible, some context that explained where the characters were etc, it would be a page with 2 panels, still really light weight in terms of narrative content. i believe that your process has you taking scans of parts of your existing body of work and cropping them to create the storytelling. this is very artistic, but lacks the ability to communicate the action occurring in the story without eventually feeling very gimicky. your reveal of the characters on page 2 shows a cast who's identities we're guessing at, since it's a big panel, i think it's your protagonists, but since their identities are completely hidden other than being characters in some sort or protective equipment, i'm also lead to conclude that these character aren't actually the central cast, and are just going to save your actual protagonists to get the story rolling and explain the conflict. you don't have to be explicit with an obvious reveal at this point, but i'd suggest inferencing at least softly one way or the other.
my suggestions are to use more panels on this page. alternate between close up and far out, i'd show a second panel here of the group of individuals, still obscured by the heavy atmosphere, moving as a group with a side perspective. conceal or reveal their actual numbers, that's up to you, but know you have about one more page to give some specifics before the reader feels their being toyed with two much and goes to read something else. id position both panels low enough in the page that the empty top section can serve as it's own panel, but i would replace the clipart woosh with context explaining the setting and your hand drawn sound effects incorporated into the image, (sand storm blowing down the street of an abandoned outpost/city, wind gusting through rock outcroppings of the natural terrain, whatever it actually is). it's more important to your success to communicate as much as you possibly can through images and then fill in the gap with what you're unable to communicate with narrative bubbles. this is the gross equivalent of the show me don't tell me principle that exists in creative writing.
regarding entire story content: I think you don't have a main character yet. that could be fine, but makes your work much harder, its very much easier to relate to one character as an audience member than it is to care about an entire group of undeveloped characters. i'm speculating about this because i didn't see any individual, identifiable characters in your paintings. they might exist and you may have just not posted any work on that site with them represented, but i have a feeling that like your art style, your intent is to intentionally not be very specific and single protagonist oriented, but that you want me to care about the outcome of the group. you can successfully do that, but it's going to be very challenging, and you'll have to be super creative. their purpose must be what binds me as a reader into your story. this is also pure speculation.
and art foundational element content: your images appear to work with little spacial depth. i see a relatively flat background with your base colors and textures, some fore-middle-background elements introduced here and there, but because you're giving us no grand vistas to stare off into, there's not a ton of awe or depth to the images that take us from a conceptual illustration into narrative, and narrative is what we're going for here. do a sand blasted, hot color, heavy textured heavy wash image, but when you give us a character in the foreground, give us also a destination or geographic feature in the background.
so, in a nutshell, use your elements, (image, text bubbles) in a complementary fashion that works together instead of antagonistically
give us context
give us image depth
get more mileage out of most of your page space
and anything else i wrote out but forgot to write here in the recap because im tired.
you are able to test your success at any time: give your sequential work, without narration or dialogue, to someone who doesn't know what's going on in your story and ask them to tell you what the story is about. if you have communicated that with your pictures alone, you've done your job correctly.
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P.S.
my tone with this review has been pretty unapologetically hard hitting, i'm telling you like i see it without holding any punches. i do so because having reviewed your work, i think you're far enough along that you're able to accept criticism like this, my goal is to drive you on in the right direction with the work you are driven to do on an instinctual level, not to discourage you in any way, though i've never had someone critique my work in any way that didn't at least slightly rub my foolish pride the wrong way. please disregard this entire post if it causes you to slow down or stop working on your project, it's more important that you actually get it done and learn from the experience than it is that you yield to the criticism of an amateur who talks big like myself.
daniel chuter said:
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