[Spiral]

These are two sketches of caveman-beast-like guys I drew and sorta "inked". I don't like them too much especially the parts with the crosshatches n stuff. It was a first try at comic style inking but apparently there is much more to it that just going over the lines . I'm not planning on doing anything else with these things yet but I am open to suggestions and I'd like some crits and guidance. Thanks.

This is a warrior of the tribe. Aaa put a sock in it...

http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/prehistoricman.jpg

I was going for a witch doctor here but I didn't know where to get related reference to add more trinkets. The thing between his legs is a horn in which he stores his 'plumming', some Australian tribe does this.

http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/prehistoricwitchdoctor.jpg

[elam]

These are pretty good. The anatomy looks right, if not a bit strange in some places. I noticed that the right shoulder is *way* bigger on the right side in the first pic.

But, foreshortening's a bitch. How long have you been drawing?

[faeklone]

Yeah, inking's a bitch unless you have good details on paper with your pencils to guide where the ink is going. My personal favorite team is Jim Lee and Scott Williams. Check them out to figure out how to ink. Also, starting to doodle a little in pen will help you a long way in figuring out how lines will affect a drawing one way or another, and how crosshatching works well.

So starting on a crit, I don't care about the face, as it matches the rest of the body in the otherworldy look. IE it's not supposed to be in proportion. It just makes it cooler at that size. The shoulder on the left side is too big. It should end with the first line that was drawn in the inside, the solid one. The hands should be on oppostie wrists and then they'd register better. The one on the right of the page is closer, and therefore should be larger. The feet are a little mismatched, and are at odd angles to one another.

The body that he's standing over seems to be on a different plane, more at a decline towards the viewer. If the body is on a ramp, that would make it a little eaiser to read, but if it isn't then there are a couple of things that need to be done. Either fix the body by putting the shoulders making up most of the body, and the head on the same gneral line as the shoulders. Or you can make the top parts of the monster slightly bigger and angled towards the viewer, giving it a two point perspective. This can also be achieved by changing the position of the feet, and letting us see the top of them a little more.

The only comment I have about the witch doctor is that his arm ont he right side of the image is broken. If there were a bone in there it would be visible on the underside of the arm due to the missing connection between the shoulder and the bicep. The bicep connects right at the shoulder, not halfway down the arm.

The odd thing about both drawings is the figures lick of a pelvis. There's a torso and tow legs in each, but they seem to join in some mysterious way. GIve the figures a little bit of a middle slope for a bit longer than the witchdoctors underwear and that should be neough of an indication of a pelvis to be believable. If you don't think so look in underware or Swimsuit mags.

I love the style that you're starting with, keep playing at it until you've refined it more. And also remember to keep up in research when it comes to comic inking, and the figure. You can never have too much research.

[Spiral]

Thanks for the crits guys. First of all I want to say that I was already aware of the anatomy flaws and I was thinking of saying this from the start but I thought that maybe someone whould see something that I haven't or in I way that I don't.

The flaw concerning the beast guy and his victim I saw too late as I left the feet for the end. When I was drawing the pencils as blocks the perspective was OK and I was planning to keep to it but after drawing and inking the rest of the thing (rather, going over the lines cause that's what I've done, this crap is no inking by me) I was pretty weary and just drew the feet weirdly. The anatomy problems although obvious occured due to the fact that I was mainly trying to figure out how I should draw the thing and visualize it inked so I missed plenty of stuff. Nonetheless it was all just a try at "inking".

The problem with the whitch doctor's arm now. Again a flaw caused by lack of sleep, I was going to make the tricep line parallel to the shoulder line. That way it wouldn't look bad. Later though I was thinking of making the fur flow over the arm and I guess down the line I got mixed up (lotta lines).

The lesson I got from this so far is: MIKE TAKE A BRAKE AND THEN LOOK AT THE WHOLE PICTURE FOR A FEW MINUTES. I guess that's my major flaw, I concentrate too much on seperate areas without looking at the general picture.

As for the pelvis, I am quite happy with the way I make the stuff I draw (at the pelvis area). I don't really like dealing with the pelvis area so I just draw the legs by imagining the way the legs should connect and cover the area with chains, loincloth or such stuff. I should start making that stuff though.

I'm not going to fix these as I can't now that they've been inked. I am just wondering what moreI should do or rather what I should change in the inking. All I used is a ballpoint pen.

[faeklone]

Ballpoint pen is fun to play with, but you need to respect what it can do first. If this is your first attempt using ballpoint pen, it's pretty good, and pretty dark. But try and varying your lines and the direction of your hatching. I don't know if there's a trick to doing it other than just playing with it and understanding how it works. To help you out, here are a couple of mine. One done with ink, the other is a ballpoint pen. Enjoy.


Ballpoint pen


Inked

[faeklone]

forgot to add that stepping away from your work to check you progress and your mistakes is also a good idea. If you're using a sketchbook, an armslength away may work, but also try and put it halfway accross the room and see how it registers then.

Also covering the pelvis to not have to deal with it is fine, but start to learn how it works. Easiest way is in your initial sketch draw a ball where the pelvis is supposed to be and then work your figure out from there. The torso from straight up and the legs half of that. If sone in that way you'll slowly get the shape that you need to make it look right.

[Spiral]

Pretty cool stuff there. The inked image, how exactly did you do it, I've never seen anyone use that stuff so I don't even know what they use, an ink bottle and a feather, a brush, what? It looks real cool.

As for my images, I wasn't really going to do the shading, I wanted to use them as templates to practice with markers but I got carried away. I'm trying to give the stuff a more comic style (like Images' stuff) rather than using too many crosshatches to make various tones. But I do agree with you that I need to experiment more to get used to ballpoint and get to understand it. I usually sketched with normal pens in high school but I took a direction similar to your ballpoint image, but still ballpoint isn't at all the same.

Thanks for the help and the discussion. Let's see how I do next time.

[faeklone]

The one done totally in ink was a school project where we were told to take the slide form a previous project, project it on to a piece of paper, and then trace the outlines, just so that we weren't preoccupied with measuring the image, and more into making the lines for the differing gradients. After the trace job, the pencil tracing was traced with a gel pen, one of those pens with runny ink. The major black area was done with a paintbrush and painted over. Much easier than hatching to get the black. The rest was done with photoreference to get the values correct. Again, the intregral part of this process was stepping back and deciding if I had enough hatching to give the correct value.

As far as I know, professional inkers use pens and bruskes to do their work, completely on top of the origional pencils. So your pencils should convey enough information that the inker, and later on the colourist will know what you're getting at.