Posted

Feb 26th 2008

Mood

Blank

i came across this rant on the front page of one of the comics i read (Two Moons) and it was one of those 'yeah man, yeah!' things. so i am reposting it.

copied from the Two Moons page...

So I'm gonna say something... I hope it doesn't sound angry, I just want to point this out.
I've been drawing for a long time, I know what I'm doing. And I know I'm not anything amazing. I'm not putting up my comic because I think it's the best thing ever, in fact this comic is probably some of my sloppiest work, drawn on trains and in between classes and stuff. And a lot of the pictures suck.

I mean, the perspective is all off, and EG's nose has three different shapes on this page, and there are too many middle tones, and the bars keep changing size, and there's only two frames with any semblance of a background, and who the hell knows where the light is coming from, and EG's jaw is way too big and some of the speech bubbles are too small and EG's legs are so close together it looks like he has to piss really bad.... etc. etc.

But y'know, I don't really care about that. I care about my story. That's my number one priority, and art comes in second.

So I want to say, it's kind of annoying when people point out what's wrong with my art because.. dude, I'm the one who drew this, I spent like two hours on this, you think I was doing it with my eyes closed or something? Like sometimes I tell people, "Okay I know this picture is bad" and they use that as some exuse to rant off everything wrong with it.. and I'm like - shut the hell up, you don't have to point out my every flaw, I do that enough in my head. Okay actually I don't say that, I just say - why you're right. Because if you snap at someone who's pointing out your flaws, then people start saying things like, "Oh you just can't take criticism. Oh you will never grow as an artist if you have that attitude."

See what would be helpful, is if people said something like, "If you redrew the chin at a higher angle, it would look a lot better." Or "Hey jen fingers don't bend that way, try drawing more from life." Because it's not a matter of pointing out what's wrong, it's a matter of knowing how to fix it. If I knew how to fix things already, I'd be a way better artist. It's easy to judge something, but it's difficult to know WHY it's wrong. I hate it when I ask someone why they think it looks wrong and they just say, "I dunno, it's just wrong." Okay.. that really doesn't help.

Some guy once emailed me about how my characterization totally sucked. It was a pretty thoughtful email, so I figured this guy could help me out. Being that I know everything that goes on inside my characters' heads, it's hard for me to get an outside view on things like story and characterization, so I asked him how I could change the setup to get across the things I wanted to reveal about certain characters... And he wrote back saying basically the same thing - that my characterization totally sucked. Okay but like.. how do I fix that...?

But someone said to me once, your moon is too wiggly, and she suggesting smoothing it out around the edges. So I did, and now it looks better. That's good, that's productive. JillyFoo has also been a big help when it comes to fixing stuff.

So think about that when you're dishing out criticism, please.