I've seen you're stuff before on your site, it's eye-catching. Really dynamic stuff, good clean lines, and you draw a suitably hot Circuit Breaker! The bot's are big and chunky, but you seem to be tailoring everything to the Dreamwave house style. I'd say that the artwork suffers from being simply too detailed, it clutters the art and makes it look incredibly busy. I also think that the black outline around the characters is a wee bit too thick on occasions. My two cents...
The artwork is very nice, good dynamic poses and pretty well balanced and all but the line weight bugs me...the purpose of line weights are to make objects further in the forground to 'pop' out away from those more towards the background, your lines seem to just outline everything with no sensitivity to depth. For example the first frame with Jazz, Prowl and Rachet....Jazz in car mode looks to be the most forward so his line weight should be the thickest, about like it is or maybe a little less, then Prowl standing further back should have less weight, while Rachet in the back should have an outer line weight just above the weight of the background. Even body parts can have variable line weight if for instance a fist is 'in your face' the line weight of the fist would be very heavy compared to the forearm, even less the shoulder and less the body. Line weight can be tricky and it just takes a little practice to get it right, but based on the rest of your technique I am confident you can perfect it. The other factors of you artwork are awesome and are great just the way they are. So keep up the great work, practice on depth through the line weight a little and your stuff will be even better than it is now....can't wait to see more of your work
Sorry guys, I've got one of those free websites for posting images; so the bandwidth is limited to very few per hour - my apologies. Thanks for the comments. All comments regarding the line weight are absolutely correct, my latest submissions to IDW have improved (I'll post them soon) but like most of you have mentioned - more work and practice is required! I'm trying to minimize the detail too; but I find that to be more difficult; like I'm trying to overcompensate for somethin', I dunno...
A piece of advise: use photobucket or imageshack, those websites don't have a bandwith limit...at least I've never had any problem with photobucket.
Wow, I remember seeing you submissions back at the old Dreamwave studio. You've improved in plenty of places! I thought you old stuff was way over detailed. The robots were cover in misc tech lines everywhere. All that detail made them all look very generic (there were all just humanoid piles of tech). Look like you've learned to balance that out, characters are easy to indentify, and the tech has been pulled back just enough and in the right places to make the bots interesting. Cool layouts too. My main concern, as a letterer - no room for dialogue. Your letterer would really have to work to squeeze in dialogue in a lot of those panels, and probably cut off a lot of character artwork.
now i can see them yeah, i was gonna say, those pages look awefully crowded my main "critique" are the big thick outlines. Its one thing to vary your line widths for the sake of creating depth, but what you have here are just a big thick outline around the characters and some objects. While it does help to seperate the stuff a bit, it looks awefully "cookie cutter" [copy/pasted] and stuff. you have a good deal of detail here, though i think it couldmaybe be toned just just a smidge more. I think that lends itself a little into crowding the panels up a bit. Also i noticed some of the faces there look a bit squished. particularly that panel with [who i believe is] Prowl. you got some neat stuff man. definately some potential there
Hey guys, thanks for the advise! Cataclizm1 - Thanks for the kind words but I don't think I'm anywhere near EJ Su's calibre. I need more practice and I'm not as fast as the pros, not yet that is, lol! MattMoylan - It's great to hear that my submissions were being circulated back in DW; I was always worried that my samples were getting ignored and immediately tossed in the garbage, man I'm so insecure, lol! I've had other comic professionals always mention, when reviewing my samples, that I would be a letterer's greatest enemy but an inker's best friend... Josh - Your comments are very similar to what Mr. Ryall & Mr. Taylor have been mentioning so far. I'm trying my best to improve, hopefully in the not-to-distant future there may be an opportunity for me to get my foot in the door... Taker - I'll PM you some stuff. Thanks! These are some of my more recent submissions to IDW:
Very nice. I love the details put into it. Poor Bumblebee. he looks disappointed by Spike choosing to ride with someone else in that last sequential.
Those look great! The first pages you showed did have too much detail! But, the new pages you posted look just right! Awesome, just awesome! Hope you get the job!
