I've seen some people commenting that they dislike his art. Yeah, his style has that depressing vibe but honestly I like his art. Got this from SGCC
That there is honestly one of the best looking pieces of Ramondelli art I've ever seen. Still some goofy things going on there (Soundwave's torso isn't foreshortened enough so it looks looong), but pretty solid, and not overdone with his usual lighting and textural overkill. The main problem with his art isn't the dark grittiness of it. The fundamental problem with most of his art is the poor geometry and spacial awareness of it. In his worst art, he just seems to slap straight lines down with a ruler without paying close enough heed to perspective and vanishing points, and it gives everything a "hard-edged" look that's honestly hard to look at. And then it seems like he washes it all in the darkest colours and most eye-searingly busy lighting in order to cover up those mistakes.
I think a lot of the "trouble" with Livio is that he creates neat looking static pictures, but still seems to have a hard time with stringing them together into coherent storytelling. Drawing pretty pictures is not the only thing a comic book artist needs to do; they need to be effective at telling us a story without words. Livio still struggles with that, imo.
I used to feel like that about his work but not anymore. His storytelling in the Spotlight series has been very effective.
Poor geometry doesn't always jack things up. 2000AD and ABC Warriors would play merry hob with spatial relationships all the time as well as stuffing every panel to the point of insanity and it still came off fairly well. I think the problem is more the coloring as you pointed out. His line art always seems okay, and then he rolls it through mud.
Livio makes dirty unclean artwork that lacks detail. And yes, part of that is due to the colouring as well.
He's fine when he's doing something specifically tailored to his strengths that he has time to work on, like the Dinobot trilogy. Something like Combiner Wars, where he had to rush everything out because Sarah Stone got sick, less so.
I liked his art for covers, or posters. He does great work for something like that. My issue with his work is that there's no flow or movement to his panels. Makes it especially hard to tell what's happening in fight scenes. He has got better at it, but I still don't feel it has the dynamic feel for movement. And a lot of the faces look the same. But for a poster or a cover? Perfect for it.
That suits his strengths. His panel work is garbage in comparison. But look at how crisp the perspective is. You get a sense of depth and life from those panels. Ramondelli fails at even that..
He obviously has talent and I think his style works best when visiting past events. Like Autocracy etc. The muddy, hard to decipher images come across to me as faded memories and I think that really works. However, I don't think that style works for present day settings, and I don't know if he is rushed but I do agree that geometry is often off. It's also just a bit to oppressive for my liking.
Can he draw? Yes. Are comics his strength? Absolutely not. He favors too many dark colors and even warm colored characters tend to become blobs with far too much shading and they disappear into the background. The grittiness makes details incomprehensible and action tends to feel watered down. My first encounter with him was Autocracy/Monstrosity/Primacy and I had to wait for Hot Rod - Hot Rod - to be named in order to recognize who he was, a character with so many distinguishing features and colors that he's nigh-impossible to forget. Shit, this is Trypticon. It's barely even a silhouette even though he is standing directly above a light source that somehow obscures 90% of his features. When he is drawing prints that don't involve action, conveying dialogue, or much more than one or two characters he can spend his time on? He's decent but his coloring and overabundance of layering and grit weigh him down (look at the OP art insert. How does that neck work? What's with the proportions? How is Laserbeak somehow the same scale as Rumble/Frenzy/Ravage when he should be- judging by Soundwave's size- stories above their heads?). On a comic page, it's improved but historically a trainwreck. Yes, it's my opinion and no one else's fact but I almost had to quit reading the A/M/P trade because of how much of an ache the art was.
I’ve always been a massive fan of livio and his work. I’d actually put him in my favourite idw artists and have always been against a lot of the criticism he he’s had in the past and have been really happy we’ve recently seem more positive feedback, which I think he deserves. I take the point above that there are issues to which his style is better suited but think this could be said of nearly everyone. Some of his covers and splash pages are IMO absolutely stunning and real, beautiful pieces of art.
The things I notice first and foremost is that he seems to draw at an angle. If you look at the heads of most TFs, they're cubes, so looking from straight on would be a square or rectangle. Now pick literally ANY Livio pic, and you'll see that crisp 90 degree corner is more of a 120 degree corner. A nice parallelogram. Not really my bag, as when it's something that obvious it leaps out at me and seems even more exaggerated than it already is, and that's saying a lot.
While I accept that Livio's artwork is flawed I still have a soft spot for it, and in my opinion it's still better than Corin Howell's hilariously awful stuff.
Agreed, his art is some of my favorite. I don't know where this idea that art has to have realistic proportions and perspective comes from. His stuff feels otherwordly like I'm peering into a different dimension. And he's great at drawing texture which is excellent for a series mostly made of metal.
I've actually talked to Livio at TFCon this summer, i think he's a genuinely a nice guy even if i'm not the biggest fan of his art. I do think in a lot of the stories tend to work to convey the feeling but I personally am not the biggest fan of it, i just find it a little to dreary and muted and dark. I'd like to see his art with more colour.
There's a difference between skewiff geometry as mistake and skewiff geometry as stylistic affectation. In ABCWarriors, as in old Geoff Senior stuff, it lends an almost Cubist jaggedness to the characters that suits the tone of the story. It's essentially a form of caricature. In Livio's - and, to be blunt, in most of Senior's newer Transformers work, since he's clearly out of practice - the forms are simply poorly judged, a mishmash of blunted and sharpened perspectives, as if the figures were perceived through a cracked lens.
Eh. I suppose that's fair. I think they're both going for the same concept as opposed to a "mistake" (i.e. the weird dynamics in Livio's art I think is SUPPOSED to equal some kind of bold impression) but I'll agree that Livio's execution of it tends to be less skilled. Also the colors don't help a lick.
