This is my first attempt at making simple comics. These comics will not be heavy on story for now because of the fact that i am still learning the art of it all. I have already made some major discoveries from simply attempting this, and I am going to go through each panel and talk a little about what may or may not have went wrong, and what went pretty good for a first time inking.
Alright, so in panel one we have the title of the cartoon, Robo. The first mistake that I made with this is the fact that the three lines under the last O don't follow the same fashion as the rest of the word, they don't have the same 3D feel as the rest for i forgot to give them depth. The Robots placement in this frame worked really well and yes, his head does float, but its a cartoon so I have that kind of freedom. The problem with him is that i tried to give him too much detail, well I gave pretty much everything too much detail, but I will talk about this later. As for the clouds, I will just address those now. So what I was originally going for was some realistic clouds, but my comic in general is not meant to look entirely realistic, so there was mistake number one for the clouds. Mistake number two is that I still need to learn to do better shadowing if I wanted to even achieve realistic clouds. Lastly, I attempted to draw them to quickly, Clouds are delicate and so I must take more care into their construction. One final not on this panel is that with the words none of them followed an identical feel of simplicity. That is pretty much the same for all the scenes with clouds in them.
Panel 2. Now i rather like panel 2 because it is a very close up shot of the little robot fellow and so you should see more detail, I did again go overboard with this but at least I am learning for my mistakes. The button teeth came out pretty well, I don't know if i would go with a complete shade with the edges of each button again. Now for the small portions of the eyes that you can see I purposefully went with two different looks, one completely filled in, all but the reflections, and one a little less dramatic. I think the less dramatic one went better, I need to better learn white space conservation, as I need to better learn a ton of things (literally). There is one line in the face detail that doesn't follow the others, simply a mistake of going to fast again.
Panel 3 the clouds actually are not that bad on the left side of the robot, the right side is a little dark, but these are the closest to what I was trying to do with the clouds, I don't think I would do them again like this either way. Now the details upon Robo's face are much to bold, and I take any responsibility for any sore eyes they may have caused. The lines around Robo are supposed to be sun-rays, but they flopped and so i would try something different next time, maybe pencil a few ideas out first. Speaking of penciling, I left a lot of it in because i could not find my good eraser. The left eye looks more appealing than the right in this frame, this is not a coincidence.
Panel 4 has some solid ideas that just didnt come out how I had planned, but will only improve as i get better. FIRST OFF, TURN CAPS LOCK OFF. Check. Now as for the clouds, just ignore them, but behind the clouds, that is a water tower. I did not attempt to look at any images of water towers because that would have only made sense, so this is drawn from memory, sorta. What the watch tower does give me is the possibility for a location in which to set my comic, as opposed to this field of clouds. The claw. Well the claw had its ups and downs, the ups would be the serial number on the wrist, I can go into some backstory into his creation, so its a nice bit of info. The downs though are the fact that the claw itself is much too rounded, i wanted to go for a good number of sharp angles in Robo on everything but his flexible arms. They claws also don't appear to be able to work even if they were real, the joint is much out of place. The wind sweeps in the sky are kind of nice and give a bit of movement in a rather still first page, but they are still a bit too sloppy.
Panel 5 reveals to the reader that Robo has no legs, revealing a bit more of the character than if i had just done a fully body shot, it would have revealed to much in too short of time. The problem with this shot is that i drew the right side of his body wrong, i drew it too flat, giving him the appearance of being a cardboard box, which he is not. Also the shadow that corresponds in the grass doesn't fit to how i drew the body. The grass overall was drawn rather well, the only thing it does is make the clouds appear to be bushes but thats not the grasses fault. I tried to go easy on the body detail for this shot which worked out a little better, but the reflections of light i did draw shouldn't be there is relation the the shadow. I still don;t know if i want to be concerned with shadow placement in general. Maybe a little here and there, but not to much, I mean it is supposed to be cartoony still. The bit of claw you do see is the only reason I will ever need for not free-handing with a permanent writing material, unless i'm doing it on purpose of course. You can still see part of the original sketch that i completely neglected.
Panel 6 is bit confusing, the clouds you see are supposed to be dust being kicked up by the wind, but the wind that I drew is drawn in a different direction, so my bad. The expression on Robo's face is exactly what i was going for. It's actually kind of funny because I use a gameboy to kind of determine how to draw to placement of Robo from whatever angle i was going for at the time. I cannot decide whether the body detail is where I should be headed for more, or if it sucks entirely. The lines for robo are a bit sloppy, I should definitely attempt to straighten all of my lines.
Panel six sucks.
And in panel 7, I was going for an extreme closeup of one of the eyes. I tried to show a closed aperture but also show it was behind glass, lets just say I should stick with more simple things for now. Also the metal detail could have been refined.
Overall I made a truck load of mistakes that I can hopefully learn from, if you have any tips or pointers, I am more than happy to hear them.
Thanks for reading.
