EOiNA 8 — Reality Intrudes
Apr04
And now, off to Miranda’s house, I’m sure nothing but fun could come from that!
The Wotch
A comic by Anne Onymous and Robin Ericson
The Wotch
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And now, off to Miranda’s house, I’m sure nothing but fun could come from that!
Nice to see the return to the story, been missing this comic for awhile and a half.
So how long is this arc gonna be? I kinda wanna see the entire world in this style.
I love the expression on his face in the beat panel. You can just hear him thinking, “Oh wait. That’s pretty much my daily life now, isn’t it?”
I wonder how old the main characters are now.
They’re still between 15 and 16. It’s just that Andy’s art they appear older. Don’t be surprised if they look “younger” with different art.
I’m really starting to like this art style
Call me a whiner. But I think I preferred the simplistic style of the original comic. But that’s just my opinion and taste.
yeh a little here as well but i like it still
I also agree.
I know some critics where hitting this comic for not improving the art style but really that is BS look at the peanut comic its simple and tasteful and guess what people are not bashing it for art style as its how it is intended and to me its the same for this comic it is how its style is.
I did think the original style was good; had a very Garfield-esk look.
However, I think this new style might be a good compliment to the slightly darker tone the comic gradually has taken as it’s gone along. More “mature” if you will. It kind of mirrors the overall arc as the story went from naive kids just messing around for innocent fun, to somewhat more tried and jaded individuals who know any moment they may have to fight to save their own lives.
What’s wrong with Garfield? And often a simplistic and kid friendly style can belie the subject matter.
yeah! Your back making more. I’m a fan. I first read your comic probably back in ’05, think it was the one with the centaur crossover. Nice to know didn’t permanently stop during the down period.
That joke cracked me up.
Its been years and usually I delete urls that are no longer active. Glad to see something up again. Its been a long time and I have missed my Wotch fix.
I have to say I like and liked both art styles. The first progressed over time as all do (look at earlier Peanuts vs his last) and this. This is more rich, vibrant with the images whereas the other did have a simplistic touch of not being overly cluttered on the characters.
Well I said my piece and what for the next here.
The new art style is pretty nice. I like how it more accurately depicts their age. One suggestion I’d have for the artist is to make the lines around the female characters’ lips a little more solid. It looks broken-up from whatever resolution the comic is uploaded at and it kind of makes them look like they have stubble or crumbs or something lining their mouth. Otherwise good work!
Hey! Thanks for the suggestion. I think it has to do with the resolution when I send it to Robin to color. I’ll try to thinker them up in hopes of fixing the problem!
No problem. Keep up the good work!
Glad to see the comic updating once more! Can’t tell ya how much I’ve hoped to see it continue.
Ah, the scoobs are back. And it looks like the maniacal magic follows.
Now to check to see how well the archives survived.
i do not like the look of the lips though i do hope that is improved but i am liking the style
Try not to break the fourth wall. Artistically you’re in an unfortunate spot where you’re too realistic to be silly and too silly to be realistic, so if you’re going to make them space off into the fourth wall it’s going to creep out the readers. And it is spacing off – if you imagine there’s no camera in front of the guy’s face, where are his eyes pointed? Dead ahead, at some very faraway point, maybe a sad point in his history when his mom ran the dog over. He’s talking to Anne, so the better thing to do would be to point his eyes at Anne.
You may want to refrain from relying on close ups. They can save you time, but it’s a high skill thing, and so far you haven’t had a character open their mouth more than an inch while speaking! If you ratchet back on the realism to do a cartoony style instead, boobs won’t be as fun to draw but you’ll save a ton of time and wind up better off aesthetically. If you plan on doing more close-ups at this art level, start drilling the heck out of faces. Until then, it’ll be easier on the reader if you do more wide shots than close ones.
I mean, it’s Jason you’re talking about here. Jason. If anyone’s aware they’re in a comic, it’s him.
Even if you are intentionally breaking the fourth wall, the character’s eyes are looking directly into a camera. You imagine the camera must be somewhere close to his face during a close-up, so his line of vision should cross or converge at where the camera is located. If the line of his vision is parallel you get that “thousand yard stare” effect.
It’s not just the last panel where the eyes are a little weird. Third to last panel we’ve got a thousand yard stare towards screen left. In the second, large panel, both Anne and Jason appear to be making rather intense eye contact with a spider in the corner of the ceiling. The red head in the bubble panel either has her computer screen mounted high on the wall or she’s communicating with God.
I’m guessing the artist might be trying to avoid giving his characters a bewildered, wide-eyed look by making it so the iris is always touching the edge of the eyelids. It’s another pitfall of trying to draw realistic faces. In a human eye, the diameter of the iris is large enough to take up most of the vertical space between the two eyelids, so if you can see the whole iris, it means your eyes are open very wide and you must be surprised.
But if you look at the girls compared to Jason, the girls have much larger eyes and the same sized irises. If the girls look straight ahead, they may appear startled because you’ll be able to see the whole iris plus some extra white space above and below. This is what I mean when I say the art is too serious to be silly and too silly to be serious. Liberties are being taken to make the eyes bigger so they’ll look prettier, like a cartoon, but the proportions are simultaneously trying to remain realistic. It’s liable to give the artist some trouble and he might need to experiment with some minor tweaks to make it work. Maybe draw the irises and pupils bigger on the girls and see if looks okay.
Stuff like this is why close-ups are high skill work. I’m not knocking the artist – generally you always put your best guys on doing close-ups. It takes a lot of technical skill and knowledge, because unlike most other things, it’s really easy to find yourself in the uncanny valley with faces. People quickly recognize when something is a little off about a face, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it. To consistently do them well in a realistic style is pretty challenging.
Please, keep criticizing the art. It’s not like this type of maltreatment has already run off two artists or anything!
Nobody’s paying anything for this right now, and I doubt you ever paid anything for it (unlike myself, who has about 120 bucks’ worth of pins!). If you were a patron in Renaissance times, I might understand your feeling that you can demand the artist change to suit your preferences…as it is, I’ll just leave this here instead:
http://www.egscomics.com/egsnp.php?id=176
There’s two brands of artists. The type that hates all their work and only moves past the flaws because the deadline is looming, and the type who feels that same way but can’t tolerate redlining and who get emotional when you need a redraw. Both can be fine artists but the former is easier to work with.
It’s not the criticism that drives artists away, it’s the sheer amount of work for zero reward. I know a professional who could do a comic a little larger than this in a day and it would look fantastic, but he’d spend the whole day on it and skip meals. I’ve known him to wake up and not move from his desk until it’s time to go to bed. Comics are not inexpensive, is what I’m saying. If you’d want to keep a team without burning anyone out, I’d put two to three people on this for sketch, lines, and color. People will work for passion, but sometimes passionate people don’t realize how much time they’re agreeing to spend on a project.
Anyway, I’m commenting because this artist is certainly doing something. There’s practice here, but it’s missing some core fundamentals that you can thankfully learn from verbal or written instructions. There’s a bunch going on aside from the faces that betray the artist might be self taught. There’s volumes and 3D, but the perspective is crazy. The window, couch, and the desk are vanishing to different points. This is definitely a case where the artist’s eye has gotten used to seeing shapes, but he needs to focus on technique.
Are you here to help him or to troll him. Personally I think its the latter in that there is no reason for it. This comic had been offline for some time and when we get one you have now let it be known that you are to be their ‘critic’ whether they want it or not. For many of us, we appreciate the fact that someone has taken up the mantel to restart this after years of hiatus.
If anything your critique should be placed in the forums and not here. If you wish to make your preferences known, there would be a place where others would, I’m sure, be better prevaricated.
Also are you willing to forgo all monetary gain and will lend us your freelance ability in providing us entertainment with the story or will you be one to say that your not paid enough to do so. But I daresay that I’m sure is not to be your intention. You droll on with your critique as if this were a Rembrandt or Picasso but where were you when the original artists were drawing or were they to beneath you to comment?
Personally I like it for its far better than staring at a blank space.
I usually don’t do this, but let me reply to some of the comments.
First, Jason isn’t breaking the fourth wall. Notice the headset? He is still talking with Anne, Katie and Wolfie and making the sort of snarky comment that Jason would make to those who understand it.
As for the positioning of the eyes and the “thousand yard stare”, to those who have gone to LAN parties or just watched those doing on-line gaming, the odd looks and the “blank stare” is something that is all too common with people talking to others in their parties — between rounds and during cool-down times.
As to your comment that “It’s not the criticism that drives artists away, it’s the sheer amount of work for zero reward,” that’s not quite true. Criticism — not constructive criticism but just criticism — is a negative value. It’s been said that 100 “attaboys” can be wiped out by one “dammit”. And there have been a LOT of “dammits” associated here.
Everybody loves Ian’s art… now. But he received the same gripes and complaints because his style — great as it is — *wasn’t Anne’s*. Now Andy’s both received and is receiving a lot of the same gripes and complaints because his style *isn’t Ian’s*. You can’t win.
And even if comment one didn’t come from the readers, there isn’t a “zero reward”. A lot of feedback comes from me (as writer and editor), both positive and negative. There are things that I think are great and things that I think should be changed. But my comments to Andy are (I hope) constructive.
Both Ian and Andy started off as *fan artists* of the Wotch. And I’ve watched (and hopefully helped at times) them get better and better in their craft. I know that I have been blessed to work with both of them and have improved by such as well.
That awkward stare is because the lines of vision are parallel in the drawing. The lines always intersect at where you’re looking, so if you have no clear intersection, it’s not a blank stare, it’s a “thousand yard stare” because the character is resting his eyes at a point a thousand yards away. Thom, just take a minute and look around your room without specifically trying to focus on anything. You’ll find your eyes snapping to points involuntarily or looking in the direction you’re moving your head. The “thousand yard stare” is an incredibly specific expression.
Even if you take a few moments to completely relax and unfocus your eyes, if you turn your head too far your eyes will refocus and snap to something. If you’re seriously handing out a hundred “attaboys” while justifying a totally common art mistake as some kind of stylistic choice, you might be doing more harm than good. His line of vision doesn’t intersect. It’s a thousand yard stare. He looks directly at the camera. He’s breaking he fourth wall. You don’t have to sugarcoat it.
These are normal mistakes that are within your artist’s skill to change. It’s not like he isn’t seeing a shape and it’s causing massive problems. He appears to have the shape thing on a working level. It’s that he needs to move the eyes. He can and should move the eyes. I get that you don’t want to be harsh, but there’s a difference between railing on someone for something they don’t have the vision to grasp yet versus something like this where I know the artist was sitting there, looking at it, thinking to himself, “Shoot, what do I do with the eyes? Why do the eyes look weird?”
If I were you, judging by what you’re telling me, I would be extremely careful when guiding artists in the future. You can ruin people if you don’t know for sure what you’re doing. It would be terrible if you applauded someone for practicing a bad fundamental until it became muscle memory to them. Then they have to unlearn a train wreck.
Hey Anon, artist here.
Just for the record, I’m pretty chill with complaints. So I actually appreciate many of the points that you have brought up. I am very self taught actually, only about 4 years of art under my belt, so I do hope to become much better.
Unfortunately, art isn’t something that comes naturally to me so I really have to work on it every day.
So basically you are gonna be stuck with an amateur artist for a bit, but hopefully I can continue to progress on my journey to art nirvana!
Feel free to give me any suggestions or ideas (or tutorial links) here dophoro@gmail.com
Also to anyone who is wondering, I missed this weeks deadline because of a family tragedy, but I should be back on schedule soon
Hey Andy,
Sorry to hear about your family. Time off to get a clear head and good heart for things is always a good idea. Never work when injured and keep your spirits up!
For tutorials, here’s a good site for some technical basics:
http://drawabox.com/
I think you can skip the line exercises. Those are about developing muscle memory, but the lessons about drawing boxes and extruding shapes in perspective is important because practicing simple shapes in perspective is a thing a lot of people skip when they’re self taught. People like to start by drawing things they want to draw and growing up around that, which I suppose could leave you with “air bubbles” in your form if that makes any sense. Like, you have structure, but there are pockets of void here and there. It sounds really rudimentary, but I know a guy who screens artists by asking them to draw boxes and he weeds out a surprising number of applicants that way.
If nothing else, just review the lessons and quickly try the exercises to see if you find some unexpected stumbling blocks.
As for faces, that’s a matter of practice. Gesture drawing sites can help you out, and there are plenty of good ones. A site with a bunch of unique models on file is best. With the girls’ eyes, I’ve been there and done that. It took me a little while to figure out why the faces looked so screwy. If you do a cartoony thing where you’ve got a great big eye and great big pupil then you get away with it more, but the more realistic stuff needs more complicated tricks to look natural.
Anyway, from where you’re at, you’ll probably get some pretty rapid improvement with few technical changes! I learned while surrounded by better artists than myself, and even the nicest guys would mercilessly redline everything I drew. The most hostile person would tell me, “This is horrible. I want you to look at this and tell me what you think you’ve done,” and I’d say I’ve drawn a hand. She would just tell me, “No you haven’t,” and wait for me to completely redraw the thing. So I don’t know, I think mental anguish is a part of learning art you never get past. If you didn’t hate all your old work, that would mean all your new work hasn’t improved enough.
Good luck and stick at it! Comics are a great way to learn. Don’t be afraid to change the style to make it look better. It’s normal to curl your toes up and cringe when you flip from the newest page to the oldest one.
Also, sorry for not sending that link to your e-mail. I still am surrounded by better artists than myself. I’ve had this technical stuff pounded into me for quite a while now but I still have a bad eye for shapes and volumes. If anyone I worked with found out I was giving advice to someone, it would eventually circulate back to a someone who would disembowel me. They’ve sadly found that beratement makes me frustrated, which makes me fix things, and I make my living this way so this is my life now. Better to be anon in some cases!
I don’t know about anyone else, but I enjoy this comic and hope I can keep enjoying it.
Me too!
The art has much improved over the last few chapters. Wonder if it’ll stick.
I see the attempt to draw lips on girls not wearing makeup; a spotty line marking where the edge of the lips would be… but I don’t care for it. Looks more like they have spotty facial hair. Better to do lips in a slightly pinker colour than fleshtone, without an outline, and if the exact edge of the lip-flesh is not perfectly distinct, that’s okay too.