[Plumsweet]

So I was planning on cleaning up my sketches a bit after I scanned them, make some details clearer etc. but my tablet pen is dead and the charge wire for it at my ex's apartment so until I can get over there to grab it (hopefully tonight sometime) this is all I can offer. The comic pages are very sketchy and mostly at this point want critique on the dialogue to make it sound more natural and any other suggestions.


(Looking at it now he looks really stiff, any help on making him look a little more natural? I have trouble with static poses looking TOO static, like they're a posed doll rather than a person standing still. Planned to fix his hand in sai but tablet issues. This sketch is a few months old from March. )

Wallace isn't sure how he got his power to turn into water. He was adopted and his parents don't like to talk about the "arduous, boring process" they had to go through so he knows nothing of the day he was taken into their care as a very small child.
Despite his loving Asian parents, Wallace turned into a brat, then a douche, then worked his way up the ladder to become Certified Douche.

He's got a large ego, is a womanizer (although being a man doesn't disqualify one from his attention but 'ladies are easier'), and despite having gone straight from High School to living in his crappy ass apartment in a not-entirely-sketchy area of town tends to act like a frat boy, and as a result is usually scraping quarters together for a package of ramen at the end of the week so he won't starve.

His ability to turn into water is more complex than what it sounds. While Wallace himself has no idea what he's actually doing when he shifts, he has the ability to change his molecular structure, items around him and (while he's not strong enough to do so) even other organisms into water until he changes them back. Likewise, he can also create tangible items out of water and turn them into a solid, though the structural integrity isn't always great because his strength is so poor. Using it too often causes fatigue so he generally sticks to using it for quick-wardrobe changes, showing off to get laid, and the occasional quick getaway a-la Alex Mack.

His parents are aware of his abilities and always cautioned him to be careful of who sees him use it, worrying about government experimentation, exploitation, or (if they were honest with themselves) him abusing it for illegal purposes.


Wallace spends his days doing drugs, getting fucked up, and amounting to nothing. The American Dream. He only drinks fruity girly drinks, usually bright in color and he'll always ask for a cherry even if it doesn't come with one.

So uh that's what I've got. I tried signing up years ago but I was kind of kidding myself at the time. My motivation was nonexistant and I hadn't so much as tried to draw a comic in years before that. I punched this intro comic out pretty fast though, looking for some feedback before I clean it up since it IS the first comic I've done in awhile and I'm not so good at the flow of it, or backgrounds.


Transcript for the comic as of right now (cause my handwriting is awful, I changed some dialogue, and it's probably kinda hard to follow at this stage).
"My name is wallace." [Guy walks across foreground]
"No not the leg.. " [Zoom in on puddle]
"Hang on a sec.." [Puddle starts to rise and form a figure seen from knees down]
"...Almost..!"
"There! I'm..Oh wait a sec."
"Stupid camera.."
"There we go!" Shing, sparkle sparkle, lookit that handsome devil
"I'm Wallace!"
"I grew up in the city and just moved out on my own!"
"My apartment is a little bare..." [A lonely dirty couch and tv on the floor]
"...But my fridge is well stocked!" [A 12 pack of 'ocean'grams]
"So it's not so bad. Most of my friends moved away though..." [Wallace holds a camera partly in frame, looking in a mirror]
"...but that's okay, cause I decided to start a vlog!" Make some new friends
"....Proooobably shouldn't have my powers on camera though."
"...."
"Fuck it! Hello America, I'm Wallace!"
"and I can turn into water!"
For some reason.
http://i.imgur.com/aeZPad5.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/EdeiC53.jpg

[Plumsweet]

Boyfriend gave me an actual sketchbook (rather than the teeny tiny notepad I was using originally) so just redid both the design sheet pic and the comic panels entirely. Tweaked some dialogue.


Wallace with his hands turning into water and a detail for his eye because they turn a brighter shade of blue when he uses his powers but very subtly.

And the pages:
http://i.imgur.com/hU8t28J.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/4o4y5X9.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/XhNRdPF.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/qF21mxC.jpg

[Minteh]

Hey there and welcome to void!

I won't be able to help you much with stiff poses, I'm always getting flack for that, myself hahaha.  I can give you the suggestions that I've been given though, go out and do sketches of real people, just gestural stuff.  Try to get an idea of how real people move and stand in real life vs how they look in pictures.  If there are any free life drawing events in your area try and hit them up as well.

The only critique I have right now for the comic dialogue (and from what I saw of your thumbs) is that on page 3 it seems like he's filming himself for his vlog, but on page 1 it seems like someone else is filming for him, it's more out of my own curiosity - does he have a friend helping him out or anything else like an NPC/side character who helps with filming? Remember that your comic only needs to be anywhere around 2-4 pages, and you don't have a deadline.  You want to make sure that we get a really good idea of who Wallace is, and by extension how you work at your best!

I also have a critique for the comic layout itself, I know these are thumbs however I really hope you're not going to ignore those backgrounds Also again something between pages 1 and 3, the location just seems to shift between outside and the inside of his home - is this puddle in the middle of his house? Is he moving from outside to inside?  Since he's doing a vlog it really gives some unique opportunities for camera angles I think, and an easy way to show change of location as he moves (if he's moving from place to place).

I hope this helps even a bit!

[Plumsweet]

Thank you so much for your response Oh man am I pumped now!

Yeah I realized as i was scanning them that the camera thing is kinda "wait what." It's meant to be him filming himself the whole time. I'll have to try to make that come across better. Maybe just showing the camera sitting in front of the puddle is enough, then it would become clear the first couple shots aren't HIS camera but the "comic camera" if that makes sense.

Don't worry I'm not gonna ignore the backgrounds (that's why I kinda forced myself to add some of them in to remind myself). The first couple panels take place outside and then, as he's narrating his life, he moves to his apartment to show the inside. I think with the backgrounds and adding the camera in the first couple shots before he picks it up will help establish that. I'll rework it a bit, add som more detail and flesh out the backgrounds a bit more for the empty panels especially.

If you can't tell I've literally always avoided them so this is going to be a struggle for me haha.


As far as doing gesture drawings, it's hard to draw actual people, not much of a park here to sit in, our coffeeshop is inside a target, and the area is all retail and chains, developed bt not a city? Dunno what it qualifies as, so I'm stuck with photos which I find doesn't help the stiffness as much because photos do flatten it a bit. I'll just make my boyfriend stay in one room for me long enough to draw him or something haha

Thank you! I'll work on this right away

[Kuro]

If I'm being honest, this character feels pretty bland to me. like his look, his jerkiness, it just kind of feels generic & a little lacking. I mean he's pretty much just a dude with shaggy hair in a t-shirt & pants. What else can you do to make him more unique/intriguing? The water power's neat & all but it's not much of a hook. For me anyway.

Same with what I can make out of the comic so far too. I get the camera pov thing & realize a lot of things are set to have it sit at a certain angle, but it's all feeling very same-y since he's fairly static, & all the panels are drawn the same way. I had an idea for doing a similar thing with intro pages for a character i still may or may not do involving it was a character filming them self. The solution I had to reduce the redundancy of the angles & vary things up was to actually have the character hold the camera, not keep it locked off. Even if you had him do it after having it on the ground when he's a puddle. Which, btw, how does it zoom? Anyway, that way too, you can have him show us things from that perspective instead of suddenly cutting from that view & expecting the reader to just follow a sudden omniscient perspective. I mean the intro's only 4 pages. Why not just keep that happening?

With your poses, in order to add some more dynamics to your poses, I think you ought to pay attention to how your character's weighted. Like in the two pictures here, he's standing with his knees bent in a way that makes his feet feel floaty. Sketch out the figure in full but have a good idea on where the ground's going to fall rather than drawing the body & then just assuming where his feet end is where the floor ends up being. Once they're firmly planted think about how he carries himself. Is there a lean to it? Add as much as you want so long as it manages some semblance of balance. To do that, a lot of cartoonists base their character's postures on an 's' curve. Head & neck slope forward ever so slightly before going back into the shoulders. They slope out into the torso & hips before slowly retreating back to where the feet are eventually planted. Adding that helps take stiffness away.

[Plumsweet]

I get what you mean. I havn't started reworking the pages yet but I'll give that a try. I'm kind of weak when it comes to poses and angles but I'll still give it a shot long as you guys coach me if it looks hella wrong when I do haha. Especially since my 'test audience' (my boyfriend) said it was kinda hard to read too. I still like the vlog idea for his intro so I'll try to rework it. Maybe change it into his house from the get go and make it more obvious he's picking up the camera from somewhere too.

As for his design, I don't think I'm going to change it. He has a lot more to his personality once it actually gets into it a bit more (I've used him in roleplay to help get a better feel for it), lot more to his story that I'm not telling yet, and plenty of characters out there are basically "boy in t-shirt." I think because of his powers and because of how I plan to utilize them that simple is best. If you have any specific suggestions I'll take them into consideration but I'm pretty happy with his design since some of my older characters have had a little TOO much going on. I appreciate the suggestion but he's really meant to be an average guy who just happens to change into water. The kind of guy that until he opens his mouth and says something to tick you off that you might not otherwise notice in a crowd.

Though again if you have any specific suggestions towards that let me hear it

[Plumsweet]

So I realized while scanning these that I made five pages not four

:I So I need to find a way to cut down a page without losing the

action I really want in here and I kinda got an idea in my mind of

how I can but for now here's what I've got. I took a lot of what you

said into consideration while remaking it and I think it's a lot

stronger this time so thank you!


I did what you suggested Kuro and was more aware of having his feet grounded and it looks 100 times better than the other one to me, thank you! Anything look off on the new sketch? I also made some of his accessories a little more clear in this sketch but he's pretty plain on default, but he can wear pretty much anything swagboys and hipsters wear.
Edit to add: Also I know he looks tilted but that's from the paper being slightly tilted in the scanner. Took me a bit to figure out why it looked so off when it looks fine on paper. When it comes time to do the lineart and what not I'll be scanning these with a bit more care obviously. and with my own scanner, not this weird one.

Transcript again if needed. Thinking of cutting out most of the first page and maybe doing a new one to tie a few panels from the second and third page and hopefully fit the last one somehow. Hoping I won't have to redraw too much :/ but if i did its my own oopsie. Also it goes from red to blue, sorry, thought i was out of blue but found some at my apartment looking for my now completely lost tablet pen, so it might be awhile before I can finish these regardless.

http://i.imgur.com/6BX9E8D.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/o7zjSgz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/HeUevb6.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/yfzAyaP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/lknpWFQ.jpg

"Hey there!"
"I'm Wallace. I'm 23,"
"and I just got my own place"
"right in the heart of the city!"
"It's not a TERRIBLE neighborhood..."
"I mean it's not GOOD"
"Haven't met anyone yet, though..."

"So!"
"That's why I'm making a vlog!"
"Not that I have much to blog about..."
"I don't really do much."
"Can't really talk about what I DO do, heh."
"Let me set this do-!"

THUMP
"Fuck!"
CRASH BOOM THUNDAH

"Well that was fucking embarassing..."
"Shit."
"Now I have to edit this..."
I don't know how to edit...

AHEM
"Laaaaadies~ (and gents <3), My name is Wallace!"
"As you can see I'm a sexy bachelor,"
"Living across from Tom's Deli," (iffy on this dialogue on this page

in general :/)
"and I...!"
"Can turn into water~"

[E.W. Schneider]

Hey, welcome to the site. One small thing I noticed you were getting wrong on your anatomy was that you're making your feet too short. On a whole, your foot is the same length as your elbow to your wrist (try it yourself!) and it's making his stand feel a little awkward I think. I have to echo Kuro a bit here, as the character isn't jumping out at me super hard with his design. The water powers and stuff are fine, but he just seems like another person to me. Even small details on his person could bring a lot out about his personality. Your more recent drawing here definitely does that, but it still falls short for me. Since he doesn't seem to dress up in any costume, you should try perusing some fashion magazines, which would have the added benefit of giving you some more studies to work from.

Also, does all of him turn into water or just his hands? If he throws a 'splash' of his hands somewhere, can the hand reconstitute and walk around like Thing from the Addams Family? This has promise though, keep at it.

[Plumsweet]

Well since so many people agreed on it I went ahead and tweaked his design a bit, or rather gave him some more stylish clothes and accessories. I got several pitures done and with that in mind I want to ask a question: I know the design sheet needs to be in color but say I wanted to show alternate outfits on it as well. Could they be in black and white or do they also need to be in color? If it's the latter then I'll just post them elsewhere and reuse the outfits in later comics unless I'm feeling super motivated to finish them.

All of him can turn into water and he can turn other objects into water or create them from water as well. The more complicated the less stable it (or he, if he changes his body) is. I showed in the new sketch here how he can basically throw his limbs off but once they're off they tend to turn right into water unless he puts a lot of his power into keeping it stable (which isn't really worth the strain).  My "science" for how he does it is that his powers basically can rearrange molecules, but Wallace's official reason for how is "Fuck if I know."

He also becomes more unstable if he's emotional or pissed off or whatever and it can either flood the room he's in or create a sort of tsunami around him that he could aim at an opponent. He's not much of a fighter though and he uses his powers for frivolous shit so he's not really strong and only uses a small fraction of his potential (and because he's kind of a lazy guy he probably won't reach it without a good reason to work harder).

Thank you for your critique roflqu! It means a lot, I'm feeling really good about this.


New design

I kept looking at this wondering why he looked so sideways, unsure if I had my sketchbook tilted while drawing or something but I think now its his right leg so I'll touch that up now, aside from that, how's this look? I want to make the necklace something both versatile that he could wear in any outfit and interestng without being too intricate but for now I'm just using shapes for placeholders. I took in consideration what you said about the feet roflqu while remembering what Kuro said but it still looks kinda off but maybe that's just because that whole one leg is wrong.


Test bust I did to see how he'd look in a hat.

Alternate outfit. Didn't have any fashion magazines (well not with any men's fashion) and my internet was out for most of the day so I just used some of my boyfriend's outfits and tweaked them to suit Wallace.


Alternate outfit


And I got the pages sorted out to go down to just four but I gotta rework the dialogue on the first two slightly.
http://i.imgur.com/Du8Svj4.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KiOBOYt.jpg (Note about the top panels, I'm going to have the image rotated within the boxes so it's more clear it's the camera picture shifting, I didn't think about it until after I'd sketched it.)
http://i.imgur.com/mtHbBdA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2iy6Se9.jpg (and this one shows his capabilities with his powers in terms of turning a tangible object (his shirt) into water to remove it)


Also happily my roommate found my tablet wire so I'll actually be able to finish these soon once I start the lineart.

[Heathen]

Doesn't he have a face you just wanna take a potato peeler to?

[Plumsweet]

I don't know what you mean by that?

[Frazzler]

Hey, it's good to see all the development work being done!

One great thing is Wallace is very recognisable in all your images. You're certainly not suffering from redrawing your character identifiably, which is super important!
He has a kinda perma-smirk going on here. I think that's what Dino is referring to (smirking dudes come off as dicks and make us wanna punch 'em). Now that's not something we often see in real life, though there are exceptions. And it's good to see that it's mixed up a bit in your test pages here, but just bear in mind "If a guy becomes a douche and nobody's around to see it, does it make a smirk?"

Another thing that has jumped out is his most common pose. On your new design sheet, and a few other images here, he has two bent legs. One forward facing, the other in profile. I'm noticing two potential issues. The first is that his shins are too long compared to his thighs. It's certainly very easy to draw knees too high, and I would just urge you to check that. Knees should just be half way down It also seems as if his heels are together, so rather than appearing in the 'relaxed' pose that I think you were going for, it seems closer to a weird squat. The biggest tip I would give is thinking about why you would bend your legs. It's a case of balance mostly. A character with a straight back is gonna need straight legs to keep him upright. If his legs are bent however, he's gonna need to lean/hunch in order to balance that out. So Wallace would look a lot more natural with either straight legs, or throw a little bend in that back, have him lean forward slightly because as he stands now, he's on the brink of toppling backwards.

I mean, really, the simplest thing to do is either physically, or mentally draw a line from between the centre of the characters feet directly upwards. Equal amounts of 'weight' should fall on each side to pull off a balanced look. This obviously doesn't apply to action shots blah blah.

The image of Wallace leaning on the wall is great though. Your legs are proportioned really well and his weight is well distributed.

Regarding your intro story, think about what you want to tell us. What is gonna add flavour to Wallace, and any cool tidbits for potential opponents?
At the moment we find out he's in Void (kind of a given).
And after starting his vlog he openly admits to having nothing to vlog about. I know it's simply an intro comic, but if he's gonna vlog I think it would be more engaging for the viewers to see him enthusiastic about it. If we see your character being apathetic we're less likely to engage. Maybe seeing him casually using the water powers to move his camera or arrange shots would be a more natural and interesting way of revealing that information to us. Either way, I think having him film himself is a creative way to do it.

Aside from that, don't be afraid of planning out pages small, and in a way that reflects the final dimensions of your comic page. Take it from me, it's gonna save a lot of annoying resizing and redrawing down the line if you're trying to cram shots in.

Keep at it, and looking forward to colour!

[Plumsweet]

Phew have been having a bit of a difficult time offline lately, got a move coming up and stressing mad hard so I haven't been able to really work on this much, but I'm still working on it. Starting a new job next week too so gonna try to get at least the character sheet finished soon.

Here's the latest sketch for the chara sheet and I'm inclined to keep this one since i'm pretty happy with the basics on it.




I'm not so sure if I wanna change the comic quite that much but since I'll have some time before I can actually work on it again I'll play around with the idea, but I'm kinda happy with the way the intro is now. I'm hoping the dialogue will help more wth telling what kind of person he is and I've gotta revise that pretty hardcore cause I'm not happy with the flow of that at all, feels too unnatural. Probably won't get into that until next week or so once my move is over so I'll take your suggestions into consideration, thank you

Thank all of you honestly, I've gotten a lot of great feedbac from all of you and it's really helped me, I feel like I've improved a lot already.

[Plumsweet]

Computer died awhile ago so putting a pause on this in particular until I get a new one in the coming months. I haven't given up!

[Thresher]

You better not have! We want to see what comics you make!