Thank you everybody for the crits!  I know a lot of you mentioned the gray shading not working, and I'm looking forward to experimenting with a new technique next time.  Hopefully I can work on cleaning up the lineart more while I'm at it.  I'm glad so many of you liked the interaction between the characters, and I'll try to keep the stories fresh in comics to come.  Philip C, I too would've liked to do more with the final fight.  D:  Time constraints hit me hard by that page.  Next time I'll have to be sure to leave myself room for epicness.

Thank you Penryn88, for my first battle!  You put up a good contest, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of your work spring up around the site.  

OK thanks

Sure, just PM me on the forums and I'll see what I can do

Sydney!!! thanks for the great fight, i was an honor to take a loss to you . thanks everyone for the great crits.
Angie, i may take you up on the one on one help, if its ok with you may send you some drawings i'll try to color and you can do your thing, and show me the ways  I'll read over your post first and try to apply some of it before i bug you with that though.
Red, i was going to color my next fight but i'm gonna take your advice and work on my lines, right now i'm using a 12/0 round brush, a Manga/"G" nib and a .05 extra fine rolling ball, do you have any suggestions as to what to use for a good result? same question to you too master loki i NEED line width!
Phil & Kuro, yeah my first 2 pages were colored at about 650-700 width, the size the pages are now, but i showed a friend my progress and he told me to at least double that to color, i did and thats way the last 3 looked better then the first two, I wish I would have had the time to go back and recolor the first two cause i think that was a big reason i lost this battle, and from now on i'm gonna try to give myself a nice cushion in case i need to go back and fix something. anyways, Phil, could you put up a direct link to that post? i looked for it but i couldn't find it. Kuro, what size do you think i should color at? the last 3 were at about 13-1400width, i thought i worked pretty good, but i'm am very new to color
Anyways wrapping this up thanks guys, i'm glad you enjoyed it if you did. Or if you hated it, read through it, and critted anyways, thanks especially. I'm gonna try to absorb all this and apply it, hopfully i should have another battle up in a month or two.

Not bad you two

Sydney: I'm gonna side with the majority about using grey for shading, it really made your comic look dirty overall. Faces also need a lot of work but that's nothing some regular life drawing and facial references can't fix up (When in doubt, draw as many faces as you can). Aside from the art, I thought your story here was the strongest out of the two. I liked how they interacted with one another without it being a meet greet and fight, but I felt the ending was a bit of a let down since the build up was good, I dunno... I guess I'd like to see Thomas do more than just drop a curtain on the bad guy. Still, I thought this was a pretty good first battle, let's see you push the boundaries of what you can do in the next one.

Penryn88: Also a pretty strong showing, although for scanning, try scanning everything at 300dpi (AKA: Printing size), this makes it so that your scanner picks up everything you've put onto the paper, and clean up is a breeze when you shrink down the page since light marks such as stray pencil markings or other stuff on the paper can disappear! But check out the forums for some clean up tips, Lysol had a great one that could help you keep your inks nice and clean no matter what you do. The story was OK, but I think it could of been better really, I liked how it was a comic without any dialogue so that's a plus. Just wish this wasn't a meet and fight type of deal. Still you seem to have a good sense of humor that fit well with this comic, so overall this was also a good first battle for ya.



Still lots to improve upon, but hopefully your next comics will be loads better. My vote goes to Sydney.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone!  It's going to help me tons on my next battle!  

Sydney: I thought the interaction between the characters was great. The coloring though, it was like soooo many brush strokes! Like Angie said, I think it works in some places, but in other places it just doesn't. The only other thing that stood out to me was that your text seemed huge in parts. This was pretty good though, keep trying other things in terms of coloring though!

Penryn: I'm really glad that you are experimenting, that's great. Especially with line weights, that's going to help you a lot. I'd suggest taking a step back though... away from color and really focus on the quality of your lines. I always say that you should make your comic look good without the help of color/editing program. Brushes are awesome, but keep experimenting too. I went to my art supply store and just bought a ton of different pens and found which ones worked for me. Overall, I think I liked that last page the best (not just because of the TL Bots haha, thank you!!) but because you really paid attention to the backgrounds, the bike in the foreground was a nice little touch.

Sydney-I'm torn on the expressive coloring. I think it works fine for things like the curtains, but not as well on the figures. It also looks like you were trying to use grey to shade on the skin which is a big no no. I've done a whole big thing on coloring in the forums http://entervoid.com/board/index.php?topic=9939.0 here that covers color palettes and such. Generally it's best to avoid using grey to shade with other colors. (well in any painting class my teacher took away everyone's blacks to keep people from ever using grey but in comics it's normally okay)  I thought you had some good pacing and expressions, I also enjoyed the interaction between the two characters. I think at the moment the big things to focus on are making your lineart a little more tight and refining those colors. Very good for a first battle dude, keep it up!

Penryn88-I was glad to see you had plenty of backgrounds! I think you took some good steps up from your intros. I think this may have been more successful as a black and white entry as the quality of the scan seems to muddy up the colors quite a bit. As for your coloring, take a look at my topic I linked in the above crit, I can also help you 1 on 1 with your colors. But in general you want to avoid super saturated colors. Try to give yourself a specific light source to go from since it looks like a lot of the panels where you had shading it wasn't clear where the lighting was coming from. At the moment the big thing to work on is your shading and color choice color wise. Lineart wise you're still looking a little shaky, you don't have to go all crazy with a ruler or anything, but some refining in things like your buildings would help make things look a bit more professional.

Good job both of you on your first battle!

well i had a proper critique, but dude...
SLAUGHTERFACE DOESN'T WORK FOR THE MAN! IN HIS GILDED CATHEDRAL OF COMMERCE NO LESS! LETTING CURRENCY SOIL HIS PERFECT HANDS!

(of course i'm entirely kidding & laughed my ass off when i saw him. but now to get to the proper critique part... )

sydney, the biggest thing that stood out to me were the layouts. i mean it starts with three panels on top of one another & a tall one to the right. typically, intuitively, the eye wants to go left to right before it starts working down. now that's not to say you can NEVER do that sort of thing, but usually you need something in the panels themselves that tangentially leads the eye. which brings me to another issue. it seemed like a lot of the default camera shots were tights of faces & generally facing the left hand of the page. when the eyes are moving across the page, seeing something facing the opposite way of the eye flow is like a subconscious brick wall that effects your pacing. really my only advice is to look at the pages of professionals & see how they construct the page from an eye flow stand point. see if a shape or form leads you into the next or stops you dead in your tracks because it's intended to do as such. and every guy aside from ethos had relatively the same shaped face & build. even the black cop outside in the beginning. beyond that, along the lines of what monday was saying, between your guy's brown trenchcoat & the brown seats & brown stage & brown curtains in the theaters, everything just kind of muddled together & felt bleh. at least varying & using lighter shades would be enough to help make things stand out or push in.

penryn, to be honest, the big bleedy color strokes in the beginning weren't doing it for me but later on it felt like other bits (like with the atm) got sloppy in too tight a sense. i'd really recommend doing the flats first & filling in all the lines & being as clean & concise as possible before moving onto the painting & highlights & shadows. generally i'd also pick a less chaotic palette to work with. the brown bear on solid red bits for instance. the giant primary/secondary shade backgrounds later too. add some different hues in there. also, what size are you drawing these at? the line art seems awfully thick. I'd recommend working larger & scaling down later.
Thanks very much for the slaughterface cameo! i chuckled out loud here at work!

Penryn: I completely laughed out loud when Thomas turned into a bear, it could have been just me, but I think it was well placed with the "emotional" complex of things. I think your line widths could have been thicker and the like and as for your coloring, my main problem was the it does not look that clean because there tends to be a lot of white space or colors out of the lines, especially in pages one and two. On your other pages, it cleans up a little better. But yeah, I just see a lot of white random dots everywhere or colors overlapping. If you spent time doing touch ups, I think it could have been better. Cleaner flats in my opinion, are better than messy ones with a bit of shading, so spend more time on it!

Sydney: I told you kind of what I thought over messenger. I really liked your coloring style from your intros over the one here, just because I thought it looked a lot cleaner and this one looked a little bit more rushed.I understand you were going for darker, but you could have used a much darker inking style as well as less saturated colors rather than doing random brush strokes everywhere. It looked good at times, like on the people who are hiding in the theater, but I think sometimes it was a bit overdone especially on panels without backgrounds and you used the lines to keep it from being flat. The story was pretty decent, I loved when Dr. Ethos showed up, pretty funny.

Keep up the good work both of you!

I also see what you mean by the girl being too small.  I got so wrapped up in the framing I forgot to think about the relative size.  Oops >>

I was trying to make it seem gloomy, which is also why the shadows are all gray toned.  I was also trying to make it seem like a dirty place, which is why I didn't smooth out the brushstrokes.

I totally agree that I need to work on hands and weapons.  I always find it the most frustrating thing to get a reference for since the angle needs to be a certain way to make sense with the pose.  D:  Do you guys have any suggestions?

I don't agree with you Monday, I actually did like Sydney's loads of brush marks. Esp. first frame on page 2. It gives this certain sad mood...

No i never heard of him, but i googled him i see what you mean, yeah i dunno i think about 1/2 those marks are from my scanner and the other from my pencil, i thought i got most of them but yeah it seems like my scanner picks up everything :/

Sydney: I think there's some perspective/angle/proportion?(can't really decide which word is it) problems in
                page 4, i.e. the robber's hand in 1st panel being a bit too small&delicate, and the hostage just seems
                too small if she's supposed to be right next to him. And maybe you need better gun references too in  
                page 5.

Penryn: Personal style nonwisthanding, I think I can make out some stray lines, probably some penciling you
             might have missed while erasing. Perhaps some additional practice on the hands, too. And was that a
             Dr.McNinja reference?

Jesus Sydney, please PLEASE color with different sized brushes. It's unneccessarily tedious to stick with one brush especially since you you have a whole array of tools to do it with. I cannot get through reading some of these things without getting distracted by it. Start with a huge brush and go smaller it will save you so much trouble.

Im gonna crit later after I digest everything.

Also uploaded!

Uploaded

good luck

BEAR VS. SCIENCE YESSS

cummings!?!?!

Oh boy

Good luck! Kick some ass Sydney!

good luck you two!

good luck with your first battle guys!