Just finished another spread :D
4yr
Yiming Wu
So I just finished another spread of my helicopter thing... I'm basically doing this as some sort of test to see if I can do shading comfortably with some painting knowledge.
Some of you guys may have already seen my last one. I think I did this one a bit too dark, maybe I could use some lighter shapes to better hint the structure of that helicopter. And I'm not very proficient in representing various textures, otherwise I think I did okay :D.
Any opinions on how I should look to improve? I'm kinda struggling with more "free form" textures as seen in a lot of Toppi's works, but I don't think I visualize that very well. And sometimes it's good to leave lighter areas in shadow, like the one I did on the blades, but it's more of a hit or miss for me tbh. Any ideas?
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4yr
These look so so good man!
I think the reason Toppi's stuff reads so well is because of the clarity of his big light and dark shapes, and the 'chaos' within is always subservient to those shapes. The chaotic calligraphy never overtakes the clarity. You can really test this in his work and your own by zooming out or squinting; If you look at his stuff from a thumbnail view it reads perfectly well, and you aren't seeing the calligraphy from that perspective.
I think your stuff is like 95% of the way there, just some more time is needed considering those light and dark shapes before jumping into the nice calligraphy. A good excercise might be to try inking some of those objects that are challenging you with just flat black (like Mignola's technique), so you ONLY have black and white shapes to deal with, and have to build your sensitivity to them and find out how to make them read as well as you want. Then I think those considerations about pure shape will more naturally manifest in your 'Toppi-style' work.
Thank you for the suggestion :D Indeed I may need more "larger shapes" so that the chaotic part doesn't collide with the overall image structure. I think one of the problem with my images is that I don't draw big as the examples here, so the scale difference of "shape" and "texture" isn't that far apart, so you'll see in my images, some smaller structural elements may get muddled within the texture. I'm not sure how to deal with that unless I enlarge the paper I'm drawing on, or I could just treat those smaller details as "lost".
I could use pure and white with no in-between, that way the light and dark pattern is really clear, but somehow I find that overly sharp, and get kind of tired when looking at that kind of style for too long. Also, how would you do the shadow areas in this way when you are trying to.... say drawing a scene whose majority is in shadow? (same with hatching style here... It's just not enough contrast?)
I may do some YinYang practice to get better sensation on shadow patterns especially on human forms, because in a mechanical thing you can sort of plotting that out, but human is rather complex.
I think this is great Yiming. The shot of the helicopter is downright epic.
My only issue with it is how information is overlapping panels. That part can be a bit confusing and it takes a second to sort it out.
Ahh I see :D. I was planning to do a gradient on the sea so that the value is differentiated from the foreground plane, but when I draw that I didn't recall the plan correctly so I ended up darken the value too much. However I found that I can utilize some of the lost edges to fade in/out on some portion of the layout. Consider this as an accidental effect XD
The looks great and I can also see teh value use as an individual style. it is dark but that gives atmosphere, too, I think.
The only thing I would think about is the shading with the many similar paralell strokes. the ground on the left looks similar to the sky and also to the technical inside on the second picture. These lines give me a feeling of fabric or even muscles. So maybe it could help to look up different mid value shading techniques and vary these more. It's just an idea, imho the drawings have a great intensity like this.
Right... I need to vary my strokes. A lot of textures are kinda hard to express though. And a lot of stuff "without texture" are hard to express using textured way. I'm looking at Toppi and other guys works and see what I can do with texturing... Thanks!
Oh I love it !
In term of values the image read very well, it's more important than detailling texture in my humble opinion...
If really you want to go with more texture effect, you can try a gradiant with lines coming from the nose and going lost/dark on the tail. The cross-lines forming cables or junk of metals would indicate a bit the metal parts. But again, what matter is the image being readable, details should come second... That can help pushing a sense of "field of depth" effect, as long as you are using it accordingly to a value hierarchie.
I think the manga "Blame!" had some good mechanical example about that (having part that are detailled then silhouette lost in dark). I'm on my phone so it's sadly hard to link to any image right now sorry :s
Thanks! I'm glad this one has a better readable shape than my previous stuff. I've heard of "Blame!" but I haven't researched very deep in that. A thing about Japanese manga is that they are using dot-matrix- (is it supposed to be halftone- ?) paper a lot, so the pattern is much more regular compared to stuff that are drawn.
Really nice I love the way you made your background !!! Yes I think you could find a better balence between light and dark in your picture but I really like your style !!!
