Congratulations on submitting your first full comic.

The panel layout is good. You have a good readable font. The reading flow is good.

The plot is good. You can do things with that kind of plot. Hard boiled gangster, film noir, kind of stuff.

Your art and your story-telling using the comic book media, is not up to that ... yet.

Your art is very sketchy, don't have enough establishing images and it is not driving the story. The story is almost only told through text and the art is not adding much. With a comic you would want the art to be the primary element of the story telling. Dialog the second and other text the third.

You also need to slow down the story telling. For example, evolve why the gangsters are so horrible that they need to be killed.

A scene where Callie contact the "no name gun for hire" could have been a good way to start the story. Does "no name" have an office, like a PI and Calli come there to hire her? Or they meet in a bar? Or "no name" could be at the shooting range, showing off some fancy shooting. That could be interesting backdrops for a dialog where Callie through dialog can tell why she wants to hire "no name".

There is a lot of things you could add to the story to make it more interesting.

You have a long way to go, but you have a start. I hope I have not discourage you, and that you will go on making comics.

Too me, this would be fine as an illustration.

Another color book pix

OK. Try again, using a ruler for the guide paper and then you can freehand on the paper that you draw the finished art on. Look at the last part as drawing - aided by guidelines-, rather than as tracing. That are two different mindsets.

Don't look like you are using a vanishing point. Your z-direction lines are all over the place, instead of coming together in one point.

If you don't follow the steps given in the tutorial, you shouldn't expect to make much progress.

And, you should probably use a ruler. Free-handing good straight lines, precisely positioned, is not easy.

Working on a digital coloring book. The white part is 40 different pieces to make each of the possible to color with different colors.

WIP

Going on the piece you linked to.

I like this character and how you draw it and how you have colored it.

A couple of points though.

1. Where the hat and the chin goes over the face respective the body I would suggest a thicker line and a shadow below. Trying different line thickness can be useful.
2. With the crying eyes I felt it was overdoing it having tears flowing above the eyes. Maybe just be me.
3. Changed the position of one arm, as it generally helps the pose not having both sides of the body doing the same thing.
4. Added small toes as the legs looked like they where cut of at the bottom and that bothered me a bit. Could also just be me.

That is just a couple of thoughts.

Don't stress out on having to improve. You're doing fine.

This is how I would do your 'Goofy gets drafted'.

1. Sketch the body pose, but not the arms yet.
2. Sketch the gun on a different layer.
3. Position the gun.
4. Sketch in the arms and hands in position on the gun.
5. Drawing the line-work on a layer on top of the sketch layers.
6. Line-work without the sketch layers.
7. Coloring on a layer below the line-work layer.

While drawing I have had a couple of reference images open of Goofy and a couple of guns.

Using references is a good routine. References doesn't have to be exactly the pose, or what have you, that your going to draw.

Before you can get a good result with this type of workflow you need to have your basics down.

You need to draw lines smoothly where you want to draw them and you need to train to understand what you see.

A common beginner mistake is to draw what they imagine something looks like instead of what the thing actually looks like, even though they are looking at a reference. It is important to train your eye (and mind) as much as your hand.

References only help you if you can draw what you actually see. You also need to be able to see when something is off in your drawing.

There are a lot of threads in this forum with suggestions of different tutorials.

Having good tools helps. You could improve your tools. A mouse would probably be a step up from a trackpad. I've never used a trackpad for drawing, but it sounds like it would be hard. Drawing with a mouse is doable.

I don't know what MS Paint looks like these days. Does it have layers? A program like FireAlpaca might be an improvement.

Paper and pen is also an alternative.

I hope you find something useful in this, even if it boils down to "keep practicing". (at least it is a bit more than 2 lines 🙂)

[DRAWING Nachtmahr's OC]

:

I would suggest making eyes and mouth very clearly visible. You need them to show emotions.

I also moved the ear to a more correct position from an anatomical point of view.

The thumb on the hand saluting seems to be on the wrong side.

I think the new clothing is better than the old. I wondering a bit though on how the coat is tied around her waist. I would have expected that the sleeves would be used for that, but they seems to not have been used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiZqTEExj8

Early Swedish animation 1916 by Victor Bergdahl. He did two before that, but I've not seen those. This one is the first of a series about Captain Grog (Kapten Grogg), Captain Grog's wonderful journey.

Bergdahl used cutout paper-dolls on top of fixed backgrounds, to avoid having to redraw each frame.

In Sweden in the 1700s and 1800s (and even into the 1900s) it was Julbocken (the Yule Goat) that came with gifts for Christmas. Then he was replaced in that role by Jultomten (Santa), but still is part of Christmas decorations in the form of goats made out of straw.

I'm glad you still are enjoying this. It is a lot of work you two are putting in, in this thread.

I thought this might give you a bit of trouble. Valkyrie actually was spot on, while gladiator was going off track as far as look of dress go, but not bad as a description of the spirit of the person.

A good try and I thoroughly enjoyed the result. 🙂

[DRAWING Winterina's OC Melanair Windismu]

A couple of suggestions for proportions of the body and wings. The wings could be even larger if you want to have a more realistic form that could fly. I'm not sure what you want to do with the head. I mainly have a suggestion on the placement of the eye as far as the head goes..

To build a 3D model you would probably want to have a front view as well, and maybe a top view too.

Best of luck with your model.

Looks like pi (π) from the first 5 numbers (which is all I care to check against). Pi is an irrational number. The decimals go on forever.

It can be used to calculate the circumference of a circle if you know the diameter.

[DRAWING KingoftheArt's futuristic knight, Odin]

1

[if you still enjoy doing this, when you come to this one]

Dotty Virvelvind (Whirlwind)

It was originally, short stories about a timid girl, Dotty Burns, getting superpowers through injections of different animal gland secretions, and fighting crime using her new powers, now using the name Dotty Virvelvind. In 1944 it was turned into a comic published 1 page a week in a weekly magazine.

Though made in Sweden for Swedish readers, the action take place in New York, and a lot of similarities with, at the time, new American Superheroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman are noticeable. Dotty grew up in the small city of Smallbury and she has a newspaper reporter named Jimmy as a boyfriend, later husband. From time to time Jimmy will need to be rescued.

Her arch enemy is an evil scientist named Hermes.

The comic version lasted for about a year.

Cate Archer,

from No One Lives Forever, 1 & 2

Of course I like it.

A very nice spoof on a golden age character spanning pretty much all genres.

So 'el Zorro' is the fox in Spanish, and el Mapache is the raccoon. I get it. The connection is obvious. Someone just had to make it.

ps. Guy Williams was a great Zorro in the Disney TV-series in the late 50's, which of course also was made into comics (drawn by the also great Alex Toth). My favorite character from that version would however be Sergeant Garcia, played by Henry Calvin.

Alfred "Lash" LaRue was an American Actor mainly doing westerns in the 40s and 50s, usually playing a character with his own name, Lash LaRue. His movies were successful enough to get a spin-off series of comic-books with the same name (which qualifies him for this thread).

There where a number of different comics that, in the same way, was based on popular characters from the movies.

Some actors/characters that crossed over into comics where: Allan "Rocky" Lane, Charles Starrett, Dale Evans, Gene Autry, Gabby Hayes, Hoppalong Cassidy, Monte Hale, Reno Browne, Rex Allen, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Tom Mix, Tim Holt and Wild Bill Elliott. Even John Wayne got to be a comic book character.

Lash LaRue looked a lot like Humphrey Bogart, his movie character, as it became defined, dressed in all black. A main part of the movies and the comics was that Lash used a bullwhip to do different tricks such as disarming an opponent, drag someone out of harms way or swing to safety. There where always some way the whip could be used to save the day.

The actor actually was really good with the whip and did different tricks live on promotional tours, lending credibility to the character in the movies and the comics.

He continued working in movies in different roles pretty much up until his death in 1990. One thing he did was to train Harrison Ford in the use of the whip for the first Indiana Jones movie. Sort of passing on the baton.

I prefer the rounded speech balloons. This is the base shape I use.

But the balloon is not what I start with. I start with the text, forming it in good sizes for balloons. I don't want to much text in a balloon. If it is much text I will split it up in more than one balloon. The text should be aligned with the middle, lines being about equal lengths except top and bottom line, that should preferably be shorter.

When you are happy with the placement and form of the text draw the balloon around it, with a nice space between the text and the outer line of the balloon. Not to much, not to little.

There are so many things to consider making speech balloons, that I've not even touched on.

A simple rule I always seems to get back to is, keep it simple. A clear readable font. Natural reading order placement. Keep fancy stuff as an exception when it can be used to drive home a point.

As an demonstration I put in the balloons in the panel as I would do it.

Of course I'm not saying that I'm better at this than Dave Gibbons. I'm not.

It is just a slightly different take, with a somewhat different feeling to the panel and a different pacing of the text (at least that is what I was going for).

Maybe it can give some ideas on things to think about when doing speech balloons.

[DRAWING GameHeroStudios' OC Jade]

This is my quick interpretation of your image. The Zebra part information I didn't have an idea on what to do with.

free programs

OpenToonz, [or Tahoma2D (version of opentoonz meant to be more user friendly)]

Pencil2D