Rose Deli sample strips!

[ryuko_midori]

I have been working hard on stuff recently, which is why there hasn't been that many updates for Green Avenger... I promised some accountabili-buddies I'd finish up 8 strips for a short not-for-posting test storyline along with a couple more. Here they are in the order I did them in! Any crit is welcome. I especially need hints on inking and jokes

Comments

[sissel]

My immediate thought was that the characters sound too alike. Maybe keep a list of speech habits different characters have? In just ten strips, there are two characters who use "or something", a few of them use "like"...in the third strip the guy uses "oh" a lot so I thought that may've been his thing, but in the same strip, another character uses it (two other characters start their sentences with "oh" in later strips too).

My second thought was that...well, they all sound a lot like you. I know it can be hard to take your own voice out of your characters but you should try being more mindful about that.

[sissel]

On the artistic end, I don't think it's necessary to share each facial wrinkle. Wrinkles alone are enough to add definition to faces -- adding shading on top of that can make them look too busy. The more simplified you can keep your characters' faces, the better (and the more impact you can get when you change their facial expressions). Plus you can save a lot of time this way.

[ryuko_midori]

Do you think I should take shading out altogether or just get rid of the shading on the faces? It would certainly save a whole lot of time... I worry if I take out the shading from the bodies they'd pop less in the scene. I feel like my inking is a little too weak to go without shading completely.

[sissel]

In all honesty I think you should take out the shading altogether because your inking is much stronger than your shading.

[ryuko_midori]

Hmmm. And even if I think it's not strong, at least I would then be less likely to use the shading as a crutch and more likely to try to improve the way I use inking and grayscale fills to stage and add depth. It would also look pretty cheap if people got used to shading and I took it out because it didn't work than it would if not-shading didn't work and I added it in.

[ryuko_midori]

...more cheap if people-

you know what I'm just going to bed

[sissel]

In addition, is it okay to assume you add shading to give your characters more depth? Your shading is actually working against that because they either aren't in the right spots or there isn't enough. It ends up making the characters look more flat most of the time. So I would suggest holding off on the shading in the comics for now and study light/shadows/volume works more before getting back to that.

[ryuko_midori]

That's a good idea. I haven't really done enough thinking about character voice, even though at the beginning I'd planned on doing a writeup like you suggested. I was also writing most of this on the fly, so maybe I'll have to script a while before I get the character voices down.