Twilight Graphic Novel (Volume 1): Artwork Analysis
ZeldaQueen: Hey, everyone! We've got an unexpected pleasant resolution for the sporking of the first volume of the Twilight! therahedwig has graciously offered to give an analysis of the artwork itself and, since I'm not an artist and thus am sure I missed plenty of points there, I accepted their offer. Give 'em a hand, folks! TheraHedwig, you have the floor!
Art Analysis
Hello, my name is TheraHedwig. I draw things. I also often critique other's art, usually at their behest. Because of that, the following analysis may seem very mild compared to traditional sporks, but I hope that I can amuse you anyway. Similarly, I will give a few tips when it comes to art critique.
This analysis is supposed to be in combination with ZeldaQueen's more detailed review of the Twilight Graphic novel, and thus I will sometimes reference her, as well as skip over things she already covered.
The artist of this comic is Young Kim. I can hardly find anything about her beyond her being a newbie artist, and she doesn't seem to have done anything ever since.
Her style is a type of realistic Shoujo-style.
The Shoujo('Girl')-style finds its origins in pre-war magazines for young Japanese women. These magazines were mostly made to instill the 'correct' values into these brides to be. Growing up with this flowery emotional style, young women eventually made it their own.
It is an aesthetic that focuses on delicate line work and expressing emotions, the latter of which results amongst others in the classic 'Shoujo Bubbles'. Shoujo Bubbles usually indicate a feeling of euphoria, which means that in this comic they are Edward's personal background posse.
Mixing realism into a style like this one has been done right many times, but is nonetheless a challenge because you are trying to combine a Western ideal of verisimilitude (pretty colours, shadows, things feel as if they were real) with an Asian ideal of animation (strong compositions, movement and linework). If you do it wrong, you can end up with pretty stiff images. And it's probably the reason ZeldaQueen became unnerved by the character designs and expressions: If you keep an obsession with keeping everything 'pretty', you lose cohesiveness and your work can tumble down into the uncanny valley real quick.
But let's get to the comic already!
… Doesn't Bella says her mother looks exactly like her but with shorter hair in this exact same scene? I mean, sure Bella's mom isn't a teenager, but the contrast is a little extreme…
Also, Bella is pouting so hard that her lips are running back to phoenix. Melty faces are not uncommon in this comic.
So… about 70% of all the backgrounds are just photos.
20% are blank designy backgrounds as expected of a shoujo-style comic.
And 10% are hand drawn.
This is lazy.
And unnecessary.
Very unnecessary.
It is often said by artists that drawing backgrounds is difficult. Personally, I find it more easy than drawing humans. However, the photo backgrounds are in place of things that would've hardly taken more time!
For Christ's sake, it's a bunch of straight lines, foliage and clouds. You did not need to use a photo for this!
The reason I also don't like this, aside from 'lazy', is that it clashes with the style of the characters, which is very clean and sharp. It just introduces chaos and blurriness where it doesn't belong.
Young Kim has some issues with consistency, as evidenced by Edward's jaw line being all over the place.
She just can't make up her mind whether Edward has a manly square jaw, or a refined small jaw… Now, usually I wouldn't mind as much but it did give me pause when coming to the following issue of his neck.
She has the tendency to draw Edward with the neck of a 'Fist of the North Star'-character. I removed the shading, because initially I was suspecting it of being the culprit…
(Pictured: the Cullens)
The first part you should know about critiquing art, especially from an artist's point of view, is that it's recommended to attempt to correct the drawing. Partially, because these are things that fall under fair use: It's for educational/critiquing purposes. However the more important reason is that it's very difficult to express these things in words. Even art historians themselves have multiple terms that mean the same thing, or could mean completely different things. The 'intensity' of a colour could for example mean 'pigment saturation', 'brightness' and 'colourfulness', and they'd all be correct depending on who you ask.
Because of this, it's much more fruitful to actually try and correct it. I'll be attempting to correct the mistakes I come across, and at the same time, I invite you to correct me when I make mistakes!
Also, it gives me the excuse to do silly things with the images ;)
You see, those two red lined things are the Sternocleidomastoids. They are very important muscles for turning your head, and also one of the first muscles you get to know when drawing the neck. They attach right behind the jaw down to the connection between your clavicles and sternum, and are the reason for that lovely little hole at the base of your neck.
She draws them rather thickly on Edward… in fact, Edward kinda has a treetrunk thing going on...
The neck problem crops up a few times, such as this lovely head-tilt…
Perhaps, after so many years, decomposing has finally kicked in again…
Of course, getting back to image, the problem with the sternocleidomastoid, is that these are two muscles on opposite sides of the body. I had to remove one of them to make Edward look like a teen again. I also made his eyes more normal.
So here's two solutions use a different start for the neck, and of course a different jawline. Take your pick.
In general this whole scene is weird. This in particular bugged me:
Nothing makes sense in this scene:
I fixed his arm and shoulders… but it's still a mess.
Thankfully Young Kim is consistent about his pose, otherwise we would've missed feeling the following sympathy backache:
Who drives a car like this?
He's not the only one suffering from mystery elbows by the way.
You may have noticed I don't talk about Bella a lot. This is because Bella is really super-generic.
She so super-generic that Young Kim can hardly make any mistakes with her, because she could probably draw Bella in her sleep.
You see, and this is a very important detail when criticising art: Beautiful people are easy to draw.
This is because of three reasons:
This is also why I am not impressed with Edward, because again, beautiful people are easy to draw… and Edward has so many mistakes for what is the reason many Twilight fans read this comic.
But, this is where we notice Meyer's influence: All the other girls shine because they were drawn 'ugly'.
No seriously, look at this cutie with the square chin.
I fixed her expression, admittedly. She had these horribly pointy eyebrows, probably demanded by Meyer to show how much of a vapid girl she was for wearing make-up and having the gall to be happy in a Twilight franchise entry.
She also now has her mouth more moving inwards, creating laughing creases.
I redrew Lauren's mouth, because it was in a different perspective that the rest of her face.
She too has a tree-trunk for a neck, but I am not sure if it's her punishment for not being Bella, or because Kim wishes they were drawing an eighties shonen…
Now, last but not least...
I have no words. Besides that I suck at dogs too, yet I still managed to draw something better.
And Meyer obviously insisted that puppy needed to have more teeth on the lower-jaw.
… Meyer has probably never been bitten by a dog.
And Edward's pose here makes NO SENSE. I get that he needs to be cool and all, but he either looks like he's blowing the wolf away (because of a silhouette fuck-up), or he looks like he's holding a staring contest with it in an action scene.
On the colouring:
I am very mixed about the colouring.
On one hand, I completely agree with ZeldaQueen that the palette is nice and muted. It could have certainly been worse. However, it does bother me it's so soft, as well as that generally, it uses too many special effects. So, too many funny brushes, too many filters, too many weird soft shadows.
It's kind of the artistic equivalent of purple prose, in that it does not flatter the existing art, and is usually an indication of the artist thinking this makes them look professional. In reality, it more often just confuses the reader (see my blurry comment in regards to the backgrounds), it's often the hallmark of an amateur, and looks tacky.
On the type-setting:
It is awful.
Type-setting is a bit of a strange arcane art form, but Twilight: the Graphic Novel is so bad that it sits just around MS-Paint manga fan-translations using Arial.
The balloons are all vector objects, which means that they are computer generated and can be adjusted at any time in the process. Yet they constantly overlap people's faces, people's eyes even, where that was absolutely unnecessary.
On top of that, using a Serif font for text… I get what they were going for, but it's mostly just pretentious, and difficult to read.
The bright side of all of this? There's no balloon-order confusion. And this is something that is very common in comics, but I had no instance in this comic where I was reading balloons out of order. As this is a complex element that relates strongly to page composition, it makes it even weirder that the rest of the paneling and type-setting is so awful! But that said, this is hard to get right, so credit where credit is due.
Final thoughts:
It's a mixed bag. Young Kim had no big jobs after or before this, but overall she doesn't lack skills in drawing and composition.
She does over-rely on special effects and photos. Sometimes with really bad results like the wolf or the car. This results in the comic losing some glamour as you feel like you are not being taken seriously, not unlike picking up a novel and finding it littered with spelling and grammatical errors.
Similarly, I would like it if she was actually a little more consistent with her character designs. She also should consider studying the face more, because she's too shy to put real expression on these characters, which results in these flat dishonest faces.
I do not truly know how much Meyer has 'influenced' her. As far as I can tell Meyer would be a client from hell that acts sugary sweet and uses vague floppy expressions to indicate the grandeur that is Twilight. Which, if Young Kim was slightly confident about her job, means that she actually had full creative control.
Interviews indicate she wasn't, however, and because it's near impossible to find this artist (not even a portfolio website. It's 2015, why does she not have a portfolio website?) I can't actually tell what he style is like outside of Meyer's influence.
Verdict: a waste of nice artwork, and not just because it's a Twilight adaption.
Back to: Part 7
Return to: Table of Contents
Art Analysis
Hello, my name is TheraHedwig. I draw things. I also often critique other's art, usually at their behest. Because of that, the following analysis may seem very mild compared to traditional sporks, but I hope that I can amuse you anyway. Similarly, I will give a few tips when it comes to art critique.
This analysis is supposed to be in combination with ZeldaQueen's more detailed review of the Twilight Graphic novel, and thus I will sometimes reference her, as well as skip over things she already covered.
The artist of this comic is Young Kim. I can hardly find anything about her beyond her being a newbie artist, and she doesn't seem to have done anything ever since.
Her style is a type of realistic Shoujo-style.
The Shoujo('Girl')-style finds its origins in pre-war magazines for young Japanese women. These magazines were mostly made to instill the 'correct' values into these brides to be. Growing up with this flowery emotional style, young women eventually made it their own.
It is an aesthetic that focuses on delicate line work and expressing emotions, the latter of which results amongst others in the classic 'Shoujo Bubbles'. Shoujo Bubbles usually indicate a feeling of euphoria, which means that in this comic they are Edward's personal background posse.
Mixing realism into a style like this one has been done right many times, but is nonetheless a challenge because you are trying to combine a Western ideal of verisimilitude (pretty colours, shadows, things feel as if they were real) with an Asian ideal of animation (strong compositions, movement and linework). If you do it wrong, you can end up with pretty stiff images. And it's probably the reason ZeldaQueen became unnerved by the character designs and expressions: If you keep an obsession with keeping everything 'pretty', you lose cohesiveness and your work can tumble down into the uncanny valley real quick.
But let's get to the comic already!
… Doesn't Bella says her mother looks exactly like her but with shorter hair in this exact same scene? I mean, sure Bella's mom isn't a teenager, but the contrast is a little extreme…
Also, Bella is pouting so hard that her lips are running back to phoenix. Melty faces are not uncommon in this comic.
So… about 70% of all the backgrounds are just photos.
20% are blank designy backgrounds as expected of a shoujo-style comic.
And 10% are hand drawn.
This is lazy.
And unnecessary.
Very unnecessary.
It is often said by artists that drawing backgrounds is difficult. Personally, I find it more easy than drawing humans. However, the photo backgrounds are in place of things that would've hardly taken more time!
For Christ's sake, it's a bunch of straight lines, foliage and clouds. You did not need to use a photo for this!
The reason I also don't like this, aside from 'lazy', is that it clashes with the style of the characters, which is very clean and sharp. It just introduces chaos and blurriness where it doesn't belong.
Young Kim has some issues with consistency, as evidenced by Edward's jaw line being all over the place.
She just can't make up her mind whether Edward has a manly square jaw, or a refined small jaw… Now, usually I wouldn't mind as much but it did give me pause when coming to the following issue of his neck.
She has the tendency to draw Edward with the neck of a 'Fist of the North Star'-character. I removed the shading, because initially I was suspecting it of being the culprit…
(Pictured: the Cullens)
The first part you should know about critiquing art, especially from an artist's point of view, is that it's recommended to attempt to correct the drawing. Partially, because these are things that fall under fair use: It's for educational/critiquing purposes. However the more important reason is that it's very difficult to express these things in words. Even art historians themselves have multiple terms that mean the same thing, or could mean completely different things. The 'intensity' of a colour could for example mean 'pigment saturation', 'brightness' and 'colourfulness', and they'd all be correct depending on who you ask.
Because of this, it's much more fruitful to actually try and correct it. I'll be attempting to correct the mistakes I come across, and at the same time, I invite you to correct me when I make mistakes!
Also, it gives me the excuse to do silly things with the images ;)
You see, those two red lined things are the Sternocleidomastoids. They are very important muscles for turning your head, and also one of the first muscles you get to know when drawing the neck. They attach right behind the jaw down to the connection between your clavicles and sternum, and are the reason for that lovely little hole at the base of your neck.
She draws them rather thickly on Edward… in fact, Edward kinda has a treetrunk thing going on...
The neck problem crops up a few times, such as this lovely head-tilt…
Perhaps, after so many years, decomposing has finally kicked in again…
Of course, getting back to image, the problem with the sternocleidomastoid, is that these are two muscles on opposite sides of the body. I had to remove one of them to make Edward look like a teen again. I also made his eyes more normal.
So here's two solutions use a different start for the neck, and of course a different jawline. Take your pick.
In general this whole scene is weird. This in particular bugged me:
Nothing makes sense in this scene:
- Edward's arms must go into infinity, being able to sit back, fold his elbow, lean again the window and still have one hand on the top of the steering wheel.
- His shoulders are lumpy as hell.
- The perspective in this scene makes no sense... after a while of redrawing, I realised that this is because it's a wide-angle shot for showing
- off the car. This is why you do not use photos willy-nilly.
I fixed his arm and shoulders… but it's still a mess.
Thankfully Young Kim is consistent about his pose, otherwise we would've missed feeling the following sympathy backache:
Who drives a car like this?
He's not the only one suffering from mystery elbows by the way.
You may have noticed I don't talk about Bella a lot. This is because Bella is really super-generic.
She so super-generic that Young Kim can hardly make any mistakes with her, because she could probably draw Bella in her sleep.
You see, and this is a very important detail when criticising art: Beautiful people are easy to draw.
This is because of three reasons:
- There's a sense of average that is determined by beauty. Beautiful faces are plastered all over the place, so it becomes a reference point.
- There's a sense of rhythm to be found in what we consider beautiful: symmetry, certain proportions…
- ...which means it's easy to learn for an artist how to draw beautiful faces.
This is also why I am not impressed with Edward, because again, beautiful people are easy to draw… and Edward has so many mistakes for what is the reason many Twilight fans read this comic.
But, this is where we notice Meyer's influence: All the other girls shine because they were drawn 'ugly'.
No seriously, look at this cutie with the square chin.
I fixed her expression, admittedly. She had these horribly pointy eyebrows, probably demanded by Meyer to show how much of a vapid girl she was for wearing make-up and having the gall to be happy in a Twilight franchise entry.
She also now has her mouth more moving inwards, creating laughing creases.
I redrew Lauren's mouth, because it was in a different perspective that the rest of her face.
She too has a tree-trunk for a neck, but I am not sure if it's her punishment for not being Bella, or because Kim wishes they were drawing an eighties shonen…
Now, last but not least...
I have no words. Besides that I suck at dogs too, yet I still managed to draw something better.
And Meyer obviously insisted that puppy needed to have more teeth on the lower-jaw.
… Meyer has probably never been bitten by a dog.
And Edward's pose here makes NO SENSE. I get that he needs to be cool and all, but he either looks like he's blowing the wolf away (because of a silhouette fuck-up), or he looks like he's holding a staring contest with it in an action scene.
On the colouring:
I am very mixed about the colouring.
On one hand, I completely agree with ZeldaQueen that the palette is nice and muted. It could have certainly been worse. However, it does bother me it's so soft, as well as that generally, it uses too many special effects. So, too many funny brushes, too many filters, too many weird soft shadows.
It's kind of the artistic equivalent of purple prose, in that it does not flatter the existing art, and is usually an indication of the artist thinking this makes them look professional. In reality, it more often just confuses the reader (see my blurry comment in regards to the backgrounds), it's often the hallmark of an amateur, and looks tacky.
On the type-setting:
It is awful.
Type-setting is a bit of a strange arcane art form, but Twilight: the Graphic Novel is so bad that it sits just around MS-Paint manga fan-translations using Arial.
The balloons are all vector objects, which means that they are computer generated and can be adjusted at any time in the process. Yet they constantly overlap people's faces, people's eyes even, where that was absolutely unnecessary.
On top of that, using a Serif font for text… I get what they were going for, but it's mostly just pretentious, and difficult to read.
The bright side of all of this? There's no balloon-order confusion. And this is something that is very common in comics, but I had no instance in this comic where I was reading balloons out of order. As this is a complex element that relates strongly to page composition, it makes it even weirder that the rest of the paneling and type-setting is so awful! But that said, this is hard to get right, so credit where credit is due.
Final thoughts:
It's a mixed bag. Young Kim had no big jobs after or before this, but overall she doesn't lack skills in drawing and composition.
She does over-rely on special effects and photos. Sometimes with really bad results like the wolf or the car. This results in the comic losing some glamour as you feel like you are not being taken seriously, not unlike picking up a novel and finding it littered with spelling and grammatical errors.
Similarly, I would like it if she was actually a little more consistent with her character designs. She also should consider studying the face more, because she's too shy to put real expression on these characters, which results in these flat dishonest faces.
I do not truly know how much Meyer has 'influenced' her. As far as I can tell Meyer would be a client from hell that acts sugary sweet and uses vague floppy expressions to indicate the grandeur that is Twilight. Which, if Young Kim was slightly confident about her job, means that she actually had full creative control.
Interviews indicate she wasn't, however, and because it's near impossible to find this artist (not even a portfolio website. It's 2015, why does she not have a portfolio website?) I can't actually tell what he style is like outside of Meyer's influence.
Verdict: a waste of nice artwork, and not just because it's a Twilight adaption.
Back to: Part 7
Return to: Table of Contents