Arguing about which part of the Titanic is most wet...
Categories: artwork, and-another-thing
Date: 23 March 2010 08:12:09
Ok so time to nerd/geek out a little. I'm a big fan of comic book artwork and have recently been getting back into that scene courtesy of iFanboy - which I love to pieces as a website and a podcast - and the various comic book apps on the iPod touch. I started with iVerse, have now moved onto Comics X and have a keen eye on what Graphic.ly will become but when the iPad comes along all bets are off and I'll keep an eye on who's best then. At the moment Comics X has the better content although all of the providers seem to be a year behind the shelf at least. It'd be so much easier if I just downloaded the comics from a torrent site but that's not the me I am. Sell me comics Marvel, DC, Image and indies... I want to buy them and preferably at 59 p a copy rather than £1.19 ta :)
Anyhow the above image was on the iFanboy site as one of the best covers of the week - and it is, no question. Colours work, nice level of artistry, placement... Ah... that's when I get uber picksome. In terms of eyeflow -yup, my old hobby horse - it works almost perfectly - nice two way diagonal, nice prominence towards the centre... But the eyes aren't the focal start point: that's the upper Rhino eye on the left hand side. The red eye is centralised which then makes the pic right hand imbalanced (stop me if I bore you) and the left hand head is bigger than the left hand side which gives an undue prominence to one character above the other.
All of which are tetches, arguing about which parts of the Titanic are most wet. It's a fab image and if one of my students had handed it in as a piece of work I'd count myself lucky to be working with them and slap a distinction and a smiley on the pic quicker than you could say quibble. But I would also have asked said student to enlarge the pic by 5% and lose the upper left hand corner which would make the image much more centralised. I'd also have suggested brightening the whites of the two character eyes (not the costume ones) a smidge to draw the viewers eye there first. Little things (and I did check them in Pixelmator first just to make sure and both suggestions increase the eye flow interest), tiny things in fact, but the pebbles which make the mountain just right.
Dissimilarly the Spider Woman 7 cover - despite my general dislike for the way female super heroes are drawn, in fact I find myself being faintly amused and perplexed by most super hero costumes truth be told, is a masterpiece of eyeflow - although you have to click on the link to see as I can't work out how to resize it when adding it to the post. Anyhow it has the whole kit and kaboodle: subtle directional (the webs in the background), contrast markers (the triangle between arm and forearm, spider), balance (logo and hair) and symmetry. Very well planned and produced image (all imo of course - I just find eye flow is the thing I notice most in a picture for whatever reason).
And with that blathered on about: to work. Just changed the Wombat logo a smidge but this seemed the more interesting thing to talk about although, again, that may be just me :)