Zatswan: Multiversal Guardian

[Charles]

Your work is awash in color to the point of its own detriment. As I scroll down the page and just browse the imagery, what I find is that the range of color in play grabs my eye, only to continually turn me off. Any particular instance of color usage, even where it seems to be a visual delight in its own right, is in constant visual competition with a whole host of other contenders. The end result is a stunted, muted effect.

Rather than assail the eye with color for particular panels or particular moments, you've gone color wild every step of the way. It's not something that I would buy, and it's not something that facilitates making it easier to persuade the reader to actually invest the time to read what is on display. That's how I feel, anyway.

Not content with beating the eyeball with color splashes non-stop in the panels, you continue the visual assault down in the gutters, also. Granted, white space doesn't have to be the color white, and it is to the work's good credit that you at least made use of the color white in your speech balloons. Otherwise, you don't seem to have much use for the color white. Such a pity, for it indicates that you don't value that color nearly so much as other colors in the color spectrum.

This, in turn, is obliterating contrast on your pages.

Part of what is visually appealing about your work is your manipulation of color. You value color. You love it! And this is nothing to be ashamed of, particularly in light of the fact that you're aiming for something "different." At what point, though, does one reach am artistically viable stopping point?

Imagine the human eye as a runner, and anytime that it sees color, it has to run. Your chosen approach gives the eye little room to rest. Your color taken to excess wears the eye out. The eye tires from color fatigue. This matters for the very simple reason that it negatively impacts the ability of the viewer to more fully appreciate what it is that you are striving so very hard to achieve.

It reminds me of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, particular the point where the poem says, "Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink." With your work on display, here, I would paraphrase that poem by saying, "Color, color, everywhere, nor any drop to drink (as in, visually drink). Your forte is color, but at the risk of artistic blasphemy, I feel that you visually poison your own work because you treat color as a mere plaything to do with as you will.

Or to put it another way, your greatest artistic gift is simultaneously your worst artistic curse. Some of your coloring is really genuinely lovely, whereas other of it simply leaves me smacking myself in the head and asking, "Why?"

I get that each panel is a visual scene, and that you want to populate it with color, much as the real world around us is populated by many different colors, no matter where we tend to find ourselves. What I don't get is why you utilize non-scene elements (such as narration boxes and gutters) to add color insult (color for the sake of color) to color injury (the non-stop visual assault by color run amok across every panel on every page).

By taking the artistic route that you have taken, what happens is that your visual apex moments yield a reduced level of visual color. So, your visual "whoa moments" take on a quality of visual "ho hum." How very quaint, more color. How very.....typical.

Or, in a literary sense, if you prefer, you are undermining the visual story telling, by cutting off at the knees what should rightly be the most visually impactful moments of your story.

Just as I begin to love what I am seeing, I immediately begin to hate it.

What you are trying to pull off successfully with this chosen approach of a full embrace of color in your handiwork is, indeed, commendable, but I question whether you have the necessary mastery of supporting elements to enable you to actually pull it off. Take human anatomy, for one. Take human expressions, for another.

You are very gifted at teasing the human eye with color. You are substantially less skilled, however, in complex manipulation of color. Your characters, for instance, tend to blend in with their backgrounds, if concentrate on the coloring conventions utilized for them and the backgrounds against which they compete for visual attention. Thus, the real star of your story is color, itself, and not the characters - and as I try to digest your work, I find that to be particularly problematic.

And to make matters even worse, where your narrative boxes are concerned, it simply wasn't sufficient for you to color them, also. No, you also had to poke the eye with the sharp visual stick of a transition effect from color to white. Never miss an opportunity to visually distract from what's going on in the panels, eh? How very non-clever of you!

That said, your work has a certain visual lure to it. Like bait, it attracts the eye's attention. Some of your panels have a captivating quality to them. These are indications of artistic greatness bubbling beneath the surface.

Which makes it all the more difficult for me to grasp why in God's name do you squander it? How can a person be so gifted in the art of color, yet simultaneously so careless with the same? You're pushing the visual envelope with color, but you're pushing it in a sloppy manner. And to make matters worse, other areas of your artistic skills are so far behind your pending mastery with color manipulation that it is acting as an anchor around the neck of your colorful undertakings.

Improve your human anatomy skills, your facial expressions skills, and your line weight skills. Your characters, colorful though they may be, have a tendency to be visually stiff. So, improve your skills as they relate to capturing and depicting poses, also. Additionally, more focus on light and shadow could help you to improve the visual transitions between your many different applications of color within a given panel.

Your work is different - and that is a plus. It's part of what makes your work unique and stand out more from other artists' work on display, here.

Oh, and one other thing - work on your speech balloons. They are plain Jane simplistic visual blobs that detract from your work.

[Neil Allen]

Continuing. Cover for Chapter 2:


Website!
http://zatswan.com

[Neil Allen]

Originally Posted by Charles

Just as I begin to love what I am seeing, I immediately begin to hate it.

For these love and hate statements you make to be at all helpful to me, or even clear, you will need to point out a specific example of what you love and a specific example of what you hate. Otherwise ... it's an interesting sentiment that I can't do anything at all with. Maybe you're content to leave it at that, which is fine, and if you are, then ... okay. I can't say anything about that, other than it's interesting.

And to make matters even worse, where your narrative boxes are concerned, it simply wasn't sufficient for you to color them, also. No, you also had to poke the eye with the sharp visual stick of a transition effect from color to white. Never miss an opportunity to visually distract from what's going on in the panels, eh? How very non-clever of you!

Well, since you said something about this, I will explain it. The gradient, or transition effect as you call it, signals that the main character is thinking to himself. A fully colored box is used by another character in the story when it speaks. If I did what you're suggesting, I may confuse the reader. See page this page for an example.



A white box is used for a character to speak while another scene is playing out. See how this page acts with the first panel in the following page. This is a common comic book convention, so it's nothing I invented:





In short, the gradient is not there just to be there, because I do things willy-nilly as you're implying. It's serving a practical function.

That said, your work has a certain visual lure to it. Like bait, it attracts the eye's attention. Some of your panels have a captivating quality to them. These are indications of artistic greatness bubbling beneath the surface.

Thank you.

Which makes it all the more difficult for me to grasp why in God's name do you squander it? How can a person be so gifted in the art of color, yet simultaneously so careless with the same? You're pushing the visual envelope with color, but you're pushing it in a sloppy manner. And to make matters worse, other areas of your artistic skills are so far behind your pending mastery with color manipulation that it is acting as an anchor around the neck of your colorful undertakings.

I personally do not feel that my coloring is leaps and bounds above the other aspects of my art. Though, I will say it is the aspect of my whole process that tends to be the most time consuming for me, sometimes even by a good margin.

Improve your human anatomy skills, your facial expressions skills, and your line weight skills.

Concerning my anatomy, I admit there are certainly things I could have done better (I've been over these pages probably more than anyone, and sometimes even with completely neutral people to get their takes), but I don't feel I did things so horribly that they will get in the way of the story for most readers. Actually, I don't think most people who aren't intentionally trying to pick the thing apart would even pick up on some of the things I could have done better. That said, there's certainly nothing wrong with fixing things if there are issues, and there are in places. I mean, when you're literally drawing hundreds and hundreds of pictures, and who knows how many figures, things are going to happen here and there. However, I don't feel the anatomy I did in these pages is so glaringly bad that the artwork falls apart, things don't make sense, messages aren't being conveyed clearly, and this artist has no idea whatsoever of what he's doing. I mean, I've seen A LOT worse.

Additionally, more focus on light and shadow could help you to improve the visual transitions between your many different applications of color within a given panel.

Yes, that's something I take into consideration.

Your work is different - and that is a plus. It's part of what makes your work unique and stand out more from other artists' work on display, here.

Thank you. Not to sound contentious, but I get the feeling you believe I'm striving to go for something mondo different with my art. I'm not. It just is what it is. This is what would come out of me when I'm just doing 'regular' art for me. And yeah, it does look ... distinctive compared to most comic art I see. I'm happy you appreciate that. That said, I'm also not trying to look generic or like anyone else. I'm indie comics and I embrace that. If someone wants to see Marvel and DC or something like them, those publishers are there for them. I'm not them, I have little interest in them, and no interest in being like them or working for them.

Oh, and one other thing - work on your speech balloons. They are plain Jane simplistic visual blobs that detract from your work.

I'm fine with the balloons. They're neat, they're clean, they're easy to read, and in a comic with so much going on with the artwork, maybe plain jane isn't such a bad thing. Though I do appreciate the opinion and understand where it's coming from, and one of these days I may experiment with something else.

[sevans]

Hi Neil.

Charles raised a few very valid points. Your work is very colourful, sometimes distracting. He put a lot of effort into his crit.

NOW, you can disagree and defend yourself against whatever you like, BUT you need to listen to constructive crits too. Many of his crits were well explained and are valid points.

Good artists always take on crits and work though the valid ones to improve their artwork.

[Neil Allen]

Originally Posted by sevans

Hi Neil.

Charles raised a few very valid points. Your work is very colourful, sometimes distracting. He put a lot of effort into his crit.

NOW, you can disagree and defend yourself against whatever you like, BUT you need to listen to constructive crits too. Many of his crits were well explained and are valid points.

Good artists always take on crits and work though the valid ones to improve their artwork.

I listened to Charles.

[sevans]

then I stand corrected good sir.
(tip of the hat)

[Neil Allen]

I listen to feedback, but just because someone has an opinion or offers a suggestion doesn't mean I'm going to change course.

About the coloring, I could have done some things better, and the book's coloring gets better as it goes on, I think. Part of the reason it looks the way it does is because visually, one of my main inspirations is Sega arcade games from the '80s, with the prime one being Fantasy Zone II:



Heck, even Sonic the Hedgehog from the '90s is a big influence on me:

[NorthWindComics]

Dude! You keep getting better as the pages go by. I love your commitment too. And I think your colors are really working! They're working for me. It's like a visual feast of hues.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by Neil Allen

I personally do not feel that my coloring is leaps and bounds above the other aspects of my art. Though, I will say it is the aspect of my whole process that tends to be the most time consuming for me, sometimes even by a good margin.

I isolate this quote out quite intentionally, because it is especially deserving of highlighting.

More so that coloring, per se, your handiwork on display here denotes a rather advanced appreciation understanding the mysteries of color. In layman's terms, you're like Harry Potter just starting out. Your words aside, your use of color betrays a demonstrated appreciation magnitudes of order ahead of your demonstrated appreciation for anatomical precision or discipline of the lettering variety.

Your own words evidence a lack of appreciation for the gift which has been bestowed upon you. There's more than a bit of magic in your coloring methodology. It shines through, whether you see it or not.

That is not to say that I like all instances of your coloring equally, for I don't. But, even with imperfections in various areas included, what you have on display here is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

To borrow a word used by another, here, but in a different context, your deficiencies in anatomical precision are nothing short of jarring. Yes, you can draw well enough to move the story along, but not nearly well enough to avoid saddling you work with the visual baggage of a litany of distractions.

NorthWindComics stated it very well when he described it as a visual feast of hues. Your work has hues to it. You don't cripple your work with a slave mentality towards base colors, and neither do you worship at the altar of coloring in swath. Your skills with coloring are as diverse as the hues on your pages present here.

In a nutshell, your use of color is interesting. It grabs the eye. In instances, it captivates. The artistic universe is full of examples of coloring that can't make a valid claim to those statements.

[Neil Allen]

I redid the cover for Chapter 1. There's a chance I could use the image as a cover for my graphic novel (that's the plan, unless I think of a better idea along the way), so I wanted to do a better version:



Website:
http://zatswan.com/

[Neil Allen]

Originally Posted by NorthWindComics

Dude! You keep getting better as the pages go by. I love your commitment too. And I think your colors are really working! They're working for me. It's like a visual feast of hues.

Thanks a lot for the encouraging words. I am happy you are enjoying this comic. And yeah, I'm always looking to improve, and the best way to do that is to keep doing pages. I've learned A LOT working on this project and have gotten quite a bit better along the way. At least I think so.

And yes, I am very committed to this story. At this point, I know very well what it takes to make a fully colored comic series all by yourself and I'm willing to go through that because I think that I just NEED to tell this story, and if I don't, I could see it depressing me to some degree.

Sometimes after hours upon hours of drawing, coloring, and so on, I do think to myself, "What the heck am I doing?" But then I consider that if I don't do this, I'm going to look back two, three, four, ten, twenty, or however many years later, and be upset at myself. So, in a sense, I feel I have to do this and make the most of it, and I suppose that's a good thing. It definitely keeps me going on, and I'm having a lot of fun doing it, and it's been very enriching considering how much I have learned along the way : )

The comic is just one part, I plan to grow the brand with an indie video game as well, which I'll begin development on pretty soon, but it likely won't be done for a while, and I'll see where else I can take things. But one step at a time!

[Neil Allen]

A small look at some of the art in the upcoming chapter of Zatswan, the cosmic fantasy multiverse adventure. This is just one panel, it's just at a really large size in this image. There are other pages ready, but I'll release in accordance with my schedule:



Website:
http://zatswan.com/

[Neil Allen]

It's time for more Zatswan: Multiversal Guardian! Chapter 2, page 1:



Website:
http://zatswan.com/

[Neil Allen]

Next page:


Website:
http://zatswan.com/

[Neil Allen]

The story continues...



Website:
http://zatswan.com