SourCherryJack's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Kind Spider]

I like the design of your spider a lot on its own. Its nice, fun and playful, with the bright colors of the flowers harmonizing pretty well with the wires on the neutral tones of the spider's body itself. Your perspective looks pretty good as well. The edges do get a bit wonky though and the shading should have a bit more consistency since the actual body of the spider would be casting shadows on the legs to our left. also cylindrical shapes would have a shade darker after the brightest area of it unless its cast on the very very edge of the viewing angle which wouldn't be the case for every limb... those were nitpicks though.
What brings this guy down is that backgound. The stark white and blue don't complement the spider very well and the positioning of the spider on the canvas itself doesn't sell the strong outreaching perspective of the flowers in hand. I think a more square canvas and cropped in on the spider a bit more would help a lot with that. As for the background itself maybe a single neutral light color like tan would work and definitely a more organic cast shadow under the spider itself that isn't so black, but a darker shade of the background would help it.

either way great work man, fun little spider dude

[Hanging Skeleton]

ayyyy

[F*CK]

I really like this design. I think its fairly well put together some of the edges and points where lines meet should be cleaned up a bitand there are some serious aliasing issues all around, but I still really enjoy the design and sharpness of the colors and fills as well as the forms displayed and can get past those previously mentioned issues.
What I can't get past is that big, fat, ugly-ass watermark over the whole thing. Putting your signature/web address on work is cool and great, but when done like this it really really really ruins a piece. Especially because its a graphic with limited colors and very simple. Fix that and this could be so much better.

akosta3201 responds:

ok thanks

[HEY COMIC]

Dude, this is some of the realest shit I've ever seen.

[Monster(4)]

Really cool concept and design on this one, with more time taken for refinement I'd say you're on to something great. The spines get a bit loose and the grey tone along the mid thigh, and top of the lower back could use some shading, right now that solid plane suggests flatness when the area is very rounded. Also try tweaking the foot placement, as it right now they don't look grounded. The back foot Reaches lower on the page (read:closer to us) than the front one which is responsible for the grounding issue. Also the blacked out feet could be rendered, but if you did a refined version I'm sure that would come.
Also this part is just a personal suggestion, I'd lose the tusks, there's enough going on in the design that I think it won't feel like it's missing anything without them. Something to consider maybe, maybe not. Anyway cool design, I'd like to see it fully realized good job either way.

GhoulKitten responds:

Thanks for the review! I actually like this one a bit, so I will probably do a more refined version of it. I'll take what you said into consideration when I'm working on it, thanks again!

[Zim]

Pretty solid drawing here, great emotion in the eyes and face, the body could have a more dramatic line of action though and angling the head up more would benefit selling the pain he's feeling being zapped. Expanding on the line of action: right now it is very vertical when you break it down to the single line, shoot for diagonal lines - the more extreme the better. Vertical and horizontal are resting positions so they are very boring; even simply rotating zim clockwise a couple degrees will make the pose feel much more dynamic and intense.
This is pretty well rendered with a nice pallet on all the respective parts of zim, but they aren't doing much to sell him being zapped. The lightning is encompassing him so the highlights would surround him on all sides and get darker when going ink inward (when e look at it from the 2D plane anyway). I think your highlights could be more intense and maybe tinged blue on Zim instead of yellow. All in all I do like the colors you've chosen, they just don't agree so we'll with the lighting.
Last point and this is huge. If you walk away from this review with nothing else take this with you: that background style has never and will never work. You're better off just leaving the background white than duplicating the image you drew and making it bigger, offset and transparent. Doing that looks and is lazy and anybody with a developed sense of design and art will not like it. A better way to do that old be to take the silhouettes and make them a singly complimentary color and make it seem like a shadow or something, experiment with it.

mannyzworld responds:

WOW!!!! Thanks for all the pointers, I really appreciate you taking the time to give me some feed back!!!!

I agree with you a hundred percent, on the lines, its something that i need to work on. I also need to break out of the realistic mentality. What i mean by this is that i used to love taking a more realistic approach to drawing but became a bit bored with it since i get enough of that in real life :]. I enjoy a cartoon approach because you can break away nd do essentially anything [at least that's what i think]. However i am still struggling to be able to push those boundaries but still have the piece make since.

I struggled with the lightning because i didn't want to take away from the color, i didn't just want to put a blue solid color and then bring down the opacity because it looked like the brightness of the color went away. But i like your in put some bright blue highlights would have sold it and not taken away from the colors.

I will look into the silhouettes idea as well.

Again thanks for the input its much appreciated!!!

[1k fans cocktail special]

U GO GURL!!!!!!

[Ratcatcher of Hameln]

Dieser bilder sind ganz toll! Aber meiner Meinung nach, das du brauchst nur die linken teil mit Wörter und Bild.
Okay fun experiment trying (and probably failing) to remember how to use German, but yeah I think you only need the left portion, the image is and composition gain so much from having the silhouetted mice/rats walking from the buildings. Plus we don't see any page layouts in the art portal so it stands out as especially great. The way it is now with the blank space in the left corner is hurting the composition a lot, but the drawing and concept is so great I can't give it anything but a five!

JulianJoelMessar responds:

Hey thank you for your great feedback...ps your german is not so bad I untersandt what do mean:D

[Gaster's Story page 4]

You've got the start of something good here, but it isn't fully realized and needs a lot of tightening up. To start off with, the full canvas size is impractically large, shrink it down to something less massive, 25% of its current size is plenty big enough to get all of the details at full size, but that's just for viewing convenience. Compositionally speaking I'd say this works alright; the panel construction is solid and the big to small "zooming" in of the character creates enough interest for a page especially if its leading to a reveal of sorts on the next page. Where this falls apart though is in the shading and color choice.
As it is right now everything is too blurry, the method you used for shading makes everything look out of focus and unfinished. There isn't enough contrast and your value range isn't big enough to grab interest. Your character gets a bit lost in the background, there are a few ways to fix this, but the most direct way is going for harder shading, not being afraid of making hard lines in your shading, comics (for the most part) live and die by strong contrast to create drama. The lack of contrast paired with he messiness of your linework create a very out of focus and unfinished look for this. The sketchy look can be done well but you're going to need to use a hard brush for that - in fact, I would suggest going with anti aliasing turned off to create a very cool pixel look that might suit your work well. Also that border isn't working, it could work, but its too similar to the panels and the bright violet eyes on the skulls pull attention away from the panels. Doing border art for comics is a slippery slope of making the border art itself look interesting while not only not distracting from, but enhancing the panel layout and action in the panels. I would recommend doing studies and figuring it out more before implementing it yourself, because when it doesn't work I find that it takes a lot more away than is worth it.
Clarity and drama are what you should be aiming for above all else with comic making, and the best place to start with both of those is bold solid shading and characters.
Hope this all helped, good luck going forward.

MissMezmer responds:

Thanks for taking the time to review the page, its a helpful insight to what i need to improve on, I'll take your points into account before I start the next page, cheers :)

(looking back on the page I get what your saying lol)