Morgan's Art and Critique Thread

[MorganManga]

What do you mean by one every 2 days? like how many hours a day is that?

When it comes to regularly producing work, speed is certainly important, but I agree with KeanFox don't focus too much on speed at the moment, it's better to focus on getting your quality and accuracy good, and speed will naturally come.

Specifically on figure drawing just practice LOTS, both copying from figure drawing websites etc, but also practising drawing from your mind, like a page of random poses. I do quite a lot of this and it's helped my speed definitely. It's good as a warmup too.

That's a nice last page, very dynamic actions and I like your line quality.

Thanks for the advice. I work anywhere from 3 to 7 hours a day. Pretty irregular. I should also mention I'm making the underdrawings more anatomically detailed than I normally would as a way to get in anatomy practice while creating pages. I'll stop doing this after I'm done with this manga, so hopefully, that should speed things up.

Is there anything you see in my work so far that you'd say I should focus on improving? I'd like to improve everything obviously, but I'd like to prioritize the most important areas I lack skill in.

[Suuper-san]

Ahhh I see
that's a lot of time to be putting into each page. I'm still working out my generic manga page style so I can't say how I compare, but I definitely don't take that long to do a page. You can see my non-rendered pages in my last post in my main manga art thread. They took roughly 2.5 hours to get to that stage.
I understand your reasons for practising anatomy at the same time, but I would recommend separating your "practice" from your "actual" work. I mean practice anatomy first on it's own as a warm up or something, do some figure sketches, and then do the manga without putting more detail into the pages than is necessary. Partly because the figures in manga are always partial so you dont get to practice the full body anyway, so it's not too effective.
Honestly I think you're above me in terms of skill so I can't tell what to suggest, other than trying to improve the efficiency of your workflow to improve speed without trying to rush.

[MorganManga]

I understand your reasons for practising anatomy at the same time, but I would recommend separating your "practice" from your "actual" work.

I think I'll give this a try. New page soon. Much appreciated.

P.S. I forgot to ask, but how far zoomed in do people tend to work when doing digital manga? I have a tendency to zoom in really close and am trying to fix that but I don't really know what distance would be considered "normal". Like how much of the page I can see at once?

[Suuper-san]

Each artist will vary as to what zoom they prefer to work at for producing consistent work.
A higher zoom generally means higher accuracy but you can also increase your accuracy by increasing your focus.

Looking at it traditionally, a manga artist will use paper that's at least twice the dimensions of the final print.
Roughly equivalent to drawing on A3 to print on A5
(That's just from memory)

But really, whatever produces the quality you want, in a timeframe that you want, is the zoom you should use. It doesn't matter if "everyone" does it a certain way or not if you can do it your own way just as good.

PS you are working at a large image size, what size will you be printing at? because at 300dpi even A4 isn't as big as your current canvas.
Reducing the canvas size is a good way to control the detail level as it will get pixelly when you are zoomed in too close.

[MorganManga]

PS you are working at a large image size, what size will you be printing at? because at 300dpi even A4 isn't as big as your current canvas.
Reducing the canvas size is a good way to control the detail level as it will get pixelly when you are zoomed in too close.

Heres the next page: https://i.imgur.com/SYSkDyw.png


The size is 297.00 x 420.00mm Binding size: B4 Size 257.00 x 364.00mm 600dpi. I don't remember where but I recall searching and reading that 300dpi-600dpi was good. What do you recommend? I wanted it to be the size of your average manga which is why I selected B4, so should I switch the DPI?

Since I'm mainly using this manga for practice I didn't think too much about ever printing it. I'm going to do a few practice manga to make sure I can give my main ideas the quality I want them to have.

[Suuper-san]

B4 is the size which is drawn on for manga I think, but it is reduced down for final printing, so you won't need 600dpi for the larger size.

A decent compromise is around A5@450dpi. I use A5@300dpi at the moment and the quality seems OK for my level.
The only reason to take into account printing size is that you dont want to produce work at a higher quality than it will ever be viewed at (including on the screen), and thus waste time.
The exact size of manga varies depending on which publisher and series, 4koma are typically exactly A5 whereas your Bleach or One Piece is a bit smaller, I think it's B6 size.