Friday, June 25, 2021

dissatisfaction leads to revision

I found some major flaws in the cartoons I'd put up, so I redid them today. You can see the originals here. Below are the revisions, with explanations.

In the first pic, the first problem was scan resolution. I don't know why, but our office copier, which doubles as a scanner, originally scanned the pic at 150 dpi instead of the standard 300 dpi that it defaults to. So I re-scanned the picture. Second was the problem of the guy's craggy-looking forearm. True, it's still a bit craggy-looking (thanks to my shaky hand), but I "straightened out" the forearm slightly by redrawing it. Still can't decide if the character on the left is a woman or a man with a mullet. I guess the tits mean it's a woman.

Huge problem in the next pic. If you go back and look at the original, you'll note that the woman's arm and shoulder don't match up, so I had to adjust that. I had two choices on how to solve the problem: (1) move the woman's arm back a bit until it matched the shoulder, or (2) move her back in a bit so that so that her arm didn't seem so implausibly far forward. I chose the latter. Here, too, there was a resolution problem, so the image below has been re-scanned. I also worked a bit on the face of the kid under the car. There was something wrong with his eyes in the original.

In the next pic, I used Photoshop's "dodge" tool to lighten the background around the evil spirit's eyes so that the "jiggle lines" would be more visible.

In the Kim Sisters' picture, the sister on the far right had problems with her ear. As any artist can tell you when studying body geometry, the typical human ear goes from about eye level to the bottom of the nose. Never noticed this? Look at yourself in a mirror, and you'll see what I'm talking about. In the original drawing, the sister's ear was far too long, so I adjusted her hair to make her ear look more proportional. I thought about adding a gradient to the background to make the pic more dimensional, but I was lazy and decided that that would be too much work. Here's the result:

For the last picture, my favorite, the problem was fairly subtle: one stripe on the tiger's muzzle seemed to have strayed too far, so I cut it back. Compare the following pic to the original pic:

I think the above pic is a bit more restrained-looking now.

Anyway, there you have it—my adjustments. Would you have caught the mistakes I pointed out had I not explained what they were? Sometimes, it takes an artist's eye to see these problems, and while I'm not much of an artist, I do dabble.



1 comment:

  1. No, I hadn't noticed any of the issues you corrected. I honestly don't look at cartoon drawings in such a critical fashion (i.e. the length of an ear), but I understand the creator wants to convey the message without the distractions of imperfection.

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