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So I convinced my friend to read aurora, and I need you to know that while we were reading it together, she gave Vash/Kendal a Scottish accent and the Collector an Italian accent

mamma mia

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YORK CAN READ?? (NOT CLICKBAIT!!)

Bonus:

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December is really busy so I was able to finish this Drawtectives Season 3 Hype fanart only now. But maybe it's a sign for everyone who missed it to go and watch the first episode!

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I can't stop thinking about my intentions with Eugene and then how he turned out. Sad death boy to confused innocent sweety happened real fast.

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I'm very much enjoying the recent pages and just how much character is pouring out especially through body language and facial expressions. My favorite being how Tess is just so nonchalant like this is a normal Tuesday and Tynan's mix of confused and pissed. So I wonder how do you draw facial expressions? I do pencil and paper art as a hobby and for me they're one of the harder things to get down right.

Ahh, facial expressions, the backbone of a character-driven story. I can't remember ever sitting down and perfecting How To Draw Faces, but while I struggled with it a lot early on, I don't remember having much trouble with it in recent years, so evidence suggests that the faces I draw were in large part refined naturally during my chibi-drawing video-making process, which makes me think that the skillset can be refined even if the faces in question are incredibly stylized. Eyes, eyebrows and mouths are apparently all you need for the basics.

Cartoon facial expressions have a benefit of modularity - you can get away with swapping out or tweaking individual parts of the expression without having to do any redrawing of the underlying head shape (a difficulty faced by more realistic or more squash-and-stretch-heavy styles, as faces can be VERY flexible and a mouth shape or eyebrow arrangement can reshape the entire profile of the head). This can help us see how extremely complex our ability to read facial emotions really is. Tiny changes can communicate entirely different vibes.

It doesn't take much repositioning or tweaking to get across a potentially very complex emotion.

Every time I try to think of a hard list of do's and don'ts for this, I fail. Facial expressions can be arbitrarily complicated. Rules like "make sure each part of the expression is communicating the same emotion" might sound good on paper, but in practice you can get a lot of mileage out of an expression where every part is saying something different - a big smile with sad eyes, a small smirk with a calm open gaze, etc. We parse facial expressions as a whole, not as a sum of parts. Like a lot of art, getting an expression to say what you want it to is mostly a matter of tweaking it until it looks right. Suppose we want to make our example elf dude look devastated.

Pretty good, but maybe a little too subdued. This gives me "you just told me something horrible that I haven't fully processed yet" vibes. Let's tweak the mouth to pull the corners out more, putting more tension in their face.

That makes them seem a little less frozen. It looks like they're breathing in, getting ready to say or yell something. But maybe instead of SAD devastated, we want FURIOUS devastated. So let's tweak the eyebrows, where anger is stored.

The other expressions give a feeling of open devastation, perhaps witnessing some incomprehensible tragedy - this new expression looks more focused. Maybe they're currently staring down the person who got them so upset, waiting for them to stop monologuing. Maybe once they're done processing, they'll look a little more like this.

That's a powerful face, but we've strayed pretty far from "devastated" by the end there. Maybe they've started their "you can never win" speech against whoever got them so upset. There's determination in that expression - whatever they were feeling before, they've sharpened it down to a knife's edge.

I wish I could give better advice than "just draw about a million little chibi faces and eventually you'll work it out through sheer numbers" but I really can't think of a better way to get good at pulling together specific emotions to match what's happening in the character's head.

sidenote this ask reminded me how much otherwise solid superhero comic art absolutely blows at facial expressions and how much that annoys me, it cannot be that hard to draw nightwing pretty

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personal comics from the past year about feeling Bad

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🎄👼

hohojo

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She's a model, she's an actress, she's a dancer

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Your snowman looks great! No, really.

[Characters are from CTC]

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my number one sleep aid this week is turning out to be Drawing More Space Bullshit

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now that the comic is on a brief pause I can unwind by (checks notes) more drawing

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Tips on how to fight the "if I overly explain, everything will be hunky doory" instinct?

Being genuine, as someone who does struggle with it from time to time. <- Like this!

No matter how good you explain, you are not immune to

person reading fast skipping words or sentences

person reading casually who is not interested in unpacking your statement to any degree of depth

person who decided what you meant three words in and is not internalizing anything beyond that point

person focusing on a part of the statement you literally never considered important and making that the sole focus of their analysis

person primed by an external conflict who is scanning your statement for dogwhistles that indicate whether you're on Their Side or the Enemy Side

When it comes to explaining, there's a baseline level of Good Enough you can strive for, to the point where someone who's paying attention, trying to understand your nuances, and not actively setting out to misinterpret you will most likely get most of what you're talking about. Beyond that, it doesn't matter how many words you use if they aren't being read or interpreted. All you can control is what you say. You cannot control how you're perceived or interpreted.

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When creating art, how do you deal with the fact that seemingly everyone's opinions and tastes are completely individual? Like, how do you make good art, when around 40-50% of what even is "good art" changes from person to person? Sure, we have points we can all agree, but I'm baffled by how three people can agree and disagree on the same pieces of media. I can like movies A and B, and feel like they're very alike, but a friend might love B and hate A and another friend thinks the opposite.

The confusion is because "good" is being used to mean several different things:

To My Personal Taste. If you like a piece of art, you could very easily describe it as good just because you had a good time with it.

Well Put Together. If a story is well-crafted, lacking in plotholes or contrivances, broadly carefully woven, makes sense the more you think about it, etc - you could deem it to be good because it's been put together well. If a work of art looks good, the light sources and shadows make sense with one another, the colors work well together, the composition has clarity, the anatomy is correct - then the work was put together competently and skillfully, and could be called good for this reason.

Objective Quality. When people describe a movie as good, this is usually what they are trying to judge. Whether an objective judgment can be rendered on something as subjective as art is something people have been yelling about for centuries. In my estimation, the quality of a work has to be judged based on what the artist was going for and how close their execution was to that goal. An attempt at photorealism might be seen as "objectively bad" if it doesn't look photorealistic.

And by the same token, "bad" can mean a BUNCH of different things:

Bad Because I Had A Bad Time

Bad Because It Didn't Deliver What I Expected From It

Bad Because It Hit Me With A Personal Dealbreaker

Bad Because I Couldn't Take It Seriously

Bad Because It Didn't Make Sense To Me

Bad Because It Said Something I Really Disagreed With

And many more. This is why I think it's helpful to unpack a story further than just "is it good or bad" because those judgments are almost always concealing a more interesting personal analysis. There are stories I find highly ineffective that are still professionally well-crafted and accomplishing the creator's goals. There are stories I enjoy the hell out of that are weighed down by ropey characterization and dubious values. It's usually more effective, in my experience, to narrow in and identify what parts of a work are working for you, and what parts aren't clicking.

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hello red! i would like to preface with I LOVE YOUR COMIC it's my favorite ever, makes me want to make comics like you wouldn't believe, so inspirational on all fronts (art, story, characters/dynamics, world), i've been on the Aurora train since Falst joined and i will never leave.

question: how heavy is dainix [rock]

almost as heavy as dainix [guy]

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oh hey I can finally post this behind-the-scenes comic from four months ago

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okay I'm sorry but I need to vent about this-

I tried showing Arcane to my sister over break (because she asked me to) and for the 7 episodes she watched she really Was Not Getting It. Which is like incredibly frustrating but also *fine*, like not everything is for everyone whatever. Until we got to episode 7 of s1. And when the Jinx and Ekko fight started she said. "They just undercut all of that tension by turning it into a music video"