[Spiral]

OK, haven't posted in some time, not that it's important but...

I have these six drawings I've done. Some are recent some older but generally I'm trying to get used to inking and figuring out the basics so that sometime I can maybe start freelancing for some small-time RPG companies. Mention anything that you find that is wrong with these. If you can also suggest what I should have done, that's even better.



http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/23guy.jpg

OK, I know that there are many flaws in this one, the sidewalk wasn't even made to look like a sidewalk, that lit portion of the car is even worse than the dark one, most objects aren't rendered all that well and I know that it's a bad mix of tones and black areas. I was mainly trying to make the main character look nice, I like it abit, mostly because of the shirt though.

http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/fightwithdemon.jpg

This one is several weeks old. I didn't finish it because I got bored and because the characters weren't posed well especially in relation to the environment. I didn't plan to do it like this from the start, I was just going to do the demon.

http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/dwarf.jpg

I don't like this one. I don't know why. I devastated the skulls do to boredom and the blocks in the background...I still haven't found a good way to make them stones.

http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/rooftop.jpg

This one is afew weeks old too.

http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/shotinhead.jpg

Was going for the same look as the previous one but didn't finish it. I just want to know if I rendered the light correctly.

http://spiralarchitect.freewebspace.com/images/zombied.jpg

Tell me what I could have done about the hair. Mind you that I was going for the hair-do Eddie had in the Iron Maiden album.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this stuff.

[amichaels]

Well, I can tell some of them are older because they have improved toward the end. If I can make a suggestion though...
If you are inking work that is ultimately going to be colored, you might want to go for less hatching and adopt a cleaner style. Since the color usually does a lot to define the light and shadowed area of a piece of art (like in Comics for example) the inker usually doesn't need to do as much hatching. That isn't as important if they are going to be published black and white though. Some of the hatching on the early ones is really thick though and makes the pics kind of confusing.

[Spiral]

You're right about the hatching. I'm just trying to figure it out and control it, I guess I get carried away. It is very challenging to try to figure out how to set up a black&white drawing in a way that gives as much detail as possible so, whenever I want to show something being in relative darkness but not all black, I tend to overdo the crosshatching because thre seems to be no other way.

These things aren't to be published, they're practice, I just want to get more used to making b&w drawings of steady quality but that won't take forever to render and won't be too confusing either.

Looking at various comic inkers I see that there are times when they overdo the inking themselvs or at least make the image very dark. I guess they can do this pretty fast because they use brushes while I am using a ballpoint pen and a marker. On the RPG end however most images are pretty low on quality, some are even rediculous and there is no specific thing that companies seem to prefer, so I am trying to do many things and see how they turn out.

Thanks for the suggestion though, I will heed your words on the confusing and overdone crosshatching.