Friday, September 7, 2012

Digital tools leads to weak artwork!

I am a firm believer that the artist, not the tools ,makes the art work. With that said I have begun to see a dark trend in comic books lately. With the use of new technology artists are trying out new tools to create their art. Well it may be that there is a learning curve to pass or just a bit of laziness involved but some of the worst art I have come across has been digital.
Look at the cover to 'Age of Apocalypse' #5 by Carlo Barberi and Edgar Delgado. First of all it is a weak cover that looks like it took Carlo about 15 minutes to draw. Then look at the area around her left hand and down around her feet...see anything that should not be there? There are sketch marks of the original layout that where not erased! How much of a hurry was Barberi in to finish this cover that he had no time to get rid of those lines? Could it be that he knew that it was going to be digitally colored and just figured no one would notice? I noticed. Then Delgado took about 10 minutes and put some color on. He also did not notice the unerased marks. Look at the "hole in the fire" to the bottom right. The digital paint strokes are just blatantly obvious...also done without a care ( lets throw in editor Nick Lowe as the last person who should have caught these mistakes but did not...or did he also not care?).
Now look at page one of ' Boba Fett is Dead' #1 by Chris Scalf. This piece was done on Photoshop or some form of digital program that uses layers. He made one layer the ground and painted Boba on a seperate layer. Well, when he combined the layers he was supposed to erase any edges that carried over and not part of the Boba drawing. Follow the edge of Boba and look at his right hand and right leg. You can clearly see where Scalf was too lazy to erase the extra edge from the second layer ( this would have taken him seconds to do) or he just did not care.
Creators, we spend our money to buy your books and the least you could do is put some TLC into the final product. If you don't care enough to give us a good final book why should we care enough to spend our money on it?
( That was only two examples...imagine how many more there are in the tons of books published every month.)


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