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I made my own a couple of years back but I've moved from country to country since then and it's gone. I just received http://www.artdiscount.co.uk/product/a3_art_craft_light_box/  in the post today. So far so good, the base wasn't 100% flat so it wobbled a bit, fixed it with a nugget of blutack easy enough.

Those manga guys you love so much (I love them too! shinkawa= the best) have a depth to their style which isn't forced but comes from being a good draughtsman first. The sooner you challenge yourself and stop taking shortcuts and calling it 'style' the better. A good 'stylised' piece doesn't come from the artists shortcoming in draughtsmanship. All those artists you quoted me learnt the fundamentals first, from 1000's of drawings from life i bet. You need to know something before you can simplify it, so many people who like comics and manga miss this point, get to a lifedrawing class. I understand your point about being another Jim Lee clone, I don't want to be that either! But the sloppy style guys (Shinkawa,Wood, Murphy) make it look easy because they can draw like a classical artist first.

Keep ignoring your weaknesses and you might end up the next Liefield instead.

good luck

your drawings have a nice flow overall and the first one shows some good colour sense. I'm not sure about your anatomy (I KNOW it's exaggerated, I KNOW your probably going for something other than human), the structure of some of it ( hips especially) take me out of it, I'm not asking for realism, but believability.

Apart from that your avoiding your main weaknesses, or the hard bits by taking shortcuts on the feet and hands. Either with 'manga boots' or using weird mechanical stuff. You need to nail these things, they look fine on a blank sheet of paper but as soon as you try and place that figure in a 3d space with wonky feet it won't work.

Sorry if this all sounds harsh but I REALLY am trying to help. you may not be quite there yet but you can be, and that takes the ability to look at your own work objectively and welcome this sort of stuff, I hope you get what i'm getting at

all the best

Ok the general flow of the pages and composition is great, alot better than i can manage at this stage. This is the stuff you learn from wanting to make comics and looking at those set of artists. Your spotting of blacks shows some good rendering ability too

Best piece of advice I can give you is look elsewhere for a bit, your draftsmanship is structurally a little weak, especially with anatomy. Comics isn't the best place to learn this sort of stuff. Get some more classical illustration/artbooks. The Loomis ones are especially good at laying out a 3 dimensional space. Bridgman's book on anatomy will also help you understand your figures more constructively (or Vilppu too).

Iv'e been a long time admirer of Ashley Wood, and I kinda got it. It looks sloppy and fast but really theres a lot of thinking going on. That was until recently, until i found out that the man does NO UNDERDRAWING. It blows my mind, to be able to lay out a page and draw it straight in ink with such confidence.. I'm not giving up, but jesus, I'm a long way off.

at the moment

1 frank frazetta
2 ashley wood
3 sean gordon murphy
4 scottie young
5 wally wood
6 calum alexander watt
7 rockwell
8 Ilya repin
9 Wyeth
10 - everyone else

Yer making the .cbr or .pdf or whatever isn't so much a problem. Both options are available for me to create easily. I was wondering from more of a readers standpoint what people thought was the most pleasant experience, and if this .cbr/.cbz thing is a bit of a gimmick or not. I've only really seen it done in comics and was wondering what .pdf wasn't doing for people to make this new format.

good replies thought cheers guys

I was wondering what peoples thoughts were on various digital formats for comics. I've been working on some short stories and assumed I would just package them as .pdf and release them online if I can't get them into print (likely). But looking through peoples online comics they have used .CBR format and myebook.com . Is their any particular reason for this, or one people prefer? Is their a standard, or one you would put your money on?

I got some good thought from PJholden about this through email and just wondered what rest of you thought.

cheers

awesome!

definitely be working on this, cheers for the heads up

to add one more nugget to this... once you have your halftones saved as a pattern you can apply it to a custom brush and just paint with the tones.

I find it easiest this way

This is my summation of the White Fury story in the 1978 2000ad annual. Hope you like

good luck peeps

just finished the inks on mine, can't get hold of a scanner until Thursday though. Not sure whether to colour it either.

We will see,

best of luck peeps.

Personally the cleanest way to do it is to set your image mode to duotone and put cyan 20% in the box. Your image needs to be in grayscale mode first before duotone.

cheers, it was a pleasure

Gonna try and find time for this.