Fantasy vs. Sci-fi: The impossible task of combining diametrically opposite genres

[Fuzzy Modem]

I’ve been frequenting another board for years with the development of this project, but now, as I prepare to re-release it after a near catastrophic false start, I find that I need a fresh perspective. I’m hoping that’s where you’ll come in. I need a new set of eyes before I’m ready to release the first issue, and so I ask that you read the following sixteen pages and give me your appraisal. Thank you




















Oh- and here is some stuff in development.















And of course the website (wip)
http://crossovercomic.com/indexTEMP.php?page=about

Try the Day/Night button! You know you want to

Oh! I almost forgot! The map->


Detail->


Detail->


We'll be using the google maps inteface once the site is finished with text bubles for each page showing it's location in the world.

Thanks again for having a look. I know it's all a bit to digest, but I look forward to your questions and feedback.

[Jason Rainville]

Using filters will give you -10 credebility points right off the bat. Any digital artist worth his pirated version of PS will spot the filters, immediately say "I could do that" and your work will suffer. I think it's posturization?

The inconsistencies in your images are not pleasent. The panel where the guy in the purple hood says something like "no allysa your parents loved you very much" it's painful to look at. The lighting on the guys face vs the girls, the inconsistent textures.... it's just not really all that pretty.

A lot of your panels are messy in composition and excecution. This sometimes makes portions of your pics hard to read (the blue map is especially a confounding mess of screaming visual information) Some textures pop right out and some are muddy. Some colours are super-saturated and some are earthy and dull. There's overall no consistency.

[Fuzzy Modem]

I will be using filters. It's a time constraint issue.

The combination of filters is as follows:

Three identical layers.

Top layer- Find edges filter. Desaturate. Set to color burn. Adjust Brightness +75, Contrast +25 Manually paint out certain areas (stars for instance always end up black)

Middle layer- Remove from original document. Increase size to 3200 x Height. Smart Blur at radius of 10 and a threshold of 25. Run water color filter. Add back to original document.

Bottom layer- Unchanged from original. Adjust the opacity of the other two layers to the desired level.


Why am I using filters? All the work here is going into the CG and costume design. Those are my strong areas, and this method allows me to produce pages quickly once the initial material is complete.

So while I may spend a month on a model of a star fighter, once it's finished I can render it from any angle, with any lighting in a matter of minutes.

As a result, though I've spent the past four years amasing content, I finished those 16 pages in less than two months. I'm not saying they don't need work, but the filters save enough time to make the release of three 288 page books, and two 144 page books plausable in my life time. So the filters stay. A neccesary evil. I'd like to think I make up for it with quantity, but maybe I'm just kidding myself.

Anything about it you did like?

I guess what I'm really looking for is some photoshop tricks. Fast and effective ways of masking the imperfections in the color and composition. Emphasis on fast. Any ideas?

[Fuzzy Modem]

I touched up that page a bit and updated my op. here is the origianl and the changes.


...


As a point of interest- how do I get the spiffy little thumbnail next to my topic?

[nuki]

dude, some of those pictures really got nice atmospheres and colors...but the filters hurt my eyes. I would just want to see what they look like without them..

[Fuzzy Modem]

A couple before and after examples of the filters->

Forgive the horribly campy dialogue. These are pages from before I had a working script. I finished twenty two pages before realizing a script would have been a good idea. After this epiphany of obviousness, I spent the next eight months working on the script before starting again on new pages. Hence the addition of a prologue.

Unfiltered


Filtered



Unfiltered


Filtered



Unfiltered


Filtered

[Leftyy]

I'm pretty sure you get an image beside your post by putting one of the images from your first post in that white box that says 'Attached Thumbnail', or something like that.

Nice images, but the thing that really bothers me is the guy with the sword on the front cover. It looks like you need to spend more time on that. Also, some of the pages have so many text bubbles all in the same place, where I'm just thinking, "Where does this start and where does it end?" An example of what I'm talking about would be the pages with the guy at the bottom who's yelling, "Alistair!" I don't really know how to fix this problem, because I don't make and never have made comics, but what I would suggest that you do is space out the bubbles more and make it more obvious about who says what. Maybe make one page where there is too much text into two seperate pages.

That's all I know about comics, so you should probably ask someone who's better acquainted with them.