Episode 665 - Eyes
Dec 10, 2023
This week our talk is an art one: eyes! We talk about how to draw them, adding meaning and expression, the way different cultures use them, different styles for doing eyes, reflection, shadow, focus and a million other things!
Topics and Show Notes
Eyes anchor a face, they're THE most important landmark because humans are instinctively drawn to them as are most other creatures because eyes are an ancient thing that connects most animals, not just mammals but birds, reptiles, fish, crustaceans, arthropods, arthropods, insects and more. And for this reason hiding eyes or blocking them or even removing them is a great indication of evil or that something is wrong. There are Soooo many ways of drawing them from simple dots, circles within circles, lines, or going full on with something more realistic.
While not the first to develop it, Disney is famous for popularising a particular style of big eyes, which notably went on to influence early manga creators and that in turn became the main style throughout eastern Asia in animation and comics. Large eyes in narrative art in the region have been honed to an intricate art form with extremely complicated reflections, intricate colourings, and a multitude of expressions and indications of character and mental states.
Typically western comic art uses eyebrows and eyelids to a lessor extent to indicate expressions. Usually eyes are either proportionally realistic or in more stylised art they tend to be large and simplified. And while the eyes in manga style art are able to take the entire burden of representing expression, in western art they tend to have to work in concert with other facial features like the mouth, brows, set of the jaw and creases on the face.
One of the toughest things with eyes is to make both of them the same. A trick is to simply copy and paste to mirror one eye. In the old days you'd use tracing paper, carbon paper etc… Ironically though if you make both eyes too perfectly mirrored and alike things look LESS real and relatable because in reality eyes are rarely perfectly mirrored and when they are it's a little weird, though it's not something you notice most of the time because your brain automatically corrects for things like that. The upshot is that you shouldn't get too crazy about making sure the eyes you draw match perfectly, as long as one isn't too tilted or higher than the other.
We talk a LOT more about this on the Quackcast of course…
So how do you go about drawing eyes? Do you prefer the manga look or the Western approach? Do you have any issues with drawing eyes?
This week Gunwallace was too busy to we replayed an old fave, Gunwallace's theme to Android Blues - Cold blue, ancient mechanisms, clicking and pulsing… springs contracting, gears turning, cams slipping, servos spinning, capacitors whining… the machine works perfectly and mysteriously.
NEXT UP - Quackcast 666. Something evil…
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Short changed - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/dec/05/featured-comic-short-changed/
Featured music:
Android Blues - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Android_Blues/ - by Stahlberg, rated A.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 645 - AI-cast
Jul 24, 2023
We're chatting about the current state of AI, it's use, abuse, and the moronic way it's typically being utalised by mid-level businesses to screw over creative people and save money in the short term.
Episode 643 - Cultcast
Jul 10, 2023
With the release of the new Indiana Jones film comes some questions… We haven't seen it yet but we hear a lot of people don't like it and it's already being called a flop. But is that because it's actually bad, because people want it to be bad, or because it doesn't match people's expectations? What's the real story? It's hard to know at this point.
Episode 638 - Rookie Mistakes
Jun 5, 2023
Beginners at webcomics make mistakes, rookie mistakes. In fact people tend to make a lot of the same mistakes and we're going to chat about some of those in the Quackcast, but there are certainly a LOT more!
Episode 632 - Star Wars
Apr 24, 2023
We finally gave in to temptation and just started chatting about Star Wars. For our Patreon video we were talking about the idea of pivotal pop-cultural landmarks that changed the cultural landscape in various ways. Star Wars definitely qualifies… but instead of finding other examples we just decided to indulge in a Star Wars only cast. We didn't do more than scratch the surface unfortunately though. It's a cool cultural phenomena and it's something we always refer back to when we talk about story structure. SO please bear with us as we indulge!
Episode 614 - Super groups!
Dec 19, 2022
Inspired by Banes we did a Quackcast on SUPER TEAMS! You know those groups like the Justice League, the Avengers, the Suicide Squad, or even Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy from The Journey to the West (Monkey Magic is my fave version). These are super powerful characters on their own but together they're even more awesome because their strengths and weakness complement each other in interesting ways. DD had its very own super team in the form of the Heroes Alliance, where a lot of DD creators got together to work on a shared universe. And back in the 2000s DD had a “Civil War” even with Keen Space (AKA Comic Genesis), where a huge number of our creators and theirs participated in something like a DC Vs Marvel crossover battle.
Episode 593 - Risky Business
Jul 25, 2022
The risks of online creative success We live in a wonderful time where you're able to turn your creative passion into a job that can support you just by using freely available online services like YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Patreon, Ebay, Paypal, Etsy, Webtoons etc. You can start with nothing more than your computer or phone and end up with a thriving business based on your passion project. It's not easy, achieving enough success where you can quit your day job still tends to take a lot of work, but once you get there it can be amazing. However, that's not the end of the story unfortunately.
Episode 589 - AB positive
Jun 27, 2022
A and B stories… And C, and D etc. It seems that it's more popular than ever to have stories with multiple concurrent threads. This is when you have a main story and a bunch of other sub stories all happening at the same time. These might come together at the end of the story or they might peter out. We don't get many stories just made with just an A-plot and nothing else these days.
