3 ms·

I love it, but having tried to build the same thing myself in the past I realized a horrible truth: you can't make comics, even ones that strictly informative,

I love it, but having tried to build the same thing myself in the past I realized a horrible truth: you can't make comics, even ones that strictly informative, without being able to draw. If you look at "Understanding Comics" try to picture what parts could be made procedurally. It's a tiny percentage. It looks neat and is eye-catching, but it's hard to add information using comics. When done well, it's amazing - just really hard.

fartcannon 7y ago
I mean you _mostly_ can't, but there are all kinds of counter-examples: https://www.qwantz.com/ https://www.qwantz.com/
- byron_fast 7y ago
  Well that proves the rule. I don't even see the dinosaurs there anymore.
mntmoss 7y ago
It's more subtle than that. For any given technique used to illustrate a scene, you could come up with a means of automating it, and those means are employed by professional artists on the regular, from rulers to draw straight lines up through 3D modelling software. A lot of finished work will go between the sketchbook and the computer and then back again to iterate on technical elements like proportioning and perspective. But what you cannot automate is the design work that puts together each of those techniques. You have to decide: how much detail to add? What are the spatial relationships? What will my light values and colors communicate? What shapes and forms should be given emphasis? And then at the level of storytelling, all the considerations around plotting and characterization; the themes of the story and how scenes develop to express those themes, and how that translates into imagery and the physical description of a character. Working on commercial art today is much more about these kinds of conceptual distinctions than about the quality of traditional pen-to-paper drafting skills. If you know how to pull out those techniques through automation, you can still get a satisfying result. But getting the "eye" for knowing what is possible still needs training.
- byron_fast 7y ago
  Yes. Exactly the difference between templated, frameworked software and software that is great.

fartcannon 7y ago

I mean you _mostly_ can't, but there are all kinds of counter-examples: https://www.qwantz.com/ https://www.qwantz.com/

byron_fast 7y ago
Well that proves the rule. I don't even see the dinosaurs there anymore.

mntmoss 7y ago

It's more subtle than that. For any given technique used to illustrate a scene, you could come up with a means of automating it, and those means are employed by professional artists on the regular, from rulers to draw straight lines up through 3D modelling software. A lot of finished work will go between the sketchbook and the computer and then back again to iterate on technical elements like proportioning and perspective. But what you cannot automate is the design work that puts together each of those techniques. You have to decide: how much detail to add? What are the spatial relationships? What will my light values and colors communicate? What shapes and forms should be given emphasis? And then at the level of storytelling, all the considerations around plotting and characterization; the themes of the story and how scenes develop to express those themes, and how that translates into imagery and the physical description of a character. Working on commercial art today is much more about these kinds of conceptual distinctions than about the quality of traditional pen-to-paper drafting skills. If you know how to pull out those techniques through automation, you can still get a satisfying result. But getting the "eye" for knowing what is possible still needs training.

byron_fast 7y ago
Yes. Exactly the difference between templated, frameworked software and software that is great.