Do Artists Using 3D Models In Comics Bother You?

[Timothy Hunter]

For the past couple decades, it has been commonplace for artists to use programs such as Google Sketchup for assistance on background and even characters in comics.

[OopsIdiditagain]

I see it a lot in webcomics and mangas. I don't mind it because it makes it easier and less stressful for artists to do their jobs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Sometimes the story is so good I forget to notice the artist is tracing over 3d models or photographs for backgrounds.

[Rob Allen]

Can someone post examples of work done with and without 3D models, so we can see what the difference is?

[OopsIdiditagain]

Can someone post examples of work done with and without 3D models, so we can see what the difference is?

Art with 3d models:

[CSTowle]

Eh, tell me a good story using words and pictures and I'm not going to care much how you do it. In movies CGI doesn't register as live-action in my brain, so any scene that involves it (like Black Widow and the helicopter scene) just looks like a human interacting with a cartoon and has the same emotional impact as a cartoon for me. But other than that, don't much care. In comics I expect most actions to be artificial, regardless of whether they're drawn/painted or computer-generated. Live pictures interacting does bump me, though (like some Kirby stuff, or the occasional appearance of a human's photo in comics).

[MRP]

"Never draw what you can swipe. Never swipe what you can trace. Never trace what you can photocopy. Never photocopy what you can clip out and paste down"
-Wally Wood

It's just another step in a long legacy of comic artists using whatever material is available (from lightboxes, photo-references and files of stock poses to now online tools and computer modeling) to make the work easier and quicker. It's been done by the best in the business and the worst, since folks started making comics, so no it doesn't bother me.

-M

[Zelena]

The important part is the result… Does it show? Is it a problem?

In the first example, I had to search the character in the scenery. In the second example, it looks like a photomontage. It’s true that I saw more homogeneous comic panels made by artists… who had probably more time to make their work.

Anyway, it’s hard to judge a panel separately from the others… How many time would a reader stay on the panel in a normal reading? Hardly more a second.

[Kirby101]

I don't mind, but it often feels more lifeless.

[Jim Kelly]

This is an "Art in current comic books" subject. Like with other current comic art, those examples are too crowded. It's about subtraction--taking away the details that overstuff the image and bringing out the details that are most important to the story.

And as I learned from an old Superman comic, when some crooks had abducted an artist, he explained you can't just trace from a photograph. Because then the image looks wrong to us--you have to pull perspective to make it look right. Jimmy Stewart would get vertigo from looking at those cityscapes. It's not enough that all the lines meet at a vanishing point. The background is still pushing forward into the foreground. To fool the eye--the lines in the foreground have to be stronger to indicate that's closest to your eye. While the background detail needs to be lessened, so it looks further away. Even then, there should be some forced perspective to create a more dynamic panel.

[Zelena]

And as I learned from an old Superman comic, when some crooks had abducted an artist, he explained you can't just trace from a photograph. Because then the image looks wrong to us--you have to pull perspective to make it look right. Jimmy Stewart would get vertigo from looking at those cityscapes. It's not enough that all the lines meet at a vanishing point. The background is still pushing forward into the foreground. To fool the eye--the lines in the foreground have to be stronger to indicate that's closest to your eye. While the background detail needs to be lessened, so it looks further away. Even then, there should be some forced perspective to create a more dynamic panel.

It’s true that a well-crafted work needs that every line must be what Benoît Peeters has called a “significant line”: when artists draw, they put everything in order to contribute to a meaning like the hierarchy of elements, the level of details… “Photographic lines” are not the result of an idea, a human goal.

But between an artist work and a laborer work, there’s no comparison.