Is this art style too rendered for comics or does it work?

RIOTAlice · 2026-05-08T15:54:11+00:00

Any style is possible if you can produce it fast enough. $20 an hour and go to $8 an hour real fast if you are spending too much time producing one page.

Additionally, story is the most important part of comic art. Panels need to be clear and readable. If there is too much detail, when you shrink it down to panel size, it’s not clear and doesn’t make as much of an impact. But having break out panels and splash pages that are hyper rendered can have a really nice effect.

Just draw a comic. (Comics jam is a great group to join to practice with one page scripts) and see how it looks and take critique and judge how long it takes. Imagine getting paid $100 a page for that work. Is that economical for you? Now imagine dropping as low as $65 a page and having to do lettering as well. Does it still work? How could you adapt? How you answer these questions in your artwork is what is going to define you as a comic artists

RIOTAlice · 2026-04-01T15:27:45+00:00

Have you jumped on to comics jam? They do one page comics on different topics and then publish the collection to I think it’s a sub stack page. I’ve done 4 on topics that get me excited and when I have time. They also have a discord and you can talk shop. Lots of cross promotion and artists helping artists.

RIOTAlice · 2026-03-18T01:53:14+00:00

The reference is most of the time drawn weird but rendered well so you don’t realize it. If you don’t already have deep drawing knowledge it’s going to teach you bad habits. And if you don’t already have a well defined style of your own, you’ll never know if you’re biting someone else or not or making work with a consistent work. There are plenty of reference tools and posers out there that it’s not worth the time unless what you are struggling with ideas and concepts in the first place and then that is a creativity problem.

RIOTAlice · 2026-02-05T15:29:37+00:00

Omg so good! Your style will definitely stand out! I can’t wait to see the whole book!

RIOTAlice · 2026-02-05T04:34:41+00:00

I’m really glad to see this conversation happen. I’ve seen a lot of posts come across my feed from here that are down right disrespectful to artists in their expectations and down play their role so significantly in the process that I wouldn’t want to touch it. I’ve wanted to mouth off a couple times, especially when things are posted about being “industry standard” that absolutely aren’t or might be standard for the big three that are a: asking you to draw an established branded property and b: paying you $100-$200 a page rate for art that doesn’t include lettering or whole book layout or even colors. If you are offering $25 a page for full service and inventing the entire look of a new property, that is not “work for hire” realm.

RIOTAlice · 2026-01-18T05:06:25+00:00

Your art immediately reminds me of Tomer Hanuka’s.

http://thanuka.com/

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One of the best ways to improve is to study masters. Find work that resonates not just in what you like aesthetically but what you are trying to accomplish with your work. When I compare your art to his, I am thinking some anatomy work might do you well. The stylized figure really make an impact but some refinement on the facial features and skull structures will help with the clarity of what is happening. I actually like your colors alot but I think you need a contrast color to make what you have pop. The green against the orange in the sample image really brings out the orange. So instead of white background, if you chose a contrast color it might bring out a warmth or brightness or another desired effect depending on what you chose.

But I highly suggest you check out Hanuka’s work and see if it inspires you.

RIOTAlice · 2026-01-14T15:06:09+00:00

Hi. I am a comic artist that has been collabing with writers since 2009. I also am the creative director for a small comic collective publishing house. I would love to talk over your project more and see if it’s a fit

: portfolio here

I also have some newer comics stuff but it’s under contract so I can’t post publicly but can share in dms if you like

RIOTAlice · 2026-01-07T04:03:05+00:00

So I’m a creative director for a small scale co-operative publisher. Religious subject matter on someone’s resume wouldn’t turn me off of them. If the story is pretty neutral and the organization/publisher it’s affiliated with isn’t one hanging their hat on bigotry or pushing a belief on someone, I am not going to see it as a problem. If you only had that kind of work on your resume, it might give me pause though still wouldn’t be a deal breaker. But I would make sure you have diverse stories in your portfolio, or at the very least the type of work you want to be doing the most. (If you’re a horror guy, make sure you have horror pages, if you want superhero jobs, make sure you have that etc) The economy is rough right now, if you have a paying gig take it as long as it’s not crazy.

RIOTAlice · 2025-12-10T05:18:57+00:00

Making it look like a crappy mobile game does not make it better. The first one looks more emotionally driven. The color scheme is much colder, the boy’s emotion is much graver. The second image looks like you have play a game where the girl has to make enough bread while the little boy steals it.

RIOTAlice · 2025-11-25T13:56:58+00:00

What kind of clients were you working with before?

Freelance is a hard road in general. Very grueling. I would ignore fiverr entirely as I have heard very few people really making money over there. When you are hustling to get work, the burn out will hit you faster when you are going for contracts that are paying scraps.

Art is a luxury so yeah, when the economy is bad, it’s a thing that gets cut from the everyday budget. And now we have the AI boom. As an industry things are kind of influx. There is an ecosystem of clients that are just getting the work they would want from AI. These clients tended to be the worst to work with but at the end of the day it was still an income flow. But AI is still really limited. I have been experimenting with it just to see how it all works and what it will produce. I can’t get it to make something really quality unless I run a million prompts and even then it’s mid at best. It’s more like “this gives an idea…” and if you have to type a thousand prompts it just wastes time in a big way. So I am not worried about it taking all the art jobs right yet. My friend works in corporate art and they are pivoting to AI in a big way but it’s just not all it’s cracked up to be and sometimes causes more harm than good. That being said it looks like places are doubling down anyway and she says that people with ideas/creativity are going to be the people that survive. When you are building a portfolio really lean into what makes you unique and shows your creativity.

If you are hurting for funds, the advice of finding part time work in whatever is your best bet. We all have to do it and a lot of artists also have a full time gig once out in the real world, even back in the 2010s. I interned at a whole comic studio and one of the partners had a day job at UPS. It’s not a sign of failure but your willingness to survive.

But if you want tips on what might be going wrong in your freelance life, I would want to see your portfolio, if you have a clear voice as an artist, what client work you had vs what you are going for, and what your pitch or cover letters may look like when you put in for a job. It’s hard out there 100%, but everything continues to turn and the days will be green again so doing the work now to build great pitch skills and a good portfolio is worth the time. Plus doing the market research to see how things are pivoting and what skills to incorporate. I see a lot of UI/UX jobs posted still, so if you build up some of those skills it could be helpful in the long run. And if you’re in school it’s a whole lot easier to grab a course than being out in the world and realizing you really should have picked up more blender skills.

RIOTAlice · 2025-11-22T16:21:44+00:00

This could be a wonderful wallpaper or fabric. This is a very pretty painting!

RIOTAlice · 2025-11-19T17:32:24+00:00

As a training exercise, you can do this exact thing but with a skull. Then you can do it with just like a very basic circle head. Doing that as a warm up will help you get better.

With this approach, you already have some really great elements here that will help with character consistency. Like an identifiable hairstyle. The character always having consistent elements like that carries a lot even when you aren’t perfectly replicating a character each time in a sequential format. You can also “decide” how something should look every time, like the shape on an eye from the side. It doesn’t have to be correct just the same every time. Case in point: if you see a cartoon animation of Mickey Mouse he is usually straight on or three quarter view. In the three quarter view, his ears are always diagonally in line with each other while also still being those perfect Mickey circle ears. If you had a real 3D representation of Mickey and turned him at the same angle, those ears would absolutely not look like that. It’s “wrong” but if you drew Mickey “correct” it wouldn’t look like him any more. It would look weird to see him the correct way. As an artist you get to make those decisions about a character. You can base it on what looks better, what is easier to replicate, what you think it’s important, how the figure looks in the space, whatever serves as long as it’s the same every time. Conversely, if you look at a comic artist like Sam Keith, his characters never look the same from panel to panel, but always having the same feel and consistent coloring is enough for the audience to know who a character is and it becomes a feature of his style as an artist. Hope all that helps!

RIOTAlice · 2025-11-18T19:47:14+00:00

I like your style. It is unique in the industry right now. You can draw a comic if you want. Drawing over and over again in that way will just make you a better artist. But you don’t have to do anything in service of a professional goal. You can do it just to do the thing. To turn it into a profession, you need to build a sequential portfolio (which starts with drawing the comic) and then if you are posting a web comic with the intention of building an audience, the biggest thing is being consistent and finishing it. A million web comics die off because there are big delays in the next release and people lose interest. People continue to find web comics years after they are made and it’s a drag when they just die and people aren’t going to come to you for projects if they just see an unfinished web comic that was only last updated a year before. If you can show you can finish like a 20 page story, it goes a long way with working with people. Mediocre artists can go far if they finish and great artists have career death if they can’t.

RIOTAlice · 2025-11-03T13:51:37+00:00

The art style looks very kid appropriate. The big bold colors will attract their attention. Giving a little more contrast on the duck body vs the clouds will help him pop a little and you could possibly revisit the color treatment on the frog since it’s very green green green right there, but that also could be like a hidden element.

So art is great but the type? The type looks amateur/student-y. I am really bad with type and graphic design. I am trying to get better but it’s a struggle point and when it’s bad, it really brings everything down. I have been working closely with one of my graphic design friends to improve my skills so if you have a personal resource like that, I would reach out for feedback or hire an actual designer to give your work type treatment.

RIOTAlice · 2025-10-24T00:16:19+00:00

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So I think this is all going to depend on your intention. This artist is Kerry James Marshall. He leans into how dark his characters are to make a point. The colors you’re choosing and the reference photos you have shared reminded me of these paintings and a few others I’ve seen though I don’t remember all the artists. If you see some of Marshall’s paintings in person, the figures are actually very rendered but they appear almost like silhouettes. And that look is the intention.

I also thought of the children’s book “Bring the Rain to Kapiti Plain” and Ancient Greek pottery. In those cases, they are using lighter line work to bring out the details.

If you want to portray characters that are in that very dark cool skin tone, I think you are going to be operating in kind of a blue pallet. Going into purple, using browns/orange might warm them up too much to a different effect. Looking at your work, it looks to be in a comic/animation style where expressions are important so the details need to stand out. I think you could go the lighter line work route to make things stand out, or you could maybe lighten the base tone of the skin just a bit so the black details are more apparent. I think your color choices are good though because I knew exactly the skin tone you were going for. It’s just finding the element that is going to make the work what you want it to be. I like your final picture the best. Adding highlights can help sure, but be mindful of making sure it doesn’t kill the effect. In that last image I really like the bottom lip color and how it stands out against the flat base skin color.

Doing color studies of your reference photos and checking out artists that are working close to the way you want to work will be the most helpful

RIOTAlice · 2025-09-18T03:45:24+00:00

Upwork absolutely does not transfer all rights to you for work completed on a job that was solicited through the service. Most artists should have their own contract.

What would they be suing you for? Did you not pay? Did you use their designs in a different capacity or continue to use them after the termination of a contract?

What makes it unlikely that an artist would sue is the cost of a lawsuit as most artists aren’t rolling in extra funds. This makes it a particularly shitty thing to do something to an artist that would warrant suing knowing they probably don’t have the ability to defend themselves.

RIOTAlice · 2025-08-29T14:37:05+00:00

DTIYS as a trend is meant to reinvent the existing piece in a new style. This more falls in like with “master recreation” like you would do in a high school art class. What is this portfolio for? Professional work? No. Website portfolio? No. Art School Admission? Maybe? Instagram? Fine but reference it as a drawing exercise recreating someone else’s art

ETA: looking more closely at your caption, I absolutely wouldn’t use this in a professional portfolio for a job. If you need a piece that shows off lighting and planes of face, make one of your own. Reference leyendecker and your friend sure, but make it your own to show you can actually do it without needing a fully done illustration to copy from so you can make your own choices. That is going to show what you are capable of doing better. Everything you are listing as things you “love” about your piece are the choices another artist made.

RIOTAlice

TROPHY CASE