Before you post

Hi there. I write and draw the comic Lucky Hazard, which is a shounen-style comic set in a high-fantasy, post-war world. I've mainly been inspired by the setting of Adventure Time, and the comic's concept, pacing and humor is heavily influenced by One Piece. Basically, it's my attempt at writing and drawing a shounen manga. If you enjoy such manga, I would appreciate it if you gave it a read!

Important thing to note: it currently has around 100 pages of content, but hopefully with the way I've paced it, it won't feel like a long drag to read. The art does get better as you read along, and I feel it gets acceptable and less straining on the eyes at around Chapter 7.

I hope you enjoy it! But don't forget to critique me, as I can only get better if I'm told what's wrong.

I just binge read the first eight chapters, and I love your comic, it's pretty awesome! I'm a sucker for battle-shounen-type stuff, but it can feel really tired and overdone a lot of the time, and you've created a take on it that feels fresh and is extremely fun to read, which is no small feat!

Thanks! I'm glad I succeeded in making it fun to read. Do you feel there were any issues in the pacing, or even the characterization of the characters?

Hey there, thank you so much for your interest in critique!

Since you've submitted an application this season and we're all discussing it right now, we may not get back to you right away, but we'll make a note that you're interested in feedback after the season ends.

Alright, thanks for the heads up!

The characterisation feels just as full of fun as the rest of the comic! The pacing worked well on a binge read, and looking at your pages right now, I think it works well enough for a page-by-page reader too.

EDIT: If there's one point of critique that I do have, then it's about the size of the header on your site. It's too big! One has to scroll a lot to get to the page. It's fine when reading page-by-page, but when you're binging on the archives it ends up being click -> scroll to actually get to the page -> read the page -> click -> scroll scroll scroll -> read the page etc. etc. etc. It can get very annoying.

Alright, I'll fix that up then! Thank you!

Just bumping this thread since app season is over.

I'm still looking for any crits that people might have. I'm aware of the contrast issue and I've been doing my best to differentiate the characters from the background.

Hey there, Vinnamonbuns! I don't want you to feel like we're ignoring you, but the area I was mostly concerned with/wanted to critique was the contrast/color value issue! However, since you mentioned being aware of it, I didn't want you to think I was ignoring that comment, either. If you want to hear my tips and expansion on that point, I'd love to give them! But if you think you have that covered, that's okay, too. c:

I don't have that covered! Right now, going forward with the more recent comic pages, I've been trying to desaturate the background so the characters pop out more. I'd love to hear any tips you'd have that would help me out!

Okay, so!

Right now, in a lot of the pages in Lucky Hazard, if you desaturate them it's close to impossible to decipher your pages, figure out what we're supposed to be looking at, and what's supposed to be the focus of the page. A lot of elements just bleed into the background.





For each of your pages, in the final stages I would test them by desaturating them and making sure that they still read.

There are a couple tips I have that I think would help keep your page and color compositions readable.

- Making the foreground elements notably darker/more saturated than the background elements (if applicable). It's a pretty well-known trick among landscape artists that foreground elements are darker and more saturated, whereas lighter and more muted elements will recede into background.

Or at least, that's the cliff notes version. I'll expand on this a bit. The style of Lucky Hazard reminds a bit of the Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, the original GameCube release, particularly. So let's look at some screenshots of that, and see how they managed to separate the characters from the backgrounds.

In these you can see that the foreground elements are often lighter than the background, however the color balancing and textures still makes them pop. Most of the backgrounds have more of blue-ish grey or beige tint to them, whereas the characters are brightly saturated and have more of a yellow-ish tint to contrast the neutrals and blues. The backgrounds also have some soft, painterly textures and are often out of focus, where the characters are largely flat-colored with deep cel-shading and bold edges. It's also notable that all of the backgrounds have their colors hand-picked against Link's bright green get-up, so that they compliment and don't interfere with our main player.

- More depth of shading/lighting on the foreground elements and characters. If you look at Cucumber Quest, which is also done in a lineless style (as you're probably well-aware xD; ) GG DiGi uses a deep range in the shading on her foreground characters, which makes them very easy to read in the space. This is especially noticeable when compared to the backgrounds, which have less depth of shading and tend to be simple (if existent) when the action is focused on the characters. You don't have to go full painterly-style like she does, but I would definitely encourage you to try darkening your shading, lightening your lighting, adding more layers of shading, or all of the above.

- Personally, I would avoid using colors with less opacity/alpha whenever possible... or ever, if you can. Given that you have such hard, bold shapes, the stuff that's see-through feels like it clashes with the overall style and just makes things muddier and harder to see. This extends to action lines and world bubbles as well as whatever you have in the comic's world.

Right now I think the best tip I can provide is to see if things still read if you swap your pages into grayscale as I had mentioned earlier. When you do that, ask yourself: Is the scene still clear and easy to read? What should the reader be looking at? Does that thing take precedence in a reading of the scene against any other elements included in it?

That's all I got for now, but if you want me to clarify anything, feel free to ask!

Wow that was super helpful! Thanks a ton! I'll try to absorb and apply all of this.

Here's a panel from the latest page. Hopefully what you gave me advice on is showing! I'm trying to make the shading more involved and detailed when it comes to characters/objects in the foreground. Does it read well?

The blue-green haired person's hand on our left looked kind of like a foot, so I removed the bit that looked like a heel (removed a little too much I think, oops), lengthened the fingers, and added a thumb, trying to keep it in your style. I figured it would make more sense if I demonstrated it rather than just describe it.



I've demonstrated some other techniques to separate the characters from the background.

If you used the lighter purple from the upper wall on the rest of the wall, blue-green haired person's pants wouldn't blend into the wall. A Curves Adjustment layer set to the linear contrast preset (I used layer blend mode luminosity so it wouldn't alter the saturation) would help the contrast pop a bit more.

If you used a hue/saturation adjustment layer with increased saturation (I used +20, which may be excessive), [ctrl]+[i] to mask out everything (adjustment layer will be solid black so the effect will be invisible) and then use white to mask the three main characters back in you'd have a less saturated background, and more saturated foreground. Alternatively you could lower the saturation and mask out the important characters with black so they'll still be more saturated than the background.

The yellow-eyed girl still has eyes that are too close in brightness and saturation to the skin, but I wasn't sure which to change for my demonstration so I left it alone.

These are all really helpful tips! I kinda wish I'd have seen these earlier! I'll see if I can work them in better for the next page. Thanks!