Redesigning Store

Have you ever noticed that when you decide to make a healthier decision for yourself, there’s always a reminder that you want a donut instead? This happens to me towards the beginning of the year when I have my resolutions. Unfortunately, this is also the time of year where you have leftover Christmas cookies, New Year’s brie, and then Valentine’s treats. And worst of all, leftover baked goods go on sale at the grocery store.

I first posted my comic Store in February 2019. This comic demonstrates how I implemented more complex backgrounds and stronger storytelling poses into my work. At the time, this was a dramatic upgrade over my previous comics, but four years later I’ve decided that there’s still room for improvement. Heck, at the time I was still using "everyone’s favorite font."

So, the key artistic issues with the original comic are that the perspective and scaling are off. For example, in panel 3, the eye level[1] is completely off from where the camera is (above her head) and the scaling[2] makes the objects gigantic compared to the character. This was before I took a linear perspective course, but now I have the foundation to approach fixing these issues. For starters, I made PNGs of simple 1-point and 2-point perspective guides. These tools speed up the process of establishing eye levels and vanishing points. For panel 3, I aligned the eye level with the angle of the camera. I also used a scaling dummy to properly scale the objects in the scene with the character in frame. In the new panel, you can see more of the scene without everything looking squished together and overall, it has more depth.

[1] Where the viewers eyes are (height, angle, etc.) looking at an object, not always on the horizon. Perspective vanishing points will converge to this line.
[2] Drawing objects accurately in proportion to one another (size, height, depth, etc.)

panel 3 original

panel 3 redo

panel 4 original

panel 4 redo

Another thing I wanted to improve from the original is the character’s acting and body language. I worked on this in nearly every panel (where the character is the focus). The strongest panel that demonstrates this is panel 4 where the character is yelling at donuts. The original reads as irritated and commanding with flushed cheeks and a pointed finger, but with straightened legs and arms she appears stiff. In the new panel, I made her lunge with her knees bent to have her shift her weight forward instead of hinging at the hips. I also made her hair swoosh back a bit to add more movement to the pose. Lastly, I opened her mouth to take up more face space to really show that she’s yelling full voice. Overall, I think the new panel shows the same emotions as the original, it just expresses them more clearly through looser body language and larger facial expressions.

​All in all, I’m very happy with how this comic turned out. Despite me having a better artistic foundation, this was still a challenging comic because of the more perspective-heavy backgrounds. But hey, struggling means that you’re growing, and I hope to grow more by improving my past comics. 
​Now I’d like to ask you guys a few discussion questions. What do you think of the changes I made to this comic? How would you approach fixing the original comic? Are there other perspective errors in the original or the new version that I didn’t mention? How would you have adjusted the character acting to read the same emotions but clearer? 

Store Original

Store Redo