Hey @Alan Funk! There's a lot creativity, and hard work on display here. You seem to have a solid grasp on what you like to draw, and what you want to do with it, and it's shows in your fearless experimentation, and playfulness with your characters, and IP mashups. Quite a few of these brought a big smile to my face, and it's clear you love this kind of work. Great work here! To bring your artwork to the next level here are my suggestions. Deep dive on the Fundamentals. Drawing Basics is well worth your time. The majority of my feedback is focused around Gesture, Shape, Value, and Perspective. Basics covers all of them! There are two levels to follow through the course, a level 1 and level 2 for more intermediate artists, and I think you'd be able to approach level 1 assignments as warmups, and the level 2 assignments will be where you'll start to stretch your abilities. Don't discount the importance of the fundamentals as something boring or beneath your level, this course lays the groundwork for any other course or tutorial you'll find, and is designed to grow with you as your skills develop so I highly suggest starting here. https://www.proko.com/s/LnpY To answer your questions directly 1. Many are stiff, yes. This is something we all struggle with at all stages of our drawing careers. It points to a need to brush up on Gesture. Many of these figures feel somewhat disjointed and like they were drawn piece by piece, and assembled almost like a toy, rather than drawn with a holistic approach using the fluid connections we find in the human body. Anatomy and rendering isn't going to save a drawing with a lacking gesture. Drawing Basics has a great module on gesture and rhythms that may help with your figure drawing practice https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/draw-any-pose-from-any-angle-rhythms Routine figure drawing is incredibly important for comic artists to construct poses from imagination, so getting in the habit of regular figure drawing practice will be a huge benefit to you. Check out the timer tool and some free model packs and get on a schedule of daily gesture drawing to improve your figures. https://www.proko.com/timer 2. The inking and hatching is not terrible, but it is inconsistent. Inking and hatching is a language, and when there are inconsistencies with a person's vocabulary or pronunciation, communication can be difficult. It's the same with inking. Line Weight plays a huge role in how inking reads, and learning how and when to vary your line weight to communicate specific elements of size, perspective, lighting, surface texture, etc. will help you organize your line work to more clearly convey your characters, and scenes. For instance, in a few of your pieces the line weight of your smoke outlines, and background elements like the trees, often have heavier line weight than the contour lines of your main characters which pulls focus. In the first piece with the X-Men, the smoke around Wolverine and Psylocke is thicker than the holding lines of all the characters in the piece which draws the eye to the smoke rather than to the X-Men. Even the foreground beams exploding from the chest of the Sentinel are thinner than the smoke in the background, and the beams look to be exploding towards us. Using a heavier line weight brings shapes into the foreground as if they're much closer to us. Wolverine should have a thicker line weight than the smoke up on the shoulder, and a thinner line weight than the closest elements of the beams exploding at us. Line weight can convey many different things, but with no established hierarchy to your line work the figures and composition are difficult to read at a glance. Learning how to organize your line weight is essential in clear communication, the Basics Course has a great module on line weight https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-to-draw-with-line-weight and Len Nicholas's Line Weight Fundamentals course is another great series of tutorials on the subject. https://www.proko.com/course/line-weight-fundamentals-course Doing inking master studies of your favorite comic artists line work will help you get a handle on how to approach organizing line weight in your own work. 3. My favorite piece on display here is #4, the guitar girl playing Monstermash for her little critter friends. This piece is a lot of fun, great expression, and it has the most convincing, and natural pose as far as gesture, construction, and anatomy is concerned! I feel like she's actually seated, holding the guitar singing to these adorable little eldrich horrors scurrying around her. Even the parts of the body we don't see, like the connection of the leg at hip behind the guitar, feels fully developed where as the body for #5 does not. #5 looks like you're masking something you're unsure of, which is very common. When we don't know how to fully draw the body in a specific orientation, the old comic adage "when in doubt, black it out" more often than not reads as someone trying to hide something they don't know, rather than a stylistic choice. In #5 the character has no neck or torso. The connections through the limbs feel disjointed, the shoulder is pinned up at the jaw and the costume feels like an empty piece of fabric, rather than a garment draped around a structure. There's a lot of this going on through each of these pieces where I see you hiding the things you are unsure of. Rogue might be the best example of getting away with it, she looks convincingly foreshortened, but the body is being intentionally hidden by her arm rather than being worked fully into this foreshortened pose and she feels scrunched up rather than elegantly flying. The far side of Godzilla behind his dorsal plates isn't fully realized, so I'm not sure where his other leg is. Leonardo an Raph in the Horror TMNT piece have hidden feet and legs, with nothing connecting them to the ground plane of the scene, etc. Getting into a figure drawing routine, and brushing up on gesture, rhythm, and structure will help a lot. Perspective is another thing I see you experimenting with, and it's nice to see you considering cinematic camera angles, and different perspectives for your scenes, but in #3 the perspective isn't working in the motorcycle, especially the ellipses of the wheels are not in perspective with the rest of the motorcycle, or the established grid of the floor. The character riding and shooting seems to have been an anatomical struggle, the connection of the hips to the torso isn't fully worked out, and her hand isn't on the throttle of the motorcycle, but rather in the middle of the handle bar for some reason. These little things all add up. 4. The color palettes are all highly saturated, which stylistically fits with the horror vibe, but again there's little control of your values and color harmonies within these highly saturated pieces so everything reads as too vibrant, and ultimately too dark and mashed together. Contrast creates interest. If you desaturate your images and look at them through squinted eyes, you can see that the bright saturated backgrounds actually read as dark, if not darker, than your main characters, and the whole piece blurs together. The tightly packed chaos of the action in each scene is fun, but hard to read at a glance, especially when the silhouette is competing with a dark background. Composition and color theory courses will help here. But also as part of your workflow, desaturate your work from time to time to get a look at your value structure. I attached an example where the background is pretty much the same value as your figures which makes the image difficult to read. When desaturated you can see how dark that vibrant saturated background really is. When the background is lighter in value, we can see the silhouette of the action more clearly, and that gives the image a quicker read. Use the free Value Tool to get an idea of how your value relationships are working on a piece. https://www.proko.com/values https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/improve-your-drawings-with-values 5. Tutorials list- Drawing Basics- This is the best bang for your buck! https://www.proko.com/s/LnpY Perspective https://www.proko.com/s/d36R Michael Hampton Gesture and Construction https://www.proko.com/s/fgMP https://www.proko.com/s/VPvP Len Nicholas Line Weight Fundamentals https://www.proko.com/s/ckQB Lucas Peinador's How to Draw Faces and Storytelling Portraits, for stylized expressions/facial anatomy. https://www.proko.com/s/DTU7 https://www.proko.com/s/rFUc Marco Bucci's Color Survival Guide https://www.proko.com/s/mxUk The Famous Artists Cartoon Course from the 1950s is recently in public domain and you can find some PDFs of it circulating online. It's an incredible resource for cartooning from the hey-day of animation, and cartoons. 6. Follow your interests! There are endless greats to study. Take a look at Draftsmen's Art Parents episode and find a few artists you like to study and develop your style from. https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/adopting-art-parents-to-develop-your-style-draftsmen-s1e05 A few favorite comic artists in the horror genre to throw out there that might be up your alley are Richard Corben, Philippe Druillet, Bernie Wrightson, Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, and Basil Gogos to name a few. Do a deep dive on 1970's horror illustration and you'll find some greats to study! Thank you for sharing your work! It's incredibly difficult to get to a level when you're ready to share your work openly for honest critique, and you're clearly putting in the hours. Stay the course, keep learning, make your art, and your skill set will quickly improve. Looking forward to seeing your horror comic, starting on a personal project is a great way to learn where your strengths and weaknesses are, so I'd stay there's no harm in getting started! Hope this helps!

I'm going to be honest with you Alan, your illustrations are not very good but still serviceable for an indie comic. If you want you can already try to start a comic at your current level or you can try improving a bit before doing that. That's up to you now. I'll get to improving your illustration skill but there's something more important to be noted first. I see all the examples here are just fanart, which makes me question if you are really capable of creating your own characters and concepts. In order to make an original comic you not only need raw drawing skills, but you also need to do character designs, writing and other things. If you were only doing fanart so far, then you might have overlooked this and never even learned to do character designs. If so, then you need to study writing and design first. And my advice for improving your drawing, practice the fundamentals first. Your anatomy looks overall fine enough to me (until I get to the detail), but you are very weak with the basics. I said it's serviceable, but your shapes and forms still look very off. So you might want to go back and practice the basics if you really want to improve.

I think the general style and angle you are going for here is cool, and mostly I suggest keep practicing, especially with structure and continuing to work on anatomy. If you are looking for a course here on Proko I suggest the Figure Drawing Basics course as well as some perspective practice. I do think the perspective work in these is fine on objects, but some of the figures are reading a bit “flat” in parts. Mostly I just think perspective is always good to practice. :) The only other thing I would suggest is you might want to knock some of the saturation out of the color palette. I think it works, but I’d experiment with different saturation levels. It looks REALLY bright. I get what you are going for, but to my eye it seems pushed a bit too far. Really though, I think you’ve got some cool stuff here and mostly I’d say keep going! I think you are really on the right track, and I’d say just keep refining and learning. It’s a solid foundation and a cool idea. I also think the gestures are pretty nice, I especially like the girl with the guitar. I really believe she is sitting there. That’s probably my favorite one of the bunch. Maybe check out Orange Cone Comics. I just did a couple pages for thier “Cthulhu Meets” series and it might be something to look in to or try to contribute to. I think it’s a good fit for what you are up to.

1. They're a little stiff, yeah. Slides five, 12, and 13 feel much nicer compared to the others, but you would probably benefit from studying gesture, quicksketch, Mike Mattesi's FORCE, etc. The point is to loosen up a bit and get those poses as exaggerated as you can stand. You can get away with so much in a cartooning context because nobody's expecting true realism. 2. Not at all! In fact, I'd say the linework is among your strong suits. 3. Yeah, anatomy is tricky. This really depends on how much realism you're going for. I mean, technically you can make a cartoon about a pillow or a toaster and have it read and emote and everything necessary to tell a story. But if you're going for a more comic book style with believable anatomy (albiet greatly exaggerated), then yes, you must study this extensively. No way around it, really. Slide 13 is your best overall work here regarding believable comic-like anatomy. Wolverine in slide one is pretty rough, as well as Elvira in 10. The non-human characters are generally better than the humans. This is one of the toughest parts of figure drawing! Don't be discouraged! 4. Color is so subjective. In my opinion, your sense of color is fine. You seem to understand color theory pretty well. I like the bold choices of bright and highly saturated colors set against more muted colors. 5. Master studies. I always go back to the golden age animations from the 30s-50s for cartoons. You don't have to want to be an animator to learn from the greatest cartoonists ever (IMO). As for tutorials, Patrick Jones has a course on drawing for animation, and Aaron Blaise makes a ton of cartooning/animation tutorials over on his website. What I would suggest is finding your favorite comics or cartoons in the style that's closest to what you want to pursue and just do a ton of master studies from them. You'll learn just as much doing this as you will from following any videos or courses. If you're leaning more towards a Marvel/DC comic book style, then David Finch makes the best comic-book themed tutorials on the net. His YouTube channel is unbelievably awesome. The Marvel course here on Proko is also an epic source of knowledge for everything to do with comics. I would suggest additional studies in anatomy and basic figure drawing (gesture especially) and perspective. 6. Trying to think what would suit your style... I see you know the 1981 animated movie Heavy Metal. Fire and Ice for more believable style could be good too. 90s cartoons for sure, maybe for more stylized stuff. Gargoyles. A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Courage the Cowardly Dog. Batman: The Animated Series. TMNT. X-Men: The Animated Series. Some cartoon names... Kevin Eastman. Peter Laird. Bruce Timm. Genndy Tartakovsky for Primal and Samurai Jack. John R. Dilworth. I'd take stills from these shows and do master studies. Horror comic artists... I mean, there's so many... Bernie Wrightson is the GOAT. Bill Sienkiewicz. Mike Mignola. Jack Davis' work for Tales from the Crypt. Junji Ito. Take your pick! This is something you're really going to have to dig into yourself to find the art that speaks the loudest to you. Then study from that! Overall, I'd just say don't get discouraged! Your stuff is wonderful already, Alan. This is practically pro-level as it is. By adding some hardcore study to the mix and brushing up on the fundamentals, I think you'll be even more formidable! Good luck and, most importantly, don't forget to have fun with it all!

The cartooning itself is good except sometimes the composition is a bit off. To make a horror comic in that style would be a challenge but try using psychological techniques like cognitive dissonance, uncanny familiarity and negative space framing. Look those up if you don’t already know them (search specifically for negative space used in psychological horror if you don’t know what it is) Stephen King wrote a “children’s book” that was quite good. (Called Charlie the Choo Choo I think…) check that out maybe. Scottie young also has done some cool, dark stuff with a cartoon art style. Anyway, good luck and Godspeed.