Advice/Critique/Help
Does my webtoon do a good job of capturing the art of a childs drawing?
I made a webtoon called lucys diary. Basically abt this girl named Lucy writing in her diary. I wanted the artsyle to look like children's drawings but now I'm kinda wondering if I did a good job on that. For context Lucy is below 10 and above 5 years old. I can't sag the exact age for reasons
I think the drawings look good there were three things I think could help though:
1. Your background is pretty dark which makes the contrast with the text low
2. I don’t think you necessarily need handwritten text. A more easily readable handwriting-style font could be better if you expect there to be a lot of text. If readers struggle to read the comic it could affect how many people consistently return
3. I wonder if a different brush might help make it look more realistic, I tried doing a bit of a mock up of what I was thinking, I hope that’s okay.
Those are just what I think, I think your comic looks good, and good luck with it!
Not really? It looks like an adult trying to draw like a child, mostly because I doubt a young kid can draw poses or faces or even circles really well. Plus, they tend to draw u proportionally because they draw one bit then the next then the next, not "oh let me draw the torseo, then the arms should be like this, and the legs make sense like this", it goes all willy nilly
Kids focus on faces, not the head as a whole. So most of the head is a face, the eyes close to the top, not in the middle. It’s also common for the heads to be comparatively large
Your hand is too stable. It needs to be more shakey.
(As an adult doing it with your non dominant hand can help to achieve that)
Also the character are all to evenly proportional. Each body part should be a lot more disproportionate. Children tend to focus on one thing and struggle with seeing the picture as a whole.
Children don't have the motorskills to make this type of drawing. It's simply too good.
The color is also to even. It should be more outside the lines and more white parts from missing paint. Children don't strive towards perfection, they strive towards "good enough" or satisfied or "I just want to move on to the next thing".
They also don't color in one direction (usually. Some older kids however can do it but it's usually achieved from watching someone else doing it).
The pen should go in all sorts of directions: zigzags, Xs, Ss, stars, circles, etc.
i think the handwriting is a bit too good? and i feel like the art is okay, but the brush strokes are too thick and it doesnt have that 'scritch scratch with a crayon' feel that i get from most kid drawings.
Not the art, but the text. This isn’t how kids write. Every paper is “this thing happened. Anyways, I left”. I think the reason they walked away could be taken out entirely on each page. Kids don’t think to make excuses like that. “Mommy was crying. It made me feel bad. I did my homework.”
Frankly, OP, I’d just age up your character. 10-13 is still young but would be easier to emulate/more entertaining to actually read.
Use a brush that has a more traditional feel. Your art feels incredibly digital and children work with physical media mainly. So use brushes that imitate crayons or pencils. The background is so dark for some reason the paper should be near white.
The writing is not supposed to be on the left hand side of the paper. The red line is the margin. 5-10 year olds don’t write this small typically. Using premade fonts will all be uniform and neater than most kids write. So the handwriting should be larger to retain a childish feel. This font and size reads more like a 12 year old
Misspell more words - not to an excessive degree but phonetically. Children at this age haven’t memorized all the e vs i sounds and words like (litter) being spelled (lider). They speak more than they write/spell and they tend to spell phonetically
Maybe you can change the way the hands are drawn. The way you put it into an artistic shape wouldn't be how children think. At least, that's my take on things. After all, children don't think about how something would be portrayed best, but what it looks like in reality and that's how they would draw it. In the case of hands, i would say either do simple circles, as if the child doesn't care enough to draw a full hand, or try to draw 5 way too ticc or thin fingers onto it. As for other stuff, it's like if you tried to draw something without any knowledge on perspective or proportions. Maybe make the heads too big. Or have people as big as trees or as small as a dog. The box(?) could also be drawn a lot bigger than it is in reality. This is just how I would go about it, idk how much it will/won't help. Anyway, this looks like a really cool concept!
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u/Biduletrait 9h ago
Try looking at real kid art and see what makes it so unique. The brush is too soft for a kid drawing
Here is one of my childhood drawing