Cartooning - Looking For Improvement

Sometimes you can come up with a good idea, you've drawn it to your best ability, but it just doesn't look right. It might be that there's a problem with the logic, or the scale, or just something that goes against our pre-concieved ideas about how something should work.

Often we don't find out about them until it's too late.

What's Not Right!

The car on the left is the original drawing which was meant to demonstrate my pointless invention, the pizza wheel. The more I looked at it, the more it just looked wrong, and it doesn't take a genious to realise this italian bread based food couldn't possible hold a car up like that.

The Original Image

The Corrected Image

The corrected image not only looks more convincing, but it drives home (excuse the pun) the idea that using a pizza for a wheel is stupid.

Scale Issues

Sometimes you can put images together that bind with some people because they have a very fixed idea in their head of relative size. I have a few examples of this.

Example 1
This image was copied from a picture I found on a google image search and I wanted to replace their giant robot head with that of my comic hero, Bender. Then I threw in a load of other sci-fi elements in amongst the junk, plus an old washing machine (just because).

Bender's Head Problem

Now, the Death Star wasn't a problem, because the mind can reason that it's far away. But a giant Bender's head started to raise questions as to how big my little green men are. To be honest, I hadn't given it much thought, it was just a tribute. It could have easily been fixed by adding "Oversized parts, our speciality" to the sign.

Example 2
The next example was posted on Reddit. I hadn't really given relative sizes much thought, and my ignorance got the better of me. (And boy do those guys let you know when something's wrong!)

Can You Spot It?

 Okay, here's the second from to Starwars - A False Hope. I just needed to make the scene look congested, so I threw in as many vehicles as I could find. (some I'd already drawn in previous cartoons). Can you spot which one is wrong?

Well I drew one of these Juggernaut Carriers from the Clone Wars, but my reference image had no figures for scale, so it's way too small. Easy mistake to make, but the ubber geeks are very defensive about their canon.

That little mistake gained enough down-votes so that the comic was essentially buried!

So What's The Answer

1. Consider your audience, are they picky?
2. Know/understand what you are drawing.
3. If you break the rules, have a reason or explaination.
4. Review your unfinished work with a friend.
5. Ask yourself the question "is there anything wrong here?"