Forcible Evolution, Part 1As many of you know, the greatest asset and the greatest liability of my comic is the art. I started off using templates meant to mimic the Order of the Stick artstyle as close as possible, reveling in the simplicity and elegance of basic geometric shapes. Unfortunately, I can't call that style my own, and because of the time-consuming nature of an Electical Engineering undergraduate degree, I haven't had time to deviate from it. Most webcomic artists who draw each new page from scratch progressively work to improve their artstyle, with a shift that takes place over years. Some, like Kris Straub (of StarslipWith the free time I have to prepare for the next arc, I aim to change that. Though I don't lack the ability to sketch by hand, the study binder doodles I've made are insufficient to tell a story with dynamic characters on a comic page. This leaves me with creating a new template library - one that retains the simplicity of OotS's shapes, but manages to make up for their shortcomings in style. Among these issues, the first is expessiveness. The hands and eyes of an OotS-style stick figure are prone to clash with other aspects of character design and the environment around them. I have to be careful when drawing eyebrow expressions for characters with black hair, and given that both of my main characters have dark hair, that just won't do. The hands also tend to clash with each other more than I like, since I use the same line width for most of my objects. Here is my first attempt to change things up, using the model of a scientist salarian.  There obviously is still a good deal of work to do before I can call my work "distinct", but I'm working on it. And no, I'm not ready to add pants yet. I've thought about it, and I'll need to revamp the whole shape of the torso before pants are a feasible option (though with that coat, I bet Mordin could "support" pants.  ).
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