Lost in the Unknown Realm (webcomic, possibly art at some point)

[rpgfan]

Email: cApRIcorn_TIGer86atYaHOOdotCOM

Desired Username: litur-comic

I'd like to apply with the challenge method, given that I have yet to find any other (even temporary) hosting for the site for a price within my current budget, and don't really have any finished product to show for it. I can post some of the stuff I've done in GIMP, playing around with fonts and layouts for the comic, as well as some of my older artwork to the thread if you'd like to see them, though.


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Lost in the Unknown Realm is a webcomic, chronicling the adventures of three somewhat lost adventurers in a Fantasy RPG, similar to Dungeons & Dragons, told through the use of sprites from various video game RPGs, like the Castlevaina, Final Fantasy, and Legend of Zelda series.

The three main characters are Aero Honor; a Holy Warrior, Sekra Jademoon; a Mage, and Orpheus Silvelord; a Bard.

Aero is the leader of the group, though he likely isn't the best candidate for it; Sekra is more capable, and is usually the one to help "pull the group up by its bootstraps" so to speak, when things don't go according to plan. Orpheus, being a bard, isn't necessarily the most useful character in battle, but tags along with the other two in hopes of crafting a ballad of a grand adventure; since that's what most people want to hear.

Over the course of the comic, the holy warrior suffers an identity crisis after failing to become a paladin; a real-estate agent's plot to get them to buy into a time share property is thwarted when the party purchases the castle for themselves, Sekra's mysterious past is revealed and the party thwarts an attempted assassination and take over of a legendary hidden kingdom. And that's just what I have roughly scripted out so far...

[griever]

I'd be interested in seeing samples of your artwork, particularly if you've got any pages of the webcomic drawn.

[rpgfan]

I'm still kind of playing around with a layout for the comic, I've put links up to what I've done with it so far.


Here's the links to some of my artwork:

http://s41.photobucket.com/albums/e295/SekraMage/?action=view&current=Sekra-1.jpg
http://s41.photobucket.com/albums/e295/SekraMage/?action=view&current=Sound06.jpg

And what I've done playing around with the comic:

http://s41.photobucket.com/albums/e295/SekraMage/?action=view&current=1Introduction.jpg
http://s41.photobucket.com/albums/e295/SekraMage/?action=view&current=2SneakyElves.jpg

[tickyhead]

Wow. I don't mean to be harsh, but your "comics" are all kinds of bad. I can understand if you're fairly new to this, but still. It's just really, really bad. I don't...I don't even know where to begin, for once.

Okay, regrouped my thoughts. I'll just start with the first thing that made my eyes hurt: the layouts. the first one is boring, and the second one is just all out confusing. A comic page needs to flow incredibly well, or it will make smart people feel stupid, and stupid people feel incredibly angry for no reason. They do that a lot. Speaking of flow, the dialogue...is also bad. The punchlines are forced, and the characters have absolutely no personality at all. But then again, that may be because I'm only looking at two pages. Then again, after seeing this I almost want these two to be the only ones you have. Again, sorry if I come off as harsh, but I am of the opinion that sugar coating these things will only lead you in the wrong direction. I do want you to succeed, honest. Your plot lines sound fairly intriguing, if you approach them right. But you have no idea what you're doing, and it shows blatantly. I don't even want to talk about the god-awful speech bubbles...okay, maybe a little. They're god-awful. They're not even speech bubbles, they're text encased in half-assed, can't-be-bothered-to-do-a-good-job failure. It is really not that difficult to look up a tutorial for making speech bubbles, in fact it can be incredibly easy. Google is your pal.

And I don't even want to talk about the "art," because that will just make me sound worse. Like a demonic troll who has come from the depths of "teh intarwebs" to eat your soul and crush your dreams with my mighty clawed fist. I'm a nice person, honest! I just think that you need a lot of work. For instance, the only "art" you have is a splotchy wall of color that makes my eyes bleed and a character that looks like you copied Sailor Moon's face and tacked on a body that you got bored with half way through. Okay, so I am going to talk about it. First, the splotchy thing. I have no doubt that it took you a lot of time, but pouring time into something does not make it good. It makes it a waste of time. Second, Sailor Squareboob. I don't mean to assume (after all, it only makes an "ass out of u and me," so they say) but it's obviously copied from someone else's drawing, and not very well.

Then again, who am I to assume to know everything about your artistic talents? after all, there's only four examples here. I don't know if if you looked at some older apps that didn't get in, but at least 90% failed for lack of content. You're creating a website, an entire virtual mansion for people to walk in and wreck up the place, on the off chance that they'll like you. It's hard to wreck someone's place if there's nothing in it to wreck, and hard to like someone for the same reason. Humans are funny like that.

What I'm trying to say is that you need a lot of work. Xepher doesn't give out webspace to every proverbial little kid with a big dream, you've got to prove that you deserve to get the kind of cushy deal he's offering. Hell, I barely got in by the skin of my teeth way back when, but I'll be damned if I didn't try as hard as I could first.

One thing we like to do around here is suggest that people wait another year or so before applying. Hone your skills, get a deviantART and Comic Gen account to get your feet wet, and if this still looks like a good deal to you after you've gotten better and know what you're doing, then come back and see how you do.

If I've pissed you off, sorry, it's what I do. Griever or someone else will come by and make it all better. My self proclaimed job here is to be the nasty Simon Cowell or whatever-the-hell-his-name-is. The devil's advocate, if you will. The bad cop. The...you get the idea.

In other words, I dare you to prove that I'm wrong about you.

On a side note, I didn't even ask you about your HTML skills. Be glad.

[rpgfan]

I admit I didn't put up a bunch of stuff here, all I did was post a couple half assed comics I made in GIMP while I try to learn the program and figure out what works and doesn't work in terms of layout and dialogue. I mentioned that in my first post and I kind of feel like I mentioned that in my first post and that you honestly shouldn't have expected more than what you saw.

Secondly my art is splotchy because I take several days to hand draw it with my one working hand and the paper taped to an art board. I honestly never intended to show it to anybody, because I know how shitty it looks. Some very caring friends convinced me to put it up, in hopes that I wouldn't abandon another creative project halfway because I couldn't find another home for it.

Your critique is hurtful and demeaning to me; you very honestly could have found a nicer way to tell me what you didn't like about my work than by taking every thing you didn't like about it and ripping it to pieces. I get that you kind of make it your job to weed out the pansies that are just going to go crying home to mommy when they don't make it; pissing me off would be one thing but you actually made me cry.

You claim to be a nice person; you tell me my work is horrible and to take some time to improve, yet you seem to try and be as harsh as possible in your critique, it's almost like you don't care about the person who made the work, only that it somehow offended you and therefore shouldn't exist in the first place.

If you're going to give a critique that people are going to listen to instead of only remember as someone being as hurtful as they could possibly be to you, it needs to be constructive. Work on this, especially since you never know the background of the person you are saying these hurtful things to.


Oh, and I don't have any skill with HTML to speak of, with the exception for a few simple lines of code I picked up from my soon to be father in law back when I was dating his kid, I've used Dreamweaver for everything.

[Xepher]

I do apologize that you were offended by Ticky's post above... but you have to realize that you're not the first (nor even the 101st) to come here with pretty much nothing to show. The thing is, it's one thing to not be good at drawing... heck, I suck at it myself, but you have to know your weaknesses. The point of the application process is for you to prove yourself, by displaying your best for us to judge. When you post stuff that even you don't think is good, or attempts that you yourself admit are "half assed", then what are you hoping to accomplish? You're just wasting your time AND ours, and that's probably what got Ticky so upset. She has kinda taken it upon herself to be the bad cop... so I can come in and play good cop when needed, but even so, you were told to be prepared in the instructions. I specifically mentioned looking at older applications, and hanging around to get a feel for how things go or what's expected. If you'd looked at many of them, you'd see quite a lot which got shot down right away for basically the exact same reasons Ticky was pointing out in yours.

I am sorry that you were offended. I don't intend for this to be a cruel or painful process, but when people continually come, asking for free service, and don't even have the courtesy to prepare things ahead of time, I have a hard time putting more effort into things than they do. If you can't even be bothered to use the oval tool to sketch a speech bubble, then how much effort can I really expect you to put into the comic in the long term? You can say a lot of things... about just learning, or starting from scratch, etc... but I've found that what people DO says a lot more about them than what they say. Ticky SAID some mean things, but what she DOES is helpful and well intentioned. You said some nice things/ideas, but the lack of preparation shows me that you probably don't really have it in you to do this on a long term.

[griever]

I admit I didn't put up a bunch of stuff here, all I did was post a couple half assed comics I made in GIMP while I try to learn the program and figure out what works and doesn't work in terms of layout and dialogue. I mentioned that in my first post and I kind of feel like I mentioned that in my first post and that you honestly shouldn't have expected more than what you saw.

I thought you were just being modest, which is why I asked to see a sample.  Would you go to a job interview without researching the company, a good black suit, and a resume?

I'm fairly easy to impress.  I can't draw and I didn't apply to Xepher as an artist.  (I think I got in by throwing a sheer wall of words at him until he caved....)  But I have to admit, I'm not happy with the examples, especially after you clarified by outwardly admitting they weren't your best.  Are you a beginning artist?  Most of the people here have been working on their comics or illustration for years OR are art students pursuing a career in illustration.

If you go back and read Ticky's post again, she was constructive.  I recommend the same thing - get a DeviantArt account and keep on working.  But if you do go there, I also recommend getting a thicker skin.  There are plenty of nice people and artists who will help you with your work, but there are also a bunch of people with direct criticisms.  It will also save you the work of setting up a site.

[rpgfan]

I applied here on the advice of a friend. She said the people here were mostly supportive, and even if my application was rejected, most people got advice on how they could better themselves. I honestly didn't think I'd get it on my first try, but that applying wouldn't do any harm; that the worst that would happen is that I'd be told to come back after I figured out what I was doing, or got some more experience.

I did not expect to get backhanded by extremely negative criticism first off after posting my work; I knew what I was posting as far as the comic was concerned that it wasn't my best work; but I wanted to show that I was working on it beyond just words on a page. I thought that might speak louder to my ability to produce a finished product and keep it going but apparently I was sorely mistaken.

Apparently, griever, telling someone their ideas are "intriguing" and that they "need a lot of work" amidst a sea of harsh, negative criticism is passable as constructive criticism to you, I'm glad for that. It means you obviously didn't grow up in the kind of home I did, where every article of clothing worn was scrutinized to see if it was wrinkled; where you got the enamel bleached off your teeth because they weren't white enough, where a straight A report card wasn't praised unless the report card before it also was a straight A report card. After 18 years of that, I have a higher standard for constructive criticism.

I'm so petrified of failure I never even applied to college, I work in a library taking care of the books that helped me cope with the awful hell that was my childhood. If I had the money to pay for it, I might go in hopes of improving my artwork, but I don't so it's not going to happen.

Every endeavor I have ever undertaken has been done after months, sometimes years of urging from my friends who are trying to build me back into something resembling a human being, not just a pathetic, terrified shell of one. Ticky's carelessness undid a lot of that work in a matter of minutes.

I'm still doing the comic, this is something that I need to do, for me more than anyone. But when it comes to getting a permanent home for it, I'd rather pay for web hosting than apply to another place like this. Not that you'd care, mind you given that you don't make any money off of running this.

[tickyhead]

Okay, so I'm not a nice person. Not in your opinion anyway. I don't sugar coat things to make people feel better, if they are bad at something then I say so. But blaming me for undoing something that took "years of building up" in a matter of minutes is just plain weak. So you had a bad childhood, lots of people have. Mine was actually pretty okay, I won't try to equate it to yours, but all of my problems were strictly internal. I was stupid enough to set the bar ridiculously high for myself as a child, and now I'm just as afraid of failure as you because I'm paranoid that people will think less of me when I do, inevitably, fall. But it was my fault for that, for thinking I had to impress everyone, all the time, just to feel loved. I had to hide who I was and what I felt because I was afraid that people wouldn't like me if they knew (and in some cases I was right, which only made it worse). I kept to the back of the room, I never did anything that grabbed attention, I was always just watching other people live my life for me because I thought that was how you did it. But you know what happened?

I grew up. I got over it. It took years, and lots of friends, and encouragement, and risk, and even that terrible thing called "failure," but I got over it. It's not my fault that you can't get over your past, and it's certainly not my fault that you can't take a beating. I didn't know you, I still don't, but even if I had, I would have said exactly the same things as before. I'm not sorry, and I never will be. Those were things you needed to hear, and you were going to hate those words no matter how politely phrased they were.

There are mean people in the world, and now I'm one of them. I hurt people deeply and thoroughly, because every time I see someone like you who can't even be arsed to really put their heart into something I'm reminded of how stupid I was as a kid. Hell I'm still stupid, and I'm not good at a lot of things, but I use that lack of talent to push myself even harder and take the time and energy to get better. You need to do the same; you need to grow up and get used to being a big girl.

On top of that, you don't even like your own work, apparently. As xepher said, all you were doing was wasting our time, and it does indeed piss me off. I am by no means confident in my work, but at the very least I try to make an effort. It's stated quite plainly in the rules that it's preferred if you have a good sized amount of content ready and waiting BEFORE you apply; you had none. The stuff you did have was not good. Even if I hadn't swooped in and done bad, you would still have been rejected.

You haven't proved to me that I was wrong about you, instead you've proven that I was incredibly right. You don't have the guts to be on the internet, and you don't have the skills for your own website.

I don't expect you to come back and read this, but know that if you keep holding yourself back as you have been, I will not be the last person to do this to you.

[griever]

Okay, now I'm getting a little annoyed.  Most people here ARE nice and sugar-coatingly constructive.  They just haven't posted yet or they're too busy with finals or work.  You're judging the entire community based on Ticky's post and you know what?  That's not fair.  Going through the archives, which was recommended, will demonstrate that Ticky is our Simon Cowell while the rest of the members are more like Paula Abdul.

I find it highly ironic that you told Ticky not to say things without knowing the background of the person, yet you lecture me without knowing my own background.  If you must know, it's startling similar.  I, too, value constructive criticism more but I also have built up a thicker skin and the ability to find golden nuggets in the poo.  My improvement can be credited to a therapist who didn't sugar-coat things, my friends, my fiance, and my work bosses who wouldn't mince words.  You think Ticky's review is harsh?  Try experiencing an annual job performance report in Japan.

I'm currently working on photography.  I wrote Xepher an email, asking if this switch would be approved.  If he had said no, I'd say thank you and run to Flickr.  It's a great option out there.  Similarly, Ticky and I both recommended DeviantArt as an alternative.  A lot of members come over from DeviantArt after they've built up their portfolio/comic.  Rather than explore that and see if that is a viable option for you, you blew it off and instead focused on how harsh and critical we all are.