Stylistic Consistency

A problem I ran into repeatedly during this project was a struggle to keep a consistent style. Since I had character reference from the previous semester, I was convinced this wouldn’t be an issue…until I started working on the comic. It was surprisingly hard to keep a consistent look across pages, and I often found myself revisiting and redrawing old panels which I felt no longer “matched”. While I wanted some consistency I wasn’t sure how much I should obsess about matching my style from page to page, to the point where it actually made the illustrations I was making worse than they would’ve been if I’d loosened up a little. 

In retrospective, a lot of this comic’s issues would’ve been remedied if I’d let myself think about them a little less, but that’s something that comes with experience, and this entire undertaking has been nothing if not a learning process. 

Fortunately, I’m not the only artist who deals with this problem. After stepping back and comparing other comic artists, it seems this issue isn’t as world-ending as I’d previously believed. For instance, Zack Morrison’s Paranatural does two things exceedingly well- humour and the paranormal. It has been doing this things well for so long, in fact, that Morrison’s style has noticeably evolved from chapter one to its current look in chapter seven. 

A panel from Paranatural chapter 1 (left) and chapter 4 (right).

Likewise, Aliza Layne’s webcomic, Demon Street, has gone through three or four style changes since its conception. However, this doesn’t at all prevent it from being one of my favourite comics. 

An early panel of Demon Street (left) and a much later panel (right). 

Artists change, and their style morphs as they grow more confident in their abilities. A good chunk of this comic’s development has been spent trying to understand that, and find a balance between letting myself grow, and having a uniform style for 22 pages. In retrospect, more experience drawing the characters would’ve helped so that they can be less stiff and more naturally consistent. 

Although the reference I developed last year was definitely helpful, I would like to tweak my character sheets to show the characters from more angles, especially things like hair, accessories and weapons. Finally, the thing that would be of most help is simply practice. Half of the reason I struggled is that I lacked the familiarity that many sequential illustrators and animators have of drawing the same character over and over again, and these things come with time and patience.