Crackpot fanart theories and Wraithfall
devildoll kindly scanned Wraithfall, so I downloaded it out of curiosity and uh. SGA tie-in comic, how is it that you trace so obviously and yet Teyla looks like a Korean girl with her hair bleached to a brassy red in that second panel of the first page, and Rodney looks freaky and utterly unlike himself?
The photo is from the high-quality promos from 38 Minutes, fyi.
This was actually the panel that made my tracing bell go ding ding ding, because it happened to be of the first picture I ever saw of Rodney and John. The photo is from Boys Will Be Boys, the John Sheppard/Rodney McKay fanlisting, although I'm not sure where it's from in the series. Note that even the background is reproduced (and you know, it's possible he didn't trace this, but the former is definitely traced). I have other examples I could bring up involving art-shading and real-life shadows and sloppy lines but this would probably turn into a long and irritated post about telltale signs, so never mind.
Okay, I want to complain about those little broken lines he scatters all over their faces, and not even in a hot Paul Pope-y way, and I'm not even going to touch on how weird their eyes look half the time because all this has nothing to do with my actual topic. I don't know what happened--sloppiness, printer error, what. Jesus christ, man. Also, I can't believe I'm complaining about a tie-in comic book to a TV series.
Speaking as a fan, though, I think this is interesting because a lot of the characters are missing that moment of recognition where it clicks into place and you think, "Yes! That's Rodney!" or "That's Teyla!" and it's curious that tracing, even the sloppy tracing in the comic, isn't enough to get that feeling. I'm floating a couple of different theories about why the tracing failed, but I like this one the best:
Okay, in canon caps, the actors don't really look like themselves sometimes. When I look really hard at the linked cap, it doesn't look like Rodney to me, even though it is Rodney, because it doesn't jibe with my Platonic ideal mental image of what Rodney looks like. But we don't notice this in canon because with caps/photography, we start off convinced and don't need to be persuaded that these are our boys and girls. Guilty until proven innocent, if being Rodney is a crime.
But fanart starts off without as strong a belief that these are, in fact, our boys and girls--innocent until proven guilty. A portrait done of Rodney in that cap I linked to is going to be more off for me because I'm not already convinced beforehand that it is Rodney. So I have this (crackpot fanart) theory that as fanartists we're on a spectrum where one end is building plausibility and the other end is throwing off plausibility and creating a sort of suspension of disbelief.
And the more someone's going for plausibility, and the more they try for a 1:1 direct resemblance in a realistic style, the more important that click of recognition is and the harder it is to achieve for everyone's Platonic ideal mental image of Rodney, because if they fail even a little, the picture can feel 'off' in a way that more stylized fanart doesn't (and stylized art can feel 'off' but it takes more wrongness to do that and it's more easily forgivable).
Whereas the farther they go from the 1:1 direct resemblances, and the more stylized--chibi, cartoony, etc--they get, the less important that click of recognition is, and, as a offshoot, the more suspension of disbelief is built into the picture for everything else. John and Rodney in lemon-candy Wonkaland in a photorealistic style? Downright creepy. (Although I can't tell if it's this suspension of disbelief thing or fanart's odd place in fandom that lets us get away with more OOC than writers; there just aren't a lot of traditional artists, so I can sort of see people being indulgent.)
There's more stuff I want to say about the actors as a sort of hub, a central point of reference for individual mental images of the characters, and the clash between individual mental images and I could go on and on and on, but, um, this is already too complicated for me to sort in my head, so I'll stop.
So I think the artist's style worked against him, at least for me: his tracing was slightly off and he was working from screencaps that don't jibe with how Rodney looks in my head, but because of the more realistic style that he draws in, it's harder to forgive him for how little of my Rodney I see in his Rodneys. Or I could just be talking out of my ass, really.
Uh. So, what do you guys think?
Speaking as a fan rather than as an artist, I think the artist does a pretty good job on John, who clicks for me about 60% of the time. Rodney, not so good--he gets him maybe 20% of the time, but Rodney's got a tough face. I think he got a perfect Rodney (and John) in the second panel of this page and a fantastic Rodney in the fourth panel of this page, though everyone else in that latter panel has freaky eyes. Elizabeth clicks for me maybe 40% of the time. He does her shocked and sardonic looks well but her normal face is awful. Teyla clicks 30% of the time but her face isn't chiseled enough.
I actually quite like those Rodney panels, although I have the feeling I recognize them from some ep or another.
The photo is from the high-quality promos from 38 Minutes, fyi.
This was actually the panel that made my tracing bell go ding ding ding, because it happened to be of the first picture I ever saw of Rodney and John. The photo is from Boys Will Be Boys, the John Sheppard/Rodney McKay fanlisting, although I'm not sure where it's from in the series. Note that even the background is reproduced (and you know, it's possible he didn't trace this, but the former is definitely traced). I have other examples I could bring up involving art-shading and real-life shadows and sloppy lines but this would probably turn into a long and irritated post about telltale signs, so never mind.
Okay, I want to complain about those little broken lines he scatters all over their faces, and not even in a hot Paul Pope-y way, and I'm not even going to touch on how weird their eyes look half the time because all this has nothing to do with my actual topic. I don't know what happened--sloppiness, printer error, what. Jesus christ, man. Also, I can't believe I'm complaining about a tie-in comic book to a TV series.
Speaking as a fan, though, I think this is interesting because a lot of the characters are missing that moment of recognition where it clicks into place and you think, "Yes! That's Rodney!" or "That's Teyla!" and it's curious that tracing, even the sloppy tracing in the comic, isn't enough to get that feeling. I'm floating a couple of different theories about why the tracing failed, but I like this one the best:
Okay, in canon caps, the actors don't really look like themselves sometimes. When I look really hard at the linked cap, it doesn't look like Rodney to me, even though it is Rodney, because it doesn't jibe with my Platonic ideal mental image of what Rodney looks like. But we don't notice this in canon because with caps/photography, we start off convinced and don't need to be persuaded that these are our boys and girls. Guilty until proven innocent, if being Rodney is a crime.
But fanart starts off without as strong a belief that these are, in fact, our boys and girls--innocent until proven guilty. A portrait done of Rodney in that cap I linked to is going to be more off for me because I'm not already convinced beforehand that it is Rodney. So I have this (crackpot fanart) theory that as fanartists we're on a spectrum where one end is building plausibility and the other end is throwing off plausibility and creating a sort of suspension of disbelief.
And the more someone's going for plausibility, and the more they try for a 1:1 direct resemblance in a realistic style, the more important that click of recognition is and the harder it is to achieve for everyone's Platonic ideal mental image of Rodney, because if they fail even a little, the picture can feel 'off' in a way that more stylized fanart doesn't (and stylized art can feel 'off' but it takes more wrongness to do that and it's more easily forgivable).
Whereas the farther they go from the 1:1 direct resemblances, and the more stylized--chibi, cartoony, etc--they get, the less important that click of recognition is, and, as a offshoot, the more suspension of disbelief is built into the picture for everything else. John and Rodney in lemon-candy Wonkaland in a photorealistic style? Downright creepy. (Although I can't tell if it's this suspension of disbelief thing or fanart's odd place in fandom that lets us get away with more OOC than writers; there just aren't a lot of traditional artists, so I can sort of see people being indulgent.)
There's more stuff I want to say about the actors as a sort of hub, a central point of reference for individual mental images of the characters, and the clash between individual mental images and I could go on and on and on, but, um, this is already too complicated for me to sort in my head, so I'll stop.
So I think the artist's style worked against him, at least for me: his tracing was slightly off and he was working from screencaps that don't jibe with how Rodney looks in my head, but because of the more realistic style that he draws in, it's harder to forgive him for how little of my Rodney I see in his Rodneys. Or I could just be talking out of my ass, really.
Uh. So, what do you guys think?
Speaking as a fan rather than as an artist, I think the artist does a pretty good job on John, who clicks for me about 60% of the time. Rodney, not so good--he gets him maybe 20% of the time, but Rodney's got a tough face. I think he got a perfect Rodney (and John) in the second panel of this page and a fantastic Rodney in the fourth panel of this page, though everyone else in that latter panel has freaky eyes. Elizabeth clicks for me maybe 40% of the time. He does her shocked and sardonic looks well but her normal face is awful. Teyla clicks 30% of the time but her face isn't chiseled enough.
I actually quite like those Rodney panels, although I have the feeling I recognize them from some ep or another.