Strings of Fate
Sep. 8th, 2003 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramI’ve finally gotten around to reading Strings of Fate by Jen Wang. I’ve been meaning to forever, ’cause I really like Jen’s flair for drawing people — an engaging cross between Disney and anime-inspired character design. But the first few chapters of Strings are done in an illustrated prose style that turned me off. I downloaded all of the first two acts (or what had been completed), and browsed through looking for where it turned into comics; looks like chapter 3, page 5.
I noticed that Jen solved a problem for one of her characters that I’d been having with one of mine: How to keep glasses from blocking the reader’s view of the character’s eyes. Jen draws her characters with fairly long noses, compressing the mouth fairly far down the face. For Zhu, her oh-so-adorable bespectacled character, the glasses slide far enough down her nose that they only overlap her eyes a bit. I’d been planning to solve the problem by giving my character the kind of glasses that have no frames along the upper edge. I may use a combination of the two ideas.
I’ve also done a drawing of Melorne in something approximating Jen’s style, working off this drawing of Hou in chapter 6, page 8; hence the startled look. Not quite there, since Jen uses markers for shades of gray like all the kids are doing these days. And if I were actually Jen, that vertical line marking the lateral border of Mel’s nasal cartridge would have gone all the way up to meet her eyebrow. Still, a useful exercise. I like the way the cheek and chin came out.
![[ Melorne as if drawn by Jen Wang ]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e1565bd077cd/221157-196009/www.grumer.org/lj_images/20030908-melornewang.gif)
I noticed that Jen solved a problem for one of her characters that I’d been having with one of mine: How to keep glasses from blocking the reader’s view of the character’s eyes. Jen draws her characters with fairly long noses, compressing the mouth fairly far down the face. For Zhu, her oh-so-adorable bespectacled character, the glasses slide far enough down her nose that they only overlap her eyes a bit. I’d been planning to solve the problem by giving my character the kind of glasses that have no frames along the upper edge. I may use a combination of the two ideas.
I’ve also done a drawing of Melorne in something approximating Jen’s style, working off this drawing of Hou in chapter 6, page 8; hence the startled look. Not quite there, since Jen uses markers for shades of gray like all the kids are doing these days. And if I were actually Jen, that vertical line marking the lateral border of Mel’s nasal cartridge would have gone all the way up to meet her eyebrow. Still, a useful exercise. I like the way the cheek and chin came out.
