Post
by arachonteur » Tue Nov 19, 2019 4:28 pm
Hussie's more polished art always bothered me because he's definitely a cartoonist by nature and stylizes people like cartoons, but a lot of his art has this very strange form of depth to it, where it seems like he will design a character to have the very flat "symbolic representation of a character" look, but then his art will render them like they exist very literally in the space, and it's bizarre! And I guess it works for when the work itself is bizarre, but the bizarreness of Homestuck isn't the bizarreness of Whistles, by any means, and I don't think it works as well for Homestuck.
It's gonna inevitably draw comparisons to Xamag's art for Homestuck^2 - with Homestuck panels it's really clear that Hussie isn't drawing the characters "literally" - they're abstract symbols of characters, distinguished by shapes rather than depictions of their forms, ie, how does the spiral in Roxy's hair work, or troll horns, which just jut out of a character's head. It's very easy to look at Dirk in Homestuck proper and see "this is a symbolic representation of that character, the true form of which exists in my head and is substituted in from what I know this character to look like", vs Xamag, where characters are lit dramatically, and things that are normally abstracted are given depth - Dirk's glasses are the most obvious citation here, which creates a feeling less like "this is an abstraction of what's happening" and more like "this is what it really looks like".
Dude's line art game is on point though.
That's how I feel.
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2021 and I'm still the only person who's read Homestuck all the way through.
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