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Oh hey, outrageous new developments since yesterday! Podcasts: Webcomics Weekly and Archives Drunk Duck Podcasts Art&Story Writing Excuses (As it says, about writing. But comics need writing too, and one of the hosts is Schlock Mercenary's Howard Tayler.) Links of Interest: Drawing Words & Writing Pictures Scott McCloud's Blog Webcomics.com Brad Guigar talks about comics Ka-Blam's comic page tech specs Blambot's articles about comic lettering reMIND tutorials and advice The Art Center Consequentialart Comikaze: comic manager plug-in for Comicpress There are threads with tons of writing and drawing info in Creative Convention as well. Edit: writing stuff Writer's Workshop by Stephen Koch Good for beginners, sweet and to the point. 102 Resources for Fiction Writing Do you have a plot? Elements of Style It seems like screenwriting guides and film criticism would also address some visual aspects of comic storytelling. Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at Feb 2, 2011 around 22:17 |
| # ¿ Feb 2, 2011 22:01 |
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| # ¿ May 20, 2013 08:44 |
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Time management is a huge hurdle. It's hard to keep chanting that each page shouldn't take this long, and stop worrying about insignificant details, and the only way to get faster is by streamlining the process through more practice. But everything looks terrible the second after I've drawn it, and that leads to the problem others have already described: redrawing pages. Luckily, the two people who know I'm doing this scold me when I revert to stalling tactics. No more after this -- it's gonna be a straight shot. I'm hoping the combination of having the story planned with a destination in mind (and impatience to get there) plus feedback from internet strangers will give me the motivation to see this project through to the end. Comics are cool. It'd be cool to make them. Like Kismet, I lurked the old threads a long time before posting, then started with lots of stupid questions that made me feel guilty about not actually contributing. This is also my first comic project, I'm currently working on building a buffer, and am terribly shy about the whole thing. As long as people describe their techniques in a way that makes sense, I've got no problem with vague, coy references to what project those techniques were applied to. So here's a chapter title page; consider me absolved!  Click here for the full 500x731 image.
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2011 18:40 |
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Quetzal-Coital posted:How long did that take you?  It took about three days, maybe. I just draw at night with something on in the background, and sometimes the difficult pages can take all week. My goal is consistency: upload twice a week, spend no more than three days on a page, maintain the buffer. Everything starts with a thumbnail, then I hunt down a ton of references and end up using perhaps a third of them. Sketch directly in Manga Studio or import a pencil scan, ink ink ink in MS, export to Photoshop for shading and other details, slap on a yellow tint (ffcc00 fill, Multiply Layer at 12% Opacity!) and call it done. I'm considering replacing the Photoshop step with SAI or adding a light texture to give pages an organic touch. I'm addicted to references, even ones I can't directly incorporate. Right now I've got tabs of neat-looking art and photos of people fighting, yet their positions and clothing have nothing to do with the characters currently being drawn. Like somehow I'm hoping the mojo will enter through my eyes, percolate in my brain, then spit out through my fingers.
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2011 21:46 |
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File types confuse the heck out of me, but I found this comprehensive Guide pretty useful. The same guy made a Quality Comparison Chart for different JPEG settings.
Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at Feb 4, 2011 around 20:17 |
| # ¿ Feb 4, 2011 20:10 |
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Fortis posted:Manga Studio has some vector tools, but I haven't tried them out yet. They LOOK like they're just the brushes that get converted into vectors after you draw the stroke. Does anyone here have any experience with those tools? I don't have any personal experience using vectors in that program, but it sounds intriguing. Using Vectors in Manga Studio
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2011 21:09 |
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I like the ball/dice idea! You could also try making all the panels concentric, so -- as The Worst Unicorn suggested -- the viewing experience is no longer sequential.
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| # ¿ Feb 5, 2011 22:07 |
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I never liked Photoshop for inking either. No amount of tweaking could eliminate my line jitters, and there was a persistent problem with lag. If not for SAI or Manga Studio, I'd never even have considered digital inking. There are free trials available if you want to give them a spin. Neeksy, I like your variation in line weight, but a wider range of tones would really help. The pages look flat as they are, almost unfinished; more grays would add contrast, as would using more blacks in the panels themselves (something I'm also trying to improve). The chat-speech dialogue seems fine -- the characters that use correct grammar and the ones that don't stay consistent, so you've got both crowds represented.
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2011 21:57 |
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neonnoodle posted:Do you use the vector inking tools in SAI, or the raster ones? Neeksy posted:When it comes to tones, I really want to be minimalist. When I go back and redo these, I'd really like to see if I could limit each page to black, white, and one gray. Shadoweyes generally does a good job of balancing the three tones.  Click here for the full 648x945 image.
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| # ¿ Feb 7, 2011 00:12 |
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(Hi!) I played with the MS vector pen last night, and it seems to work just as well as the raster tool -- I occasionally forgot I was working on a different layer type. There are several pen tool options: Size, Shape, Stroke-in and Stroke-out (whether the ends of the stroke taper and how much), Correction (anti-jitter), and in vector mode allows you to turn vector Snap on or off (and control the degree), and Delete Overlapping Lines.
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| # ¿ Feb 8, 2011 16:02 |
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The Cintiq does sound very nice. If I ever got one it would have to be a few years from now, and I could never breath a word about the cost, especially not to family. (You spent what on a what?) There needs to be some sort of "try before you buy" arrangement, though, because it's hard to imagine blowing four figures on a drawing tool sight-unseen. On a more personal note, gently caress this page I'm working on. I'm sure there's enough of that sentiment going around to fill up its own thread, so I'll use it sparingly. But for real: gently caress. This. Page.
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| # ¿ Feb 9, 2011 19:45 |
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Anybody have some good resources on drawing action and action sequences? Personal stories are also welcome. Most of the advice I've read amounts to "keep figures dynamic, avoid stiffness," but that's awfully vague. It would be useful to pin down specific things to look for and tweak. The animating squash-and-stretch technique seems better suited to cartoony comics, but realistic figures might benefit from slight exaggeration. There's also the possibility of speed lines, which I personally don't have anything against. They've been used to disguise poorly-drawn action (or lack of action), but talented artists have made use of them as well. Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at Feb 11, 2011 around 00:35 |
| # ¿ Feb 11, 2011 00:30 |
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Thanks guys. I've never gotten around to We3 for some reason, but I've been flipping back through McCloud, Watchmen, and some Blade of the Immortal volumes. In an attempt to latch onto the hallmarks of a successful action sequence, I'm keeping track of some common "dynamic" elements that keep showing up: foreshortening, looser line work (sometimes), using hair and clothing to its best advantage when indicating movement, using asymmetrical figures to create a feeling of imbalance or motion (asymmetrical composition, too, since the negative space does a good job of emphasizing where the figures are moving toward/away from), drawing the body and limbs mid-rotation, and showing the mid-point of an action. As with rotation, I guess our brain sees a motion it knows is unfinished and wants to complete, and that mental connection keeps an image from looking static. There are also a lot of crazy angles and wide shots, but these sequences are scattered with close-ups for emotional context. Those are just my observations so far.inkblot posted:And if you are going to draw people fist-fighting go actually watch a fight. MMA and boxing are huge, it is not hard to go find video footage of people who actually know how to fight doing just that. You can draw a character who has a great line of action throwing a punch, but it will look weird as hell if no one actually throws punches like that. Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at Feb 11, 2011 around 05:26 |
| # ¿ Feb 11, 2011 05:10 |
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Re-found all the Action! posts on the Consequential Art blog. As for Quietly, he's getting very experimental here, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The first example would be horrible if it went on the same way for several pages, but it looks like an obvious set piece -- the violence equivalent of a centerfold. I got that it was meant to be dissecting a few seconds, and the context (how the animals experience time differently) supports that. But the little snapshots do make the background image hard to see, and the way they're ordered in neat rows comes off as weird more than chaotic. The cat version works better for me. This wouldn't be how I'd want to handle most action sequences. However, Quietly is twisting conventional rules to deliver a very specific type of action and accomplish very specific goals -- showing violence from an alien perspective that the reader can still understand -- and that's worth learning from.
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| # ¿ Feb 11, 2011 17:18 |
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Kubo's true calling was... fashion design. Samura tends to have nice panel and camera angle variation in his action scenes, but he's not perfect. His loose style and love of graphite can occasionally be a problem. Sketchy lines with no weight variation + low contrast + lots of action lines = what the hell is going on in this panel. But I always thought this was a cute sequence, though (read left to right):  Click here for the full 630x958 image.  Click here for the full 630x939 image. I need to get over my fear of covering things up or having people going off the page.
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| # ¿ Feb 11, 2011 22:16 |
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The article was full of things most of us already know on some level, but it's good to see those ideas expressed -- be realistic, set goals, feeling bad is normal so use that to drive improvement, have fun. I also liked the stylization links she mentioned, and I'm looking for more on the subject. Stylization is an important part of comic art (to me), but most of the time you're stuck looking at other artists and reverse-engineering to dissect their style. There aren't as many articles that put it under a microscope and look for potential problems. Drawing milestone: I still remember what table I was sitting at when I drew the Best Raccoon. It was in kindergarten, and I even know what direction I was facing and where the table was in the room -- that's how perfect this raccoon was. He was washing a clam with his forepaws, loving immaculate. His body proportions were all correct, I'd gotten his mask and tail right, mixed crayons like a wizard to get the right sort of gray-brown for his body, but most importantly: he was exactly how I'd pictured him in my head. It was the first time I'd ever tried putting something on paper and had the result match the goal. My hands and brain were cooperating for once. Another big day was realizing how cool eyes look if you leave a white shine-circle in the iris, but mostly I'm still looking for that perfect raccoon.
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| # ¿ Feb 19, 2011 17:27 |
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Reiley posted:Never look at that actual drawing again. Preserve this memory exactly as it is.  For WEBCOMIC SITES -- I assume most people who are hosting themselves use form of ComicPress or Comic CMS. I'm thinking of downloading one of these as a skeleton (leaning toward CMS), then customizing it with Dreamweaver or some other program. Warn me away from horrible pitfalls and programming disasters, crap you hate seeing on comic sites, and bestow other hard-won sage advice. Or perhaps someone has references they can point me toward in the likelihood they don't have time to explain things to a moron such as myself. Last week I didn't even know what File Transfer Protocol was; learning is good.
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| # ¿ Feb 20, 2011 02:05 |
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Gosh dangit, guys. Free downloadable comic management systems aren't something to be taken lightly! God forbid I make the wrong choice and have to try more than one.Kismet posted:So here's what I want to know. Reading over their advice, it's obvious that just slapping down colours the way I'm used to doing is far from ideal. (No more working in RGB or forgetting to save copies in .psd format.) I'm accustomed to scanning pencils in colour to lend a bit of warmth and texture, then colouring underneath and overlaying a similarly colour-scanned ink layer, but now I'm somewhat paranoid that this is a sloppy approach that could land me in trouble later, giving muddy results if I ever get to the point of considering print. So what practicalities need to be taken into consideration for a full colour strip? Is there a middle way between the super-optimised (and to my mind kind of sterile) line art supremacy that Kurtz and pals promote, and the sloppy mush that I've seen all too often in poorly prepared independent graphic novels?
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| # ¿ Feb 20, 2011 20:27 |
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Pencils and digital undercoloring make me think of this method. Substitute SAI for Photoshop, but the principles still apply. I've always heard most printers will accept Photoshop files -- ideally 300 to 600 dpi -- or TIFF. For posting online I usually convert to 100 or 72 dpi JPEGs, but then I read PNG-24 is better for web-quality, so I'm planning to do that when I go through my pages and resize them.
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| # ¿ Feb 20, 2011 23:45 |
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I considered using black gutters to help 'pin down' my B&W art; I'm also bad at tone balance and hoped dark gutters would disguise that by adding the illusion of more black on the page. In the end I decided against it. White gutters will force me to improve my shading, and borderless panels will be easier to handle with a white background. However, I do plan to use black gutters to visually separate chapter title pages and two extended flashbacks. Both types have pros and cons, but ultimately I had to weigh those against my artistic goals. It's not something I pay much attention to while reading, so I think gutter choice should be based on what serves the artist best. Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at Feb 21, 2011 around 23:28 |
| # ¿ Feb 21, 2011 23:25 |
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The only thing I don't like about MS's inking tool (and it's a very minor nitpick) is the jaggy bitmapped look it can have at huge zoom levels. Some people want that crispness, and high resolutions render the point kinda moot, but it bothers me occasionally on tiny details. Turns out Spookyblang's high-resolution Gaussian blur method works for digital inks too! The art is still clean, but it's not as crunchy and stark. Ya'll want to discuss more of the writing aspects involved in comics? Plotting, conflict, dialog, critique...
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| # ¿ Feb 27, 2011 21:34 |
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The Worst Unicorn, you might want to check out this presentation on story structure. It takes a minute or two to get rolling, afterwards I found it pithy and useful: Dan Wells on Story Structure: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Obviously this is more in-depth than most sixth-graders will care for, but there may be several points you could distill down and present: start with an end then devise how to get there, make at least one character change drastically by the end of the story, use popular examples to illustrate your ideas and so forth. I like Reiley's suggestion because it forces the kids to work a story into a context they might not have chosen otherwise. God knows my high school's AV class were left to their own devices when it came to the final films, and 9 out of 10 submissions were slasher plots. They were all goofy and the absolute simplest form of conflict. If those kids had been given more restrictions, I think they would have produced more creative results instead of going for the easy option. Furikku posted:I'd love to! Anything in particular?
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| # ¿ Feb 28, 2011 01:17 |
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If you're going to polish nude sketches, it feels odd to spend time detailing the hair and feet only to leave the crotch vague. I may not need to draw a character's genitals for reference, but I don't really need to draw individual fingers either -- a clean drawing feels unfinished if I neglect parts of the anatomy, no matter what they are. The project I'm working on will have eventual nudity, so I have that excuse, but ditto on "it's fun." I hate covering figures up in clothing, and lots of side drawings end up more naked than originally planned. This photoset linked farther down on Diaz's blog is worth drawing attention to.
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| # ¿ Mar 2, 2011 16:42 |
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Found Hemlock linked on TJ&Amal, and I love how the artist handles sound effects. A crazy assortment of hand-drawn fonts that include serifs? I may have to steal this.
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| # ¿ Mar 5, 2011 19:20 |
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I wish I could get Lazy Nezumi to work with Vista.  bigbigtruck posted:I've been wanting to go offset for quality reasons, but also, no US-based comics POD service will accept adult content. The last one that did changed its policies a year or so ago. :/ Also, is there a not-so-secret webcomic code of etiquette? Like linking. Should you let an author know you're going to link them, or have you ever felt guilty when someone else has linked you but you really don't want to return the favor?
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| # ¿ Mar 12, 2011 20:20 |
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Thanks for the feedback, guys. Lately I've been reading several Emerald City Comicon follow-up posts, and the comic artist community seems both awesome and intimidating -- prime faux pas territory for dorks like me -- so it's nice to hear from people with experience. It also keeps me from inventing too many outlandish nightmare scenarios. As for offset printers, I've seen positive reviews for LeBonFon, though apparently it's important that interested parties correspond with their info guy Patrick Jodoin. The Teahouse team told me they use another Quebecois printer, Transcontinental, and gave it a solid recommendation. This isn't the first time I've heard good things about the company, and Transcontinental also does a lot of professional comic printing: Dark Horse, Image, and Shoujo Beat. I don't know how the prices compare, but Transcontinental has a solid portfolio, quality-wise.
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| # ¿ Mar 13, 2011 06:30 |
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Thanks Heresiarch. It's great to have those resources in one place! I'm downloading several guides I've never seen before.Fantasmo posted:My partner and I have ~100 inked pages of a story we were trying to sell to publishers but have decided to take the webcomic route. Neither of us knows what we are doing. He's got some sample pages all lettered and bordered in PDF, but I heard that's a crappy format to use online. The beginning of the thread has some good advice -- like how 72 dpi PNGs or JPEGs are much more reader-friendly than PDFs. And a free hosting site might be a useful training-wheels experience, but you'll probably find Comicpress or similar plugins make hosting a comic on your own domain just as simple. Also check out the Webcomics Weekly podcast and, if you feel like shelling out $12 or so, the accompanying book. It's aimed at people who have a decent grasp on comic production but who are clueless about the technical aspects of online hosting. I was in the same position as you, and it really opened my eyes to simple marketing solutions, starting points for further research, and things to avoid at all costs. I also stumbled upon this webcomic site design article yesterday.
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| # ¿ Mar 29, 2011 01:37 |
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I got paranoid and shelled out money for Eurocomic on Blambot. It felt totally pretentious to assume I'd make prints and money with it one day, but whatever. Peace of mind. On the subject of disabling comments, I've always been on the fence about whether they're worth it or not. Assuming you've taken the step to make them visible only upon clicking so the story flow isn't interrupted, there's still spam, FIRSTies, moderation, and other weirdness to deal with; but on the other hand, it seems like a nice way to build community without having to resort to forums. When I get bored waiting for a new page of Templar or The Meek, I tend to click on the comments and play around in those for a bit, and there's a nice sense of fandom. And dare I say it ... immediate gratification.
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| # ¿ Mar 30, 2011 21:40 |
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Yeah, let us know how it goes! I'm another person who found the first panel to be really confusing in its original format, but I think taking out the gutters, shifting the figure in the center panel, and connecting the smoke rings will all do a lot to improve the flow. Another thing that might help the establishing shot is to define what that creamy-yellow space is in the upper-left corner. While it balances the warm light coming through the door at the bottom of the page, the blank light made me think we were looking up at the sky above the buildings. Also, is this the first page? I bet other artists here have taken a more practical approach to the matter, but man did I sweat (and still do) about the first page. Something about first and final images of a comic seems to carry so much weight, like the opening lines of a book; it makes them tempting to fuss with constantly. Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at Apr 6, 2011 around 05:41 |
| # ¿ Apr 6, 2011 05:06 |
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Are there any constraints besides "Make a minicomic," like a minimum page number? Because trying to go in without at least brainstorming sounds brutal.
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| # ¿ Apr 11, 2011 03:05 |
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I'm interested in the idea (haha, another distraction from building up buffer!), but will probably only shoot for a minicomic's worth of pencils. Nice pencils, though.
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| # ¿ Apr 11, 2011 04:41 |
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Shop Talk off the front page? This will never do  I haven't finished reading yet, but I found most of Panel Discussions: Design in Sequential Art Storytelling by Durwin S. Talon on Google Books and thought some of the thread-goers would enjoy looking through the available content. I've enjoyed it so far, and I can always use more reminders to pay attention to balloon placement and panel flow. Here are a few pages from an old Wizard guide on Eye Level and Horizon Line -- sorry if it's a bit hard to read (and for the kitsch). This freaked me out a little because, while I'm aware of the basic rules of Eye Level, I admit to going on instinct most of the time and am generally uneducated on the subject. I don't know what I don't know, and would love to hear more "tricks" like the ones mentioned on page 2 and 3 if anyone knows them.    
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2011 21:30 |
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Grantaire is right about it being different for every collaboration. You can search for comic script samples and compare them to the final pages to see just how many different approaches there are. For example, Stan Lee and his artist Jack Kirby worked so closely the line often blurred between artist and writer, and at its most extreme Kirby found himself working with little more than a basic plotline that he filled in as he drew. Contrast this with Alan Moore, who is famous for writing scripts of such detail that he could spend a page describing a single panel -- the angle, lighting, mood, background details, "stage directions." There's no wrong way to do it as long as the result works for you and your artist and you successfully communicate what you intended. Moore's stories often involve a lot of symbolism and foreshadowing, so it's no surprise he needs meticulous scripting to make sure the artist planted the right details in the right places. If you're writing, say, a complicated noir tale full of social commentary, you'll probably spend more time writing than you will for a gag-a-day comedy. Regardless of what format you're interested in, it might be good practice to try drawing a page of your own script. It may not be pretty, but this will give you a good idea of how much you're asking from the artist, and it'll help you understand how to break the script into pages (assuming that's part of your process). If you've written five characters having a long conversation while performing seven important actions, but you're having trouble cramming all that onto one page, chances are your artist will too. Good luck!
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| # ¿ Apr 22, 2011 03:57 |
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The new page is a major improvement, KingKalamari. If you keep making leaps of this magnitude each time BSS tears you down, you'll be good to go. I don't know who else is doing the comic weekend thing, but I'm trying to get eight new pages formatted, lettered, and tight-penciled before Sunday ends. That's a Herculean task considering my normal work rate, but perhaps making a promise to internet strangers can keep me from making up excuses for myself. (Like sweating over dialogue as a result of the very interesting Unsounded critique in the Webcomic Readers thread.) Fingers-crossed. Edit: I've also broken down and ordered Chealsea's Persepective! For Comic Artists.  And Ninja_Orca, if you're still around, you may want to see if there's an easy way to lay hands on Panel One: Comic Book Scripts by Top Writers by Nat Gertier, Writers on Comic Scriptwriting by Mark Salisbury, or The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Denis O'Neil. They might be of use in your scripting adventures. Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at Apr 24, 2011 around 01:09 |
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2011 01:02 |
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Grantaire posted:Minicomic check-in: ten pages in about fifteen hours, counting food breaks. I have come to accept that I can't go for the whole 24 (this time), because I started out with not enough sleep and in the last two hours or so I've been literally hallucinating. I really enjoyed this, but am also on the verge of passing out due to pollen as much as anything. Smells like success! Go to bed -- you've earned it. 
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2011 02:51 |
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Hey, any progress is good, setbacks or no. I ended up working into the wee hours of the night to clear out some especially nasty malware, but I've also gotten some much-needed work done on five pages -- that's still a plus, even if it is behind schedule.
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2011 01:13 |
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There's seriously about a million households with no power here, so she's probably okay, just unable to communicate.  As long as your "distractions" supplement to the greater story, I don't see a problem. Side adventures can help create a sense of time and distance traveled, and if you introduce suspense and difficulty along the way there's more of a payoff when your cast finally reaches the antagonist. However, side adventures need to create a satisfying suspense rather than the "hurry up and get it over with" frustration you're trying to avoid. Two distractions or twenty, there's no magic number. Take a look at these scenes and see what you can do to make them work as hard as possible -- tie in themes, foreshadowing, character development, link it to other goals and characters -- if you can't, cut them out, but if it works, I promise readers won't care that the antagonist hasn't been confronted yet. It's a pleasure to watch engaging, entertaining characters do anything, and hopefully you can get your audience to care as much about the journey as the destination.
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2011 02:59 |
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DarthVersace posted:Pft. Anatomy. Hey DarthV, we were discussing potentially adult-content printer options earlier in the thread, and since you're handling Smut Peddlers -- which would obviously be R+18 -- would it be okay to ask if you have a printer in mind? Thanks.
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| # ¿ May 1, 2011 23:23 |
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Someone a while back complained about the size of Family Man, and since we just discussed ideal buffers, what might be considered the ideal width for a webcomic page? I'm not too confident about the code involving browser sizes vs page sizes, so I'm curious as to what other readers prefer and why creators chose the page dimensions they did.
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| # ¿ May 11, 2011 23:04 |
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Yeah, I've never had a problem with Family Man, myself, but I guess if you have poor vision...? Though there are browsing options for that, and Control+ works on websites. 800 seems a decent width if we're talking standard rectangular format. The Meek is surprisingly small at only 590 pixels wide -- slightly over half the width of a typical Lackadaisy page -- but the font makes it look larger.
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| # ¿ May 12, 2011 04:26 |
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| # ¿ May 20, 2013 08:44 |
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DigitalAdhesive posted:I'm really glad I stumbled across this thread. I've learned a lot just by lurking, let alone posting questions. I'd be hard-pressed to figure a lot of this out on my own, like the dpi/posting sizes, etc. I don't read many gag strips, but I looked through the gallery and can offer a few comments: First, I won't lecture you on the art because I'm sure you know it's very crude. There are steps that can be taken to improve it, but I'll get to that later. One thing I do appreciate is the variety of compositions and frames. Many untested artists feel too intimidated to try drawing their characters beyond a few comfortable positions, so you end up seeing a lot of amateur webcomics where people are always framed from the waist-up, always facing directly toward the reader, facing each other, or in a constant 3/4 profile. It's a boring composition that never changes, so I commend you for using an assortment of zooms, full-body gestures, and swiveling the "camera" around so conversations are more than copy-paste talking heads. This is more apparent in the earlier strips -- don't lose it! The way your panels are stacked means repetitive layouts are obvious at a glance, so you need that visual variety. As for the writing, I didn't like the cliché "she crashes into her potential love interest" Meet Cute. When you're working on scenarios or dialogue, try to come up with at least three to five possibilities to choose from, and always be critical of the first thing that pops into your head. The reason that first thing popped in there might be because you have the character's voice so perfected it flows out naturally, but it's probably because your brain just grabbed the first thing it associates with a scenario, which means you've already seen it, and it's usually a cliché. Most of the dialogue is pretty good, though. You let the characters speak in fragments but not to the point of distraction, and it isn't coming off as stilted or unnatural. Imagine the same words being said in a comic (or show, or film...) you really admire. Does your script sound too expositional, flat, or abrupt? Don't dumb it down or sell yourself short. Read often, learn from the best. Unless your writing and voice is CRAZY GOOD, art's going to be a barrier to readership. You can help improve your strip in the short term by adding line weight variety and better shading, which is possible if you have anything more advanced than Paint and a mouse. If you don't but you're serious about digital art, there are tablets and drawing programs for every budget. I'd also try drawing your lineart traditionally for a few strips -- use different pens, work on smoothing out the lines and using different weights to show emphasis. Use references! Over the long term, practice with traditional materials every day and never stop reading about ways to improve. Look at your favorite artists and study their decisions: why did they frame a drawing the way they did, how do they shade or show contrast, what do their lines and figures look like and why does it work? Also learn how they did it: what materials and methods did they use to achieve those results? Many great artists online have tutorials and videos available so you can watch their process in action. Then try it yourself. It will be very frustrating, but as long as you're thinking while you work, set artistic and writing goals, and focus your practice, you absolutely WILL improve.
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| # ¿ May 24, 2011 17:42 |
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