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With regards to worldbuilding: if it doesn't affect the specifics of the story you're telling then you're wasting a lot of time on bullshit.
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May 28, 2015 06:24
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Here's a hot hand-lettering tip for dumbos like yours truly: use a font, figure out your wording and spacing and when you're happy with all your edits flatten your font layers, drop the opacity and then hand-letter overtop of the font, using it like an Ames guide to keep it level and maintain consistent kerning or whatever. You can use this method to both take advantage of all the conveniences a font offers while also correcting the capital-i having or lacking crossbars within a given font (the sideways-H looking I is only for the pronoun I, and not for general-purpose capital-vowel use).
Reiley fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 02:02
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Divide a page into thirds vertically if you want to talk a lot or divide it into fourths if there's more action than talking. These horizontal lines are your main visual break points and will frame the horizontal spaces around them as strings of moments. Subdivide your rectangles into smaller rectangles. Remember the eye reads from left to right, top to bottom; if you have two subdivisions on top of each other on the left side of the page you're going to need a way to visually convey that you're meant to Z back to the lower panel before your eye goes / up to the top-left corner of the right panel. You can usually do this by ensuring the vertically-stacked panels are wider than they are tall. Take your page, divide, subdivide, tinker as needed. End the page on a moment, to make sure there's a reason for this page existing at all. Pace your pages from moment to moment.
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Jul 9, 2015 23:23
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Paneling is very much a science as its rooted in the physiology of how a reader- presumably an anglophone- actually engages in the act of scanning and decoding information on a flat surface. There's a lot of little tricks to it and it's easy to gently caress up but at the heart of it it's "top left to bottom right", snaking from visual point to visual point of interest, side to side like an ambling typewriter. Art is an abstract fusion of many scientific disciplines, and how a human being's eyes and brain work is one of those fields. This is why things like dead space in panels where there's no visual anchor and poor panel layout actually exist, because they conflict with the science of how a reader naturally consumes the information in front of them.
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Jul 10, 2015 21:58
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Scribblehatch posted:Any of you guys ever dealt with precensorship before? This is an easy subject to misinterpret, it's little effort to cast oneself as the victim of culture gone wild. At the heart of it "precensorship" means "don't be a loving idiot". and if you find yourself thinking about or saying words like PC Police, for example, you're standing on the precipice of becoming another loving idiot. Rod Serling uses an episode of Lassie as an example, but you should be very careful about comparing whatever you're making to Lassie. The world is a bigger place than it was when Lassie was airing, and it's vital to keep in mind the breadth of people who might encounter your stories and how the choices you make might impact them. The things you make do not exist in a cultural void, and it's important to keep in mind how they might ripple the waters around them when they make a splash.
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Jul 22, 2015 21:09
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Delta Echo posted:Wow. I'm pretty sure I just won this thread. Here's some practical advice: never trace. Don't do paintovers, don't use photos or renders or anything as a base for you to put art on top of. Don't do those things and don't trust anyone who tells you it's an okay corner to cut. The reason for this is because you want to train your eye to read the underlying structures of a reference, digest that and reinterpret it onto your canvas. Skipping the read-and-process step robs you of any chance of developing an eye for how things are actually structured. A great exercise is to look at an object, figure out it's basic forms and how it's built and then draw it from an angle other than the one you're seeing it from. Don't start your drawing with a Paste command.
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Jul 28, 2015 09:30
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Scribblehatch posted:When, meanwhile, I find nothing relatable about Spike Spiegel. Spike's an honest guy trying to do the right thing, so in a way this make a lot of sense.
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Jul 28, 2015 21:33
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Scribblehatch please stop trying to browbeat everyone. You have a very prominent trend in posting here and literally everyone is aware of it, so when you post vague poo poo people know from the context of remembering history what angle it's coming from. The hoighty "well NOW I'm just mediating discussion" shaming poo poo is not doing anyone any favors. Shop Talk: have you worked on cutting out the dead space from your comic panels? It was the biggest technical issue you needed to address and I haven't seen if it's been tightened up lately.
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Jul 28, 2015 23:08
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Space-Bird posted:Heya, I have a question about using digital screentones. Is there anything to look out for when re-sizing, ratios etc. I notice sometimes if you size an image down, it'll create weird patterns. I'm currently thinking of using them for a project, but I could totally see like a sized down jpeg, and a print image coming out totally different. Anyone have any advice? This is called the Moire Effect, you can combat it by making sure your screentone dots are a good size proportionate to the dimensions of your page so when you downscale they don't become too small. If your dots are 100px wide at 1000dpi then they'll be 10px wide at 100dpi, for a super-simple explanation. Photoshop usually does a good job of handling this as long as you don't screen to finely at a high working resolution.
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Aug 5, 2015 03:56
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Mercury Hat posted:I finished up another chapter, feels good I'm proud of you for sticking with this, by the way.
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Aug 9, 2015 09:06
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WrathOfBlade posted:Let's say you're doing a regularly updated comic, and you hit a patch where keeping your schedule becomes impossible, either due to Life Stuff or just needing to play catchup. Do you guys think it's smarter to go on hiatus 'til you know you're in a good place again, or to go on an "irregular schedule" and just put up comics whenever you can get them out? Do what you have to do. People might wish for regular updates back but they'll still keep up with you as long as you still put work out, no matter the pace. Your health and your wellness should come before anything else.
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Sep 1, 2015 19:04
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Working in greyscale is fun because you get a lot more depth in value compared to color (pure white to pure black has much more visible contrast variation than mid-light color to mid-dark color). You lose the power to use hue and saturation to create contrast but pure value gives you a lot more data to work with, albeit on a single linear spectrum. I actually find black and white more time-consuming than color because you have to simulate hue and saturation contrast within the value spectrum, especially when it comes to reflected or atmospheric lighting. My dad used to comment how much more "expressive" old black-and-white shows were, since he grew up with the Munsters and the like, and I always took that to heart. Anyways that's my post on the topic.
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Sep 14, 2015 07:00
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People who buy your book at conventions will sneer at the price if it's greyscale, like "if I'm gonna pay $20 I want my money's worth, I want ALL the colors". It sounds ludicrous but I've seen it happen to multiple people more than once.
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Sep 15, 2015 07:02
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Nowadays when I print up business cards to put at my table at a convention I just print up a couple sheets of cardstock at whatever local printing place is open at the last minute. It's mega-cheap and then you just chop it up in the paper cutter and put it in a nice little sugar packet caddy to make it presentable and people will take them and forget why they had them in their pockets a month later all the same.
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Nov 2, 2015 04:37
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SynthOrange posted:Remember to cut away from yourself. That's for whittling sticks, when you use an xacto you want to carefully bring the blade towards you (inward strokes are a much more precise & controllable muscle movement than outward strokes), this goes for freehanding straight lines with pen as well! If you're cutting business cards you don't really want to be using an xacto though, get yourself a paper cutter!  They sell affordable home models, they'll save you a LOT of trouble and blood whoopsies.
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Nov 2, 2015 04:44
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Paper cutters and long-reach staplers should be packaged and sold as a cartoonist's starter kit, they're such invaluable tools.
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Nov 2, 2015 04:54
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Dogwood Fleet posted:The new ones might work better anyway, they're in much better shape than what I had. Thanks for the help. If a cutter doesn't cut cleanly, try giving the handle a little bit of inward pressure (towards the main body of it) to ensure a clean scissor-like cut. If the blade arm is loose or you pressure it outward it won't cut well or just bend the paper, but a little pressure with your cutting-hand palm does the business.
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Nov 2, 2015 05:07
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It's really important to avoid a mindset where you "aren't ready yet" or you're waiting intil you're "good enough" because you're never going to find the point where you're satisfied enough to formally start and make successful comics. Your first stuff is gonna look awful to you once you're three years deep in it but to start out it'll be fine. Mastery only comes through repetition and failure, it's a hard road and the only way to walk it is to put one foot in front of the other and start from the beginning. If you're worried about not "doing it right" I think you can find most of the cartoonists here (or anywhere) have much, much uglier first pages than last pages of their work. Just remember: if you don't like something about a page, fix it on the next page.
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Nov 16, 2015 21:04
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The reason it's actually important to make comics to learn making comics is because the difference between comics and life drawing is the element of time passing between panels. Whether or not you're good at life drawing is a lot less important than how good you are at pacing, framing your shots and moving your camera from beat to beat, which is all stuff you only learn by making comics. There's rules that apply to fine art which apply to comics all the same, specifically about leading the eye and how a reader scans a page for visual data, but ultimately "just do landscapes" isn't going to make you better at making comics, it will just make you better at drawing.
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Nov 17, 2015 06:07
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It's way healthier in the long run to learn to pick your own colors and paint with them. There's nothing wrong with using tools and shortcuts but you'll get strong if you do digital art as much with your own two hands as you can.
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Jan 6, 2016 06:55
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Complimentary, contrasting, analogous colors. Yellow light, purple shadow. The red of human flesh and the blue of atmospheric perspective. the way we see an individual color is informed by the colors around them rather than solely by the light they reflect themselves. It's really worth your time to learn a bit of the science behind color theory so you can make informed choices instead of leaning on the crutch of hue sliders and eyedroppers for the rest of your life. I'm fairly certain manga artists don't work in black and white either because of a lack of eyedroppers, yikes.
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Jan 6, 2016 21:45
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Here's a hot trick for gauging contrast in your work: squint your eyes and look at it. When you squint your eyes condense values into broad groups and you can see if your shadows blend with your highlights or if a red and a blue blend together. Squint those peepers and have a look at your work, see if it still pops how you intend it to.
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Jan 13, 2016 02:13
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Yeah I mean "things designed to scroll down" not working on mobile is a dumb thing to say. You can make an argument that newspaper-style strip comics are phasing out of relevance, though. One of the cool effects Homestuck had on the web was it got a lot of people interested in telling their own stories, and a great many of them are long-form narratives that scroll well on a phone.
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Jan 14, 2016 19:11
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The old webcomic rule was to keep at least the top of your page above the fold but I'm not sure what the word is these days. I don't think the actual layout of my site has changed in close to nine years.
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Jan 14, 2016 23:34
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Take the story you've written from your inspiration, reskin everything with your own designs and go from there.
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Jan 21, 2016 09:41
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Scribblehatch posted:Star Wars is the good kind of stealing from Kurosawa. Fistful of Dollars is to Yojimbo as The Magnificent Seven is to Seven Samurai. It's a loving homage, and the relationship between westerns and samurai film is wonderful. 
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Jan 21, 2016 22:04
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Here's an important piece of worldbuilding advice: if it's not relevant to your storyline as it is meant to be told, it's not relevant. An alluring pitfall many new writers fall into is one where they get too invested in Worldbuilding and finding out all the intricate little details about their setting, and they put a lot of energy into drawing that worldbuilding and maybe 5% of it is useful to the reader. I've seen a comic which has to wit never actually launched and subsists entirely on worldbuilding vignettes, its wild. Make sure you handle that part of your story carefully, and make sure to be bold enough and honest enough to recognize what belongs on the cutting room floor. It can be quicksand otherwise.
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Jan 23, 2016 21:23
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I ain't saying no names here................................ but god drat if that isn't one for the textbooks.
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Jan 23, 2016 21:49
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My rule has always been "the best idea is the one you haven't had yet". In the act of telling the story you came up with you'll think of better paths for it to take which you likely wouldn't have thought of had you stayed in the planning stage. It's an organic process and the act of making your comic will inspire you to come up with even better ways to keep telling it. That's a big reason to be wary of too much worldbuilding, you're technically never fully planned for the ideas you're yet to have.
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Jan 23, 2016 22:35
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FunkyAl posted:As I've adapted to making ~animated short films~ I've started to fall in love with the short subject as a means of expression, so I pose the question: why not, instead of a Worldbuilding Tolkeinesque Epic, make a bunch of short comics that explore any number of ideas in HALF the time??? I've been working on a videogame for the past year or so and part of our design doc is a sort of randomly-seeded objective (a connected intro/endscreen that gives a stage a feeling of purpose) and I'm actually playing with the idea of using that as a way to explore side-stories and expand on the little threads of the setting that a main comic storyline wouldn't ever get to. It's been a lot of fun and I think it'd be a cool medium to try it with.
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Jan 23, 2016 23:35
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FunkyAl posted:That's cool as hell!! How close is that to being done, btw, I've been very impressed with all the stuff I've seen about it THUS FAR. We're building it around other obligations so its slow going, but we almost have the core of it put together. There's still a -lot- to do but it's shaping up to where we add more stuff-stuff and less system stuff. We have design docs though, so its all slow but steady!
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Jan 24, 2016 01:43
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Treat grass like a bunch of Saiyans hiding in the ground with just their hair sticking up. Boom. Powerful land is now yours to command.
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Jan 26, 2016 22:12
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DrSunshine posted:Create a "grass" texture then Photoshop Pattern Fill!! [the camera cuts back to my face, slow-mo screaming and diving for the NO button]
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Jan 26, 2016 22:15
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SPX table lotto was announced: http://www.spxpo.com/lottery it's a great first con for new artists, go put your name in there.
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Feb 12, 2016 03:41
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What I mean is sign up for the thing, pay for a table, sell your work and then meet your peers and build good networking connections. If you make a comic you have to go out and become a face at some point. Go make friends and sell minis.
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Feb 12, 2016 05:45
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When you start out you might not make back your travel, hotel or table costs entirely but people do buy things they've never seen before and being at least a passable salesperson helps (know how to engage people and not overwhelm them). The real value of it is making contacts with your fellow artists and becoming a part of the scene, a face you see in one corner of the country or another and people recognize you and associate you with their past experiences of you. You might start out just meeting up with other artists you meet online but you invariably meet other people. During con hours you're there to make up your expenses but after hours you make friends, have a drink, strike up conversation and eventually get dinner with people and then you become Someone. That's the real value of the investment is the social connections you build. You're not going to make back your costs on trip one, absolutely not, but it's the first step in the road towards turning a profit. Everyone has to pay their dues. If you're not actually interested in professional contacts or stapling minis together the above link might not be for you, that's really a big thing for people trying to make their art their career. Also, I guess since I'm talking about socializing, it's important not to be intrusive or try to get buddy-buddy with people who don't actually know you. Those connections form naturally but if you spend like 20 minutes hanging around another artist's booth or inviting yourself to their groups you're gonna leave a bad first impression. Be cool and people will recognize you as cool.
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Feb 12, 2016 08:52
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Sharing a table with a friend is a great way to offset the cost and also have a core social group to work with, I've only had I think one show where I wasn't next to someone I didn't know and I ended up making friends with that person anyways, it's great to have someone to talk to in the downtime. The one big thing I would point out not to forget is: bring your own tablecloth! Cons don't really provide those, it makes your table look nice and presentable, the hangdown in the front means you can store boxes underneath the table out of sight and at the end of the day you can flip the ends up overtop of your table to cover your stuff so the next day when you come back you just flip them down and your display is half-assembled already.
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Feb 13, 2016 21:17
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Troposphere posted:I honestly don't see a problem with it and don't care if people make money off of popular titles and wouldn't care if someone profited in a small way from enjoying something I created. Setting all the morality of riding someone else's marketing to make your buck aside, as a creator of the source material if you let that sort of thing slide it creates legal precedence of "you allowed X to sell your work but now you're trying to get it off of Hot Topic t-shirts" that harms your ability to claim infringement on future cases. That's why you see creators publicly say no, you do not have my consent to do that. It's a tremendous headache for independent creators who don't have the luxury of a legal team to pursue all of that, no matter how much of a tradition it seems like.
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Feb 17, 2016 04:22
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people in Japan create entire careers based off mass produced fanworks and I tend to lean more towards that attitude
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John Liver posted:I'm gonna go to a couple of cons this summer - walk around at ECCC Come say hi! Play a videogame 
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Feb 24, 2016 07:34
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DrSunshine posted:The reason I set it in the future is so I can have "genetic engineering" as a justification for anime hair/eyes. You don't need a worldbuilding justification for your stylistic choices, you can just make them and let your story's world accept them as reality.
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Jun 8, 2016 20:25
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