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Hey, I've got a webcomic! I've been doing it since the turn of the century (I love saying that) and I've been doing it in pretty much an echo chamber all that time. Was hoping I could get some good ol' fashioned criticism. It's at bobned.com. Since I've been doing it for a decade and a half, the style and tone have varied wildly throughout. Just recently I started doing the comic 100% digitally with a WACOM tablet in PhotoShop and I'm wondering if it's paying off. Thanks to this thread I'm pretty keen on trying out that Manga Studio program, though.
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Feb 27, 2014 05:25
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I only had time for a quick look, but I'd suggest you tighten the kerning on your font. The letters are super spaced out, and while it's not unreadable, it's kind of intimidating because my mind tells me that I'll have to start riddling it all out. Push them together a little and see if the legibility gets better.
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Feb 27, 2014 16:38
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I spent most of yesterday drawing brick walls. The street I drew is pretty barren looking, because I spent so much time on getting the storefronts to look right, that I forgot to add other people, cars, street signs or plants. Oh well, next page I will remember to leave space for all that stuff.
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Feb 27, 2014 16:48
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John Liver posted:I'm thinking about finally starting my own webcomic in the next few weeks, after brewing on it for about a year and a half. I have some buffers made and I think I'll be updating about once a week. I'll probably need to buy my own domain name, but I have some money saved up and know a good hosting company. Does anyone have any other advice for someone just starting out? Be sure to post it when you've got it up. I recommend having a print version of your comic in mind, even if it's only a booklet containing parts of a story, so that you can talk to people in real life and get them hooked on your comic via the magic of knowing who you are in person and seeing it as a 'finished' product.
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Feb 27, 2014 23:06
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Plankhandles posted:I only had time for a quick look, but I'd suggest you tighten the kerning on your font. The letters are super spaced out, and while it's not unreadable, it's kind of intimidating because my mind tells me that I'll have to start riddling it all out. Push them together a little and see if the legibility gets better. Ha! I didn't even know you could adjust the kerning in PhotoShop (because apparently I'm stupid)! Well, that does look a whole lot better. Thanks! EDIT: Latest comic shows the changes. Phylodox fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Feb 28, 2014 |
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Feb 27, 2014 23:22
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  Greetings~ I recently drew these two pictures, to try and get motivated about webcomic and because I wanted to try something unfamiliar with my art. I do have a webcomic but I do not think I am ready to post it here I drew with markers and ink, and tried to color it by watered down acrylics. I didn't really end up looking so good, so I went on photoshop and painted the skin there. She is a ladybug by the way if you are wondering.
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Mar 1, 2014 05:07
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Can we have some more scanner talk? Went to scan stuff today (just some inked drawings) and no matter what I do the lines always came out splotchy, requiring tons of clean up in Photoshop. I'm scanning at 1200 dpi normal paper, rather thick lines. Tried some tips from earlier.
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Mar 1, 2014 05:11
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Evil Vin posted:Can we have some more scanner talk? Went to scan stuff today (just some inked drawings) and no matter what I do the lines always came out splotchy, requiring tons of clean up in Photoshop. I'm scanning at 1200 dpi normal paper, rather thick lines. Tried some tips from earlier. What setting are you scanning on? Color, greyscale, or black/white? Do you have a sample of the unedited drawing? This is kind of natural, though. Scanning at a high resolution is the equivalent of holding a magnifying glass up to the paper. Did you try reducing it to web viewing size before and/or after clean up?
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Mar 1, 2014 05:23
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al-azad posted:What setting are you scanning on? Color, greyscale, or black/white? Do you have a sample of the unedited drawing? I assumed black and white would be best for just some line work. Linked for huge. Attempted to try your method of flipping and then using auto-align but it kind of made the picture look out of focus. Haven't attempted to shrink the page down yet since I want mess with coloring it first.
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Mar 1, 2014 06:06
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Evil Vin posted:I assumed black and white would be best for just some line work. Linked for huge. Attempted to try your method of flipping and then using auto-align but it kind of made the picture look out of focus. Are you scanning it in bitmap? Cause that's the kind of jaggyness I get when I scan poo poo in bitmap, aka a thing you usually shouldn't do. If you are in bitmap, change it to greyscale and remove pencils/dirtiness with the levels sliders.
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Mar 1, 2014 06:10
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Ruin Completely posted:Are you scanning it in bitmap? Cause that's the kind of jaggyness I get when I scan poo poo in bitmap, aka a thing you usually shouldn't do. If you are in bitmap, change it to greyscale and remove pencils/dirtiness with the levels sliders. I really didn't mess with the settings other than scanning it in as black and white. I've swapped it to greyscale when I entered photoshop, but messing with the levels really didn't do anything there. Neither the scanner or the original image are available to me at the moment so I can't really reattempt anything at the moment.
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Mar 1, 2014 06:37
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Evil Vin posted:I really didn't mess with the settings other than scanning it in as black and white. I've swapped it to greyscale when I entered photoshop, but messing with the levels really didn't do anything there. Neither the scanner or the original image are available to me at the moment so I can't really reattempt anything at the moment. Changing it to greyscale later won't do anything to fix your problem. If you scan it in as b/w bitmap the scanner will filter out all the mid tones since black and white means ONLY pure black and pure white, and since even sharpies have some amount of softness at the edges it'll go from a tapered edge to a best fit line of where the pure black ends, ending in what you have there. Change the mode on the scanner to greyscale next time you have the chance and do the clean up afterwards rather than trying to let the scanner do it for you, cause it's not good at it.
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Mar 1, 2014 06:48
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Evil Vin posted:I assumed black and white would be best for just some line work. Linked for huge. Attempted to try your method of flipping and then using auto-align but it kind of made the picture look out of focus. My process is for colored work where the scanner creates shadows on the page. You won't see any results with black/white. I will tell you that what you're getting is completely normal. Your ink has a lot of feathering and the scanner is picking up a lot of "dirt" off the page. There's nothing you can do about it no matter how clean your inks are or how well you erase. No matter what you do if you work traditionally you're going to have to clean up the page. As far as grayscale scanning, I only recommend it if you're not coloring digitally. If you want to color, black/white (or bitmap, whatever the scanner calls it) is the way to go. Remember, when you reduce the image it's going to look far better than you expect. That's my experience with it, experiment with both and see what you're comfortable with but I want the ink work isolated from the get go.  Hope you don't mind that I colored it. If I put more time into it I would have cleaned up stray lines. Thin lines, like what you have around the suit's seam, are very difficult to reproduce. The trick is to use the magic wand select tool then select > modify > expand 2-4 pixels, delete. This will prevent the lines from almost evaporating once they're shrunk and anti-aliasing takes over. al-azad fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Mar 1, 2014 |
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Mar 1, 2014 07:11
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al-azad posted:My process is for colored work where the scanner creates shadows on the page. You won't see any results with black/white. Oh my god, that's beautiful I won't mind if you don't mind me stealing some of your color choices. Here's my progress in clean up. 
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Mar 1, 2014 08:05
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Just a quick aside, that's a great character design so far.
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Mar 1, 2014 16:35
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al-azad posted:As far as grayscale scanning, I only recommend it if you're not coloring digitally. If you want to color, black/white (or bitmap, whatever the scanner calls it) is the way to go. Essentially, if you scan in black-and-white, the scanner scans in grayscale and then threshholds the values (turning every grey value to either black or white). Scanning in greyscale at a minimum lets you treshhold it yourself after you've scanned it, which is always going to be more flexible (although the image will be larger) and is never going to give you worse results. Plus it gives you the option to only threshhold after doing some other cleanup. So there's really no good reason to scan in black & white (except for storage size).
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Mar 1, 2014 17:19
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nothings posted:Essentially, if you scan in black-and-white, the scanner scans in grayscale and then threshholds the values (turning every grey value to either black or white). You have to separate the line art from the paper texture regardless and that threshold setting is something you have little control over. If anything you'll end up with the same results but with more work on your part.
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Mar 1, 2014 17:47
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TheGreekOwl posted:
Hey I remember seeing these! I'd definitely be interested in seeing more of your work in the future, whenever you feel confident enough to share!
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Mar 1, 2014 17:54
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nikochansan posted:Hey I remember seeing these! I'd definitely be interested in seeing more of your work in the future, whenever you feel confident enough to share! Ah yes, I forgot to mention those were drawn for a 4chan thread on webcomics, that I tried to also share for people. Also, I am lurking all around and I don't seem to notice that there aren't a lot of tutorials on how to do lettering and speech bubbles together. I don't mean digitally, I don't do anything digitally so its kinda hard for me to work with speech bubbles, stracture them and then add the dialogue in without it ruining the picture.  This is yesterday's practise on my lettering, I am still working on today's practice. I found an old caligraphy pamplhet that has different exercises and I try to practise with it commonly. Another exercise I find helps is to find a comic page you like with dialogue and try to copy (not trace) the actual comic. This is done in the context of a study of course, don't take credit for the image.
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Mar 1, 2014 18:20
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Is your first language Greek? That's some really nice lettering, whatever the alphabet.
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Mar 1, 2014 18:36
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chthonic bell posted:Is your first language Greek? That's some really nice lettering, whatever the alphabet. Yes, my first language is Greek, as I am of Greek descent and living currently in Greece. Incidently, I do plan on having two versions of my webcomic, one written in Greek and one written in English.
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Mar 1, 2014 19:31
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I considered offering my comic both in Russian and English, but my Russian has gotten so abysmal that I don't dare. Sorry for getting nosy, I'm just kind of used to most webcomic people being Anglophones, so seeing a non-Latin alphabet was surprising. 
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Mar 1, 2014 19:48
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I have no idea how to handle languages in my comic. It has a very multilingual cast and most of them wouldn't be speaking English in private scenes. I feel that I ought to at least try to get translations - I asked my friends about it and they all said that just putting <> marks around the dialogue with a footnote saying what language it's actually in would be tacky and silly-looking, and I agree - but most of them are languages that I don't speak and that I don't know any speakers of. I don't know if I could find trustworthy translators online who aren't too expensive for me and wouldn't make all the dialogue about dongs (granted, this would probably improve the comic) and even if I could, I'm not sure if it's worth the effort for what probably amounts to about 200 words of dialogue per language. I'm guessing plenty of you have handled a multilingual cast before. How do you do it? If you just take the symbols + footnote approach, have you had any negative feedback about it?
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Mar 1, 2014 21:26
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Avshalom posted:I have no idea how to handle languages in my comic. It has a very multilingual cast and most of them wouldn't be speaking English in private scenes. I feel that I ought to at least try to get translations - I asked my friends about it and they all said that just putting <> marks around the dialogue with a footnote saying what language it's actually in would be tacky and silly-looking, and I agree - but most of them are languages that I don't speak and that I don't know any speakers of. I don't know if I could find trustworthy translators online who aren't too expensive for me and wouldn't make all the dialogue about dongs (granted, this would probably improve the comic) and even if I could, I'm not sure if it's worth the effort for what probably amounts to about 200 words of dialogue per language. This is something I'll eventually be negotiating as well, along with the puzzle of implying that certain different stories are told or played out in different languages. I've decided to take an approach copied from Asterix comics, where language changes are differentiated by heavily stylised fonts.  This works for me because I play around with fonts a lot in my comic anyway, but I think it's generally a fairly intuitive way to get around the problem.
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Mar 1, 2014 21:38
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Yeah, that's what I plan on doing -- the cast of the thing I'm working on is multilingual and it gets a bit tricky handling characters who are bilingual and codeswitch, as well as characters who speak one language with friends and at work and a different one at home.
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Mar 1, 2014 21:40
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I'm getting deja vu, I think I've actually asked this question here before.  Sorry, everyone, I only just woke up.
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Mar 1, 2014 21:42
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sweeperbravo posted:Just a quick aside, that's a great character design so far. Thank you, our main artist does some really great work. (I feel embarrassed posting it like I'm taking credit for it. I do writing, concept sketches, coloring, clean up, among other things ) I'll post another character later when I'm done cleaning it up.
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Mar 1, 2014 21:48
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Kismet posted:This is something I'll eventually be negotiating as well, along with the puzzle of implying that certain different stories are told or played out in different languages. I've decided to take an approach copied from Asterix comics, where language changes are differentiated by heavily stylised fonts. I might be pointing out the obvious, but that's a Gothic font, so it's a joke. But changing fonts can work. Paranatural is currently doing a thing where these creatures talk in 'skulls', it's pretty great. I originally had different languages within my comic, but I decided to move away from that (at least in dialogue) unless it served an important narrative purpose. I didn't want to develop my own constructed languages, and decided to base the languages on actual languages that I knew about. My reasoning was you hear people speak in real languages in fiction anyway, out of necessity, I wanted to extend that rule further into the world. I made a rule for myself, where I'd try to actively avoid inventing any word/phrase, and instead have an etymological reasoning behind every fictional concept/noun in my story. I guess I was trying to have a transliteration for everything, instead of like, inventing Elvish. I try to leave hints and smatterings of this in the backgrounds of my story, you'll see signs of English, Chinese, Latin, Greek, French...depending on the location/culture, but I also really wanted to avoid a sort of 1:1 approximation of a fantasy culture with actual earth cultures. I didn't want to do the "This is Fantasy Not-China, and this is Fantasy Not-France!" stuff. Anyway, I put a lot of thinking behind something that just ended up being basically background flavor, and I'm not sure if people would even know or care about that sort of reasoning. It was fun for me though, so I guess you should just do whatever you might enjoy, and won't obstruct you telling your story the way you want to. hell astro course fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Mar 1, 2014 |
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Mar 1, 2014 21:48
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My worldbuilding definitely suffers from fantasy-counterpartitis, but I've taken great care to at least reach in for the obscure historical roots. So while there's a fantasy Not-Russia, it's Kievan Rus' crossed with 1920s USSR and not, say, tsarist Russia or Cold War USSR.
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Mar 1, 2014 22:38
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Space-Bird posted:I might be pointing out the obvious, but that's a Gothic font, so it's a joke. But changing fonts can work. Oh yeah, Asterix is kind of a critical mass of puns at all times regardless, but they also do the font thing for e.g. Greeks, Celts, Vikings, Romans etc. Now that you point it out, I think this panel is from Asterix the Gaul or one of the other very early volumes, so I wonder if it started as a pun and then they just ran with it. e: Avshalom posted:you can make up any old poo poo in a conlang and nobody will ever know don't toy with me, kid. 
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Mar 1, 2014 23:20
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Thanks guys! I'll play around with fonts and see how that goes - I hand-letter, so hopefully that will give me a bit more freedom. Honestly I think finding a translation for each bit of non-English dialogue would be more effort than the comic's worth, especially as there are a few languages that are very difficult to find a willing translator for. (Mandarin? Easy. Turkish? A little harder. Khorakhane Romanes? Uhhh...) It would be so much easier if I'd just set it in an alternate world, you can make up any old poo poo in a conlang and nobody will ever know. v v
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Mar 1, 2014 23:33
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Serious suggestion: ask your friends if they know anyone who can help. I know, or know friends of people who know, speakers of a lot of obscure languages.
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Mar 2, 2014 00:05
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chthonic bell posted:Serious suggestion: ask your friends if they know anyone who can help. I know, or know friends of people who know, speakers of a lot of obscure languages. Beyond that, lets be serious, you are on the internet. Go on any IRC channel thats decently populated and ask anybody if they speak any a specific language or if they know anybody who speaks said language. You will be suprised by the amount of people who know an obscure foreign language, or who know somebody who does. Then again, I only have tried this on generally well-known languages compared to where I live, (Eastern Europe mostly). I am not sure if you can find anybody who knows obscure languages that easilly.
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Mar 2, 2014 00:17
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Bringing back Manga Studio chat for a second, apparently Manga Studio EX 5 is the one-day-only SHELL SHOCKER  special on Newegg for $79.99. Found here.
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Mar 2, 2014 02:15
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Mirage posted:Bringing back Manga Studio chat for a second, apparently Manga Studio EX 5 is the one-day-only SHELL SHOCKER Snagged this, can't wait to construct my comic purely off of 3d wireframe anime models  .But seriously, I bought this and am excited, even if I'll have to buy a new set of Frenden brushes.
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Mar 2, 2014 05:21
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Avshalom posted:I'm guessing plenty of you have handled a multilingual cast before. How do you do it? If you just take the symbols + footnote approach, have you had any negative feedback about it? (Warning: there are bare titties involved in the linked comics so maybe don't check these at work or in front of Grandma.) I usually just end up using the cipher for Reliquary's not-lingua-franca language, since most of the time the current viewpoint character doesn't know it. When I did need to use a readable (to people who aren't into decryption) version, I just used the brackets and a different letter style. I don't really see a big problem with going with brackets and labels, myself. It's probably the least intrusive way of getting the information across quickly and easily. Though the Water Clock has a really clever workaround. (It was a little too subtle for me first readthrough, tho'.)
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Mar 2, 2014 05:29
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Oh man, going on about lettering, I was planning a short comic once to experiment with tons of different types of lettering to indicate tone and quality of voice and stuff I never really got around to it, though, it was just going to be a short comic that would expand on this even shorter comic I did in the past with the same characters  I did it around July of last year, it's kinda dumb looking back on it, but hey, I should be worried whenever I DON'T feel that way about old art
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Mar 2, 2014 08:41
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Avshalom posted:I have no idea how to handle languages in my comic. It has a very multilingual cast and most of them wouldn't be speaking English in private scenes. I feel that I ought to at least try to get translations - I asked my friends about it and they all said that just putting <> marks around the dialogue with a footnote saying what language it's actually in would be tacky and silly-looking, and I agree - but most of them are languages that I don't speak and that I don't know any speakers of. I don't know if I could find trustworthy translators online who aren't too expensive for me and wouldn't make all the dialogue about dongs (granted, this would probably improve the comic) and even if I could, I'm not sure if it's worth the effort for what probably amounts to about 200 words of dialogue per language. A little late to the conversation but I personally have never felt that the brackets are particularly tacky, though I do think the footnote is unnecessary. I think that as a comicker, if you decide to use brackets you could try using other (visual) context clues to let the reader know what language is being spoken. I agree with Space-Bird though that translating is probably unnecessary unless it is important to the narrative. On a visual level it's also kind of jarring and distracting if overused.
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Mar 3, 2014 08:46
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Is it bots that account for weirdness in your stats page? It looks like yesterday, I had 14 visitors and 118 hits, but that cam't be right. Is that just something that happens with webcomics? I can only presume that it's bots and I can ignore it. As far as foreign language in comics go, I guess you have to choose which is more important to the story, the readers being able to understand what the people on the page are saying or for speakers of that particular language to understand what the people on the page are saying. How important is it to the story to understand the dialogue? Nessa fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 16:44
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I'm having a similar problem with languages, in that twenty or so pages will be in Germany, and the other 60 or so in England, but I don't really want to bracket up nearly everything in those first pages since that'll look a bit weird, and I've not used any font/bubble tricks for German before- It's only been very small phrases, and I left it untranslated. Nessa: What stat program are you using? I get a lot of junk referrals popping on AWstats.
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Mar 3, 2014 16:55
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