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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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Fangz posted:I have recently discovered Manga Studio's Gradient Map Correction Layers, and it's pretty amazing. Clip Studio Paint is used for print work *a lot* here in grorious 日本, and I only ever see this used in a very glaringly obvious way when works that were originally B&W printed get fresh reprints with color pages. I agree with Reiley, shading and coloring are different skills entirely, being good at one does not equate to being good at the other, and you will be better at art if you treat them like different things. Of course, the reason why "Colorist" is a profession in industry is because many artists aren't, so, ymmv.
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Jan 6, 2016 09:12
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Is there an ETA on Sai 2? I swear I've tried to look more into it.
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Jan 6, 2016 14:15
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Reiley posted: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. I mainly see this as a way of prototyping a bunch of different colour schemes and tweaking things repeatedly without having to repaint each time. Which I think it's very powerful for - a nice alternative to use hue/saturation adjustments, anyway. It's also much nicer than multiply layers etc because the mapping of grey to colour does not have to be linear. If you can put together a rough colour sketch for a scene or object, you can use that to build your palette with eyedropper, which is a lot more convenient than trying to figure out what colours work together purely in your head. It wouldn't work for any monochrome image, which is probably why it isn't useful for manga. Note that the image I used didn't have much pure whites in it. Whereas manga is usually purely black and white. Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 14:36
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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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Reiley posted: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. I'm not really sure why this is a controversial argument suddenly. I'm not saying throw out colour theory, I am saything that this is an useful tool because you can see the effect of such theories on an image as a whole and experiment around with different choices and have a look at what it would look like immediately? Yeah, you might have some idea of complimentary colours, so you'd construct a gradient using a blue at one end and a red at another, toss it on your image and see if you like it. And then if you don't you can go back in and tweak the blue to be a bit more purple etc etc. There's not one single palette that would work for every image, there's some things you can't figure out until you actually see it and decide, gently caress, the blue in this image is really overpowering the mood I want to evoke. At least that's how I work. And no, the image you get out of this is not an endpoint for anything you want to put effort into, but it's an useful starting point. You'd go okay, this part needs reflected light, this part needs a bit more shadow, and so overpaint on a new layer. Or you just use this as a thumbnail sketch for your final image. The eyedropper helps then because your initial thumbnail acts as a palette, so you don't have to start again from the beginning on the colour wheel, you already know what your scene roughly looks like. I think you missed my point about manga artists. The other poster was talking about using the tool to naively colourise B&W manga art. Which is stupid, because B&W manga art are not value studies. I have no idea why you think eyedroppers are a crutch now, or somehow represent a lack of informed-ness in colour choices. If you want to do, say, the internally reflected light thing and have some warm saturated shadows to flesh, how else would you do that other than eyedropper your midtone skin colour, then adjust the colour a bit on the colour wheel to find the colour you need? Not using the tools on offer seems absurd.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:16
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One thing I did in coloring my comic was to load a golden-age CMYK swatch set into MS5 and use that limited palette, plus spot black. No screentones. The limitation makes for some interesting and helpful constraints that keep the colors somewhat harmonious and also keeps me from spending a zillion hours on tweaking colors.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:57
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I'm pretty good at making MS-Paint stuff; although I very rarely do, usually only doing so when I think of something transgressive to depict. Such as this charming little oddball from my collection: or this  My question is this: should I be doing this every month, with narratives, and will this make me internet famous*? *I mean, I'm already internet famous, but this could make me more so. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Somebody fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jan 9, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 13:51
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you forgot the ring on his finger!
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Jan 8, 2016 14:04
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fun hater posted:you forgot the ring on his finger! it's always the first thing I look for
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Jan 8, 2016 15:02
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BlitzkriegOfColour posted:My question is this: should I be doing this every month, with narratives, and will this make me internet famous*? Monthly updates are pretty hard to build an audience with if you're starting brand new. Weekly's about as low as I'd recommend, probably.
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Jan 9, 2016 00:41
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auspol invasion stop the boats
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Jan 9, 2016 02:11
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Anyone have any good video beginner guides for Manga Studio 5? I just picked it up after using PS my whole life and I know it has the capacity to be a lot more useful for what I want to do its just a tad confusing.
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Jan 10, 2016 08:05
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Hey there, part of an artist couple here. The other half just made this comic: http://vankingdom.tumblr.com/image/137010954762 Was wondering if anybody had any advice on where to take it?
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Jan 10, 2016 13:05
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The old man is right
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Jan 10, 2016 13:11
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In case anyone is interested, Udemy has a lot of its courses on sale for $10 till midnight tonight. I've been watching K Michael Russell's tutorials on youtube and sprung for his Coloring Comics, well worth the 
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Jan 12, 2016 00:01
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 Creating an ad is surprisingly fun.
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Jan 12, 2016 18:29
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Scribblehatch posted:
Thinking of ads, how familiar is the thread with the dark art of MARKETING? I'm putting together the Kickstarter proposal for the next Toronto Comics book, and I'm looking at web marketing. Basic social media outreach is a given, but I'm also looking at other angles. I've got a couple hundred bucks to spend on marketing, so my budget is pretty tiny. I've looked at: Hiveworks: Minimum budget is $1,000. Nope. Reddit: All Reddit ads are 1000 views for $0.75. They can be targeted to specific subreddits - in this case, r/toronto, r/canada, maybe r/comics. That's for a sticky link at the top of a subreddit, and it doesn't stand out very much. Project Wonderful: Cost is complex, dependent on site traffic and banner size. We should select some comics with similar tones and try to run a 30-day campaign. Twitter: It's hard to pin down just exactly where your money vanished to. I did a tiny $25 Twitter campaign last year and got roughly zero clicks from it. Something Awful: $30 a month to add a banner to the rotation. There’s no way to track how many banners are currently in rotation, and the SA audience may not care about the book. Facebook: I've heard a lot of negative things.
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Jan 12, 2016 19:02
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I know literally nothing about marketing, but I'd love to hear how things work out for you.
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Jan 12, 2016 19:11
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Scribblehatch posted:
It really needs the values looking at to make it pop. It's so pale and neutral it almost blends into the background. The actual ad is great though, I'd click through on that if it wasn't already on my read list.
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Jan 12, 2016 19:30
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 Cheers! I think that did it.
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Jan 12, 2016 22:22
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Scribblehatch posted:
Improved, could go farther. Darken and saturate your title area more, see if that helps. I love the idea of playing with pastel hues on the illustration vs. big bright splashy colors on the typography, means it'll look good no matter if the website is light or dark. edit to respond to MARKETING! questions with what little I know: I tried Twitter ads to try and drum up more followers and hated the interactions I got with it. People don't quite understand that ANYbody can buy ads on Twitter so it's easy for them to dehumanize you. My impression of Twitter is that the ads are great for getting people to follow your Twitter, but clicks out aren't as good. Facebook ads, on that one I had a $50 credit so I just used it to jumpstart my comic's Facebook page. The accounts that followed were by and large non-interactive so I suspect there are bots that come in when you pay for them. HOWEVER, I've found that sharing posts from my page to groups that are amenable to them (comics, art, dinosaur groups) gets a lot of great interactions and followers. I think the biggest key for an event like a Kickstarter is to get a giant burst of click traffic, rather than views, so for more grassroots stuff you might try looking into Thunderclap (https://www.thunderclap.it/) and getting volunteers to spread the word on their social media all at once. I've heard that Hiveworks is actually well worth the cost for such an event. But yeah $1k is a lot. I tried Project Wonderful but it was so much work...I was spending hours obsessing over freebie site selections, and it was a little bit addictive and distracting. I dunno if you live near a big city but a lot of kickstarters I see succeeding in the $15k-$20k range actually went out and pitched to people in the field in person. I know this because I've seen the comments on Meetups thanking people for listening to the kickstarter pitch. I also got solicited via email for a lot of kickstarters when I had the means to go out and network like a crazy person. Come to think of it an email mailing list is probably one of the best things you can do because people tend to drop social media accounts but rarely discard email addresses, a few people who have fledgling small businesses swear by mailing lists. ANYWAY yeah there's a reason Marketing people get the big bucks, that's some arcane witchcraft going on there. GreatJob fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 13, 2016 02:10
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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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Hey guys! Is it okay to promote contests for your comic in this thread? To celebrate a new year (the 6th since starting my strip!) I've launched another little Fan Art contest. The number of prizes given away scales to the number of people who enter... and if you ever wanted one of the infamous Rusty the rust monster plushes (survivors of a near brush with legal death), this might be the last chance, as supplies are running low. Check out the rules for the Rusty & Co. Fan Art Contest #2! (And here are the totally adorbs entries from the past contest!)
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Jan 13, 2016 05:52
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Last month I finally took the dive and started a comic. I've made little comedy ones before, but this is like ... The Big One. And phew, it's hard. There's a part in the main post here that says think how many pages you can do per week and then lop at least one page off and I totally understand that now. I don't understand how some people like Blindsprings manage to put out three pages a week! I'd die. A question from a comic making newbie. Did you guys have some serious art shifts in the beginnings of your comic? I've only got up three 'real' pages (I suppose five if you count the cover and chapter cover pages) but every time I start a new page I seem to find a better way of doing a thing and I feel like even in that short time the pages have improved noticeably. I still have a massively long way to go and lots to learn, but I guess for now I'm just settling in and trying to find my own rhythm? I feel like such a noob in comparison with everyone else's work.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:17
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Operation Juicebox posted:A question from a comic making newbie. Did you guys have some serious art shifts in the beginnings of your comic? I've only got up three 'real' pages (I suppose five if you count the cover and chapter cover pages) but every time I start a new page I seem to find a better way of doing a thing and I feel like even in that short time the pages have improved noticeably. I still have a massively long way to go and lots to learn, but I guess for now I'm just settling in and trying to find my own rhythm? I feel like such a noob in comparison with everyone else's work. It's because the more you draw, the more you learn, and the more you show that AS you draw. It was one of the main things that made me stop working on my old comic- I was working in a certain style and finally reached my limits with it, like I wanted it to be more expressive and have more potential for drama than it did. So I took a few years working on my current comic and going through different styles before I settled on what I do now. In those years I also wrestled a lot with what I wanted to do with the comic from a narrative perspective, so all those early chapters wound up getting deleted/removed from the canon storyline when I finally had things pretty well founded later. My oldest pages in my comic that survived the culling are from 12/2009. For me changes in the art aren't really noticeable on a page-by-page level but you can see it at the beginnings and ends of chapters and following chapter breaks. But since this is your first time really starting in on a comic it's normal to have the art vary wildly on a more noticeable and condensed scale.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:59
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Operation Juicebox posted:Last month I finally took the dive and started a comic. I've made little comedy ones before, but this is like ... The Big One. And phew, it's hard. There's a part in the main post here that says think how many pages you can do per week and then lop at least one page off and I totally understand that now. I don't understand how some people like Blindsprings manage to put out three pages a week! I'd die. The way I look at it is to examine the things you weren't happy with in the page you just created and try to fix them in the form of another page. Got to accept that you'll be changing a lot, at least if have a will to improve. Lots of comics out there have been pretty much static in their artwork for better or worse (generally worse) so I'd rather see it change with every single page. The first thing I do whenever I decide to read a comic is to check the first three pages, then skip to the end and look at the art there to get some idea of how passionate the creator is about improving. Just keep in mind that it's better to accept the mistakes you made in the past and move on than to redraw the same pages over and over because you're improving.
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Jan 13, 2016 23:40
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I'm glad to hear that. One of the reasons I wanted to do this comic was to help myself improve. I figure I will be really happy if I can look at the first five or so pages in a year and cringe at how awful the art is. I think my biggest issue at the moment is transitioning. My last page felt a bit clanky in comparison to the page before it, really disconnected, like there should be a page between them, so I'm trying to double down on that for my next few pages. It's pretty fun so far. 
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Jan 14, 2016 00:37
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Every page is a chance to learn and experiment and add to your bag of tricks. Sometimes what you try works out, sometimes it doesn't. I did a broad recap of my art progress in 2015. I was pretty surprised that even when I thought I was doing alright for myself, I still had a lot of areas of improvement. It's not just the art, I've streamlined my process and figured out what worked for my needs. Anecdotally, I didn't see the most growth until I started averaging a page a day by the end of the year, but that's not fair to expect of a newer artist.
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Jan 14, 2016 00:40
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I've been out of the loop for a while, how is the webcomics scene these days. How are you people.
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Jan 14, 2016 06:21
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FunkyAl posted:I've been out of the loop for a while, how is the webcomics scene these days. How are you people. webcomics are over. we tried to call you!!
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Jan 14, 2016 06:38
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fun hater posted:webcomics are over. we tried to call you!! shoot!! i never got paid!
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Jan 14, 2016 06:40
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fun hater posted:webcomics are over. we tried to call you!! I actually read some articles that seemed to be claiming this a few weeks ago. Basically, the point that was made was that with the rise of mobile web and how a lot of peoples' only interactions or experiences with the web are through their mobile devices, webcomics are threatened as a medium because most just simply aren't formatted to be viewed on a mobile device. That, basically, webcomics are a relic of the desktop computer age and therefore doomed to obscurity after their brief heyday in the early 2000s. Thoughts?
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Jan 14, 2016 15:06
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DrSunshine posted:I actually read some articles that seemed to be claiming this a few weeks ago. Basically, the point that was made was that with the rise of mobile web and how a lot of peoples' only interactions or experiences with the web are through their mobile devices, webcomics are threatened as a medium because most just simply aren't formatted to be viewed on a mobile device. That, basically, webcomics are a relic of the desktop computer age and therefore doomed to obscurity after their brief heyday in the early 2000s. Thoughts? I think sometimes about going back through my archives and upscaling them somehow to look better on phones, either by manually enlarging all the text (which would be a pain in the rear end & would poo poo all over the art/composition), or by adding some kind of "zoom and drag" functionality (which I can't see be anything but annoying to use). Probably a better idea to cut my losses and focus on making new comics that look decent.
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Jan 14, 2016 16:00
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DrSunshine posted:I actually read some articles that seemed to be claiming this a few weeks ago. Basically, the point that was made was that with the rise of mobile web and how a lot of peoples' only interactions or experiences with the web are through their mobile devices, webcomics are threatened as a medium because most just simply aren't formatted to be viewed on a mobile device. That, basically, webcomics are a relic of the desktop computer age and therefore doomed to obscurity after their brief heyday in the early 2000s. Thoughts? That seems a bizarre argument to make. It's like saying the coming of CD-ROMs killed off videogames because most games of that era were distributed in 3.5in floppy disks.
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Jan 14, 2016 16:32
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Here's the articles I read: http://maxriffner.com/webcomics/the-sorry-state-of-mobile-webcomics/ http://webcomicdojo.com/post/38234416686/will-mobile-slowly-kill-the-webcomic-industry
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Jan 14, 2016 17:01
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Kind of a non-problem. Also, I can't say mobile traffic is exactly overwhelming my own site-
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Jan 14, 2016 17:05
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If my format of comic can be read on mobile, I'm confident just about all of you will be fine doing whatever.
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Jan 14, 2016 18:59
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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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Not to mention there's also been an up take in things like tablets which are practically tailor made for an archive binge.
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Jan 14, 2016 19:21
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