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There's now a chatroom, #makingcomics on synIRC. If you've never used IRC before, just ask for help. This thread is for anything comic-making-related. Comics are a great marriage between prose and illustration and they have their own unique language and structure, I like comics a lot! This thread will be more skewed towards making webcomics, but most of the same stuff applies to print comics as well. More and more these days, independent comic artists are finding a good audience online, we're in a real upswing of comics as a medium. It's an exciting time! Previous Thread is Here How do I use this thread?
New Resources! Background and design tutorials from Twitter user Thomas Romaine. Lots of neat perspective tricks.   Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen: Geared more to film, but lots of stuff can be applied to comics, too. Random Resources scoured from the old thread. Comics: How to make a comic - An essential step by step guide from the very talented and successful creator of Lackadaisy Cats. From Heresiarch a bunch of stuff! Wally Wood's 22 Essential Panels  Books about comics: Scott McCloud - ignoring the early 2000s "the internet is the future" stuff, Making Comics and Understanding Comics are still two solid resources. Reinventing Comics is a bit more dated and probably just worth a library check-out, if that. Will Eisner How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way Random Art Posts from the old thread: The classic Tom & Jerry Line of Action  How to draw lively poses - Spongebob drawing tips from Nickelodeon  Expressions - An excellent primer on expressions from Tracy Butler of Lackadaisy Cats. The Phobs face tutorial. Coelasquid's How to Draw Beef, and other tutorials (maker of Manly Guys doing Manly Things, professional animator). OP is still a work in progress, feel free to complain about anything up there and submit OP stuff throughout the thread. Mercury Hat fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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May 24, 2015 01:34
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Back up your work, back up your work, holy poo poo back up your work.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 15:22 |
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 Goooon Comiiiiiiics! PM me or post in this thread to get your comic added to the post below Goon run comics! Some of these goons may have moved on, but their comics linger.                           Here are even more goon comics: Princess Rainblood - Operation Juicebox Dreamers - Nessa Latch Key Kingdom - psych Iothera - rincewind Monster Pulse GunnerKrigg Court - TeaSan - Has its own thread here. The Intrepid Girlbot - Snicket Sorcery 101 - KellHound The Dragon Doctors - Speedball Retired or not updating          Bobwhite by MagnoliaPearl untitled comic - Oldyogurt Name Removed - 0sn paltry achievements Little Blue Couch Girly (ended) - SuperHappy Templar, Arizona - DarthVersace Do you run a comic, and want to have your thumbnail added to this post? Just Post or PM me a 300 x 250 thumbnail that contains the name of the comic. Mercury Hat fucked around with this message at 12:49 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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May 24, 2015 01:35
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So I hear this is never gonna be made into a comic, but I think this belongs here anyway.
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May 24, 2015 02:12
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RIP Quetzal-Coital, you'll live on in a link at the top of the page.
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May 24, 2015 03:20
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Making comics is hard work, but drat if it doesn't feel fulfilling.
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May 24, 2015 04:47
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Just started this one. It's neat! And now I'm sad that it's apparently dead.
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May 24, 2015 07:17
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Ahh, thank you for the new thread. Really helpful. I couldn't resist helping myself to those Frenden brushes.
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May 24, 2015 13:58
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I went ahead and added an Imgur album with Thomas Romaine's stuff to the OP: Background and design tutorials from Twitter user Thomas Romaine. Lots of neat perspective tricks.
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May 24, 2015 14:27
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Here's a process GIF of a recent page. I really like how this one came out. 
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May 25, 2015 06:17
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That lighting is so lovely.
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May 25, 2015 13:17
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Oh flip, I love process gifs! More of these please, thread. Here's one for an older page of mine.
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May 25, 2015 21:48
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Kojiro posted:Oh flip, I love process gifs! More of these please, thread. Here's one for an older page of mine. What are those filters that you do before and after laying the shadows? Is it to give the whole page a more unified tone/palette?
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May 26, 2015 00:49
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SexyBlindfold posted:What are those filters that you do before and after laying the shadows? Is it to give the whole page a more unified tone/palette? The first is just me reducing the opacity of all colour layers to 90% to let the colour underneath show through a little, then there's a texture (usually an old paper type one) laid under the characters and over the backgrounds. And yeah, it's a quick and dirty way to set a tone!
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May 26, 2015 01:30
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neonnoodle posted:That lighting is so lovely. Thanks, I'm glad people are enjoying it.
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May 26, 2015 01:49
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Hello all! I'm studying to be a colorist and was hoping for a critique.  Pencils from the Greg Capullo. Inks by Rexbegonia. My professor told me, if I want to study it, I have to practice on others lineart. So, I am! John Liver posted:Thanks, I'm glad people are enjoying it. I'm a fan of your work! I just found El Indon on Tumblr last week, so I'm still reading. It's great! Viga fucked around with this message at 06:36 on May 26, 2015 |
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May 26, 2015 06:33
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I make A Ghost Story and the new thread is a good start to trying to worm my way into discussions instead of lurking from the sidelines. Right now, I'm looking for resources other than Scott McCloud for paneling and framing panels! I'm tired of winging it+feel like it need to put more thought into how I set things up.
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May 26, 2015 10:17
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If you're looking to punch up your stuff with more action, you'll probably have good luck with Draw Comics the Marvel Way as well as the DC equivalent The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics. Sometimes public libraries have a copy of one or both or you can probably get them cheap secondhand on amazon or half.com.
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May 26, 2015 11:31
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Viga posted:Hello all! I'm studying to be a colorist and was hoping for a critique. Very nice colour choices, though I'm a sucker for warm scenes like this. A few things though.... I would warm up the first panel a bit. The dark blue used for the background is drawing a lot of attention because it's the only cold colour on the page. It could still work if you balanced the page out with more cool shadows. Colour the lips. Even if they aren't wearing lipstick, human lips are still going to be a slightly darker shade than their skin. Push your shadows. I know you're just getting started, and I used to have the same problem, but try to make your shadows darker, so the page looks less flat. It's okay to put more focus on colour choices first, but try to work with your shadows, and make sure those shadows don't become too saturated. The shadows for this scene should be somewhat purpley blue to contrast with the warm sunlight. I would recommend putting a lot of side shadow on the girl in panel 4 to separate her more from the two characters in the background. Keep the background warm and the foreground a bit cooler. Same goes for panel 2. The girl's head and shoulders kind of blend into the background. Play with it a little to push her into her own plane. Don't be afraid of gradients. Even if you're not going for a super rendered look, a simple gradient can do a lot for a scene with this kind of lighting. Lastly, pay attention to the inking. A lot of lighting direction comes from the inks, rather than the script. In panel 3, you are actively going against the inks. See all that black ink by the dude's feet? Those are the shadows of the boxes, meaning that the light source in that panel is coming from the left side, whereas you have coloured it as coming from the bottom right. That could only mean that the primary light source it not coming from the windows after all. Maybe this isn't meant to be a sunset/sunrise scene in the first place. Also, for help with breaking up planes, here's a great breakdown by colourist Dave McCaig. http://www.dave-co.com/gutterzombie/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11966 The Gutterzombie site isn't as active as it used to be, but you can still find some good tutorials on there.  I hope that helps! Nessa fucked around with this message at 16:29 on May 26, 2015 |
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May 26, 2015 16:18
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Abyssal Squid posted:So I hear this is never gonna be made into a comic, but I think this belongs here anyway. Rethy posted:RIP Quetzal-Coital, you'll live on in a link at the top of the page. If I'm remembered for nothing else I hope its these.
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May 27, 2015 01:20
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I had this question on Tumblr, figured this would be a good thread to repost it.  So I was going to answer this short and sweet, but it became something complex and I feel like other people might as well read it. There’s an old story that I don’t think I have anything left of … I wrote it in high school, it was called Sands of God. It was meant to be a sort of tough farce, an unforgiving slam on the kind of lame, cheap paperback fantasy that I used to get from book fairs and discount shops. The idea was that it would be a fantasy novel set within a bad fantasy novel, the latest in a long-running series by a fictional author. And at some point during the story, this fictional author would die, and his creations would be left adrift, forced to continue the story without his guidance. It was a really intriguing concept that I made an awful lot of supplemental material for - plotted chapters, designed characters, even charted out paths for a sequel. I never wrote a word of it. The setting was vast and interesting, I just never made a narrative. Didn’t even start. Writing up your own fictional universe feels like a massive undertaking because, more often than not, it is. Even short half-issue scripts can be a huge job because you need to pick over details again and again to make sure what someone says isn’t out of character, or that you didn’t forget that visual detail from Chapter 2, or you didn’t forget what shade of orange Roth was. And because it’s so much work, one logical strategy is to hash out absolutely everything in the setting - the “worldbuilding,” as some call it. Does this world have the same physics as our real world does? What’s the map of this planet look like? What languages do the people speak? What ethnicities do they have? What are the names of towns, cities, kings, criminals, gods, food, animals? This is a very, very enjoyable part of writing fiction. Weird and wild settings are insanely fun to write up, and are the color and flavor of every story… but they’re not the story, now are they? Worldbuilding is fun to detail, but that’s all it is - detail. In writing El Indon, I wanted to make drat sure I didn’t fall into that same pothole. So I outlined the narrative arc first - crudely, superficially - and fleshed out from there. Pages and pages of copy. Then I did a ton of trimming. Whole characters vanished, came back, were renamed, combined. And now, the ending is decided, and written. I even like it a little. So now my document looks like this:   The “meaty” outline of El Indon is about 70-75 pages of single-spaced copy. On a good day. The comic so far has covered about 12 of those pages. A lot more is gonna be cut out from here, but make no mistake, this story I’m writing and drawing is … well, it’s gonna take a while. And I’d rather finish it before I keel over and die, so I’m trying to optimize it as best I can. My biggest point to new comic writers is this: keep it moving forward. You need to keep brevity and efficiency in mind. Remember, every page you type is a page you have to draw, and color, and shade, and format correctly. Every single one. It really helps to know where your trail ends, too - all narratives end, and one doesn’t embark on a journey without an idea of where they’re going. Now I’m not saying to rush through your story - God knows, you and the reader want to enjoy the time you’re spending here. But know where you’re headed, and make sure you get there.
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May 27, 2015 04:15
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Winging usually works better for me than detailing everything in advance. Like, have a general plan, but let that plan be flexible. The thing about comics is that since you have to do each page at a time you may find the characters subtly evolving even as you draw them, so you may wind up with things happening you never thought about, and usually for the better.
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May 27, 2015 04:25
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yeah sometimes my male characters will subtly start growing boobs and I'm like wow, what a happy surprise!
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May 27, 2015 06:41
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That's a different kind of narrative climax if ya know what I'm sayin
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May 27, 2015 10:20
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My viewpoint is if it's directly important to the story, you should have an idea of how it works. If you're figuring out the past millenia of conflict between your elves and trolls and your story is about a kobold running a coffee shop you might have gotten carried away. The most important thing of writing a story or drawing a comic, in my view, is to actually draw or write it. It's great if, after five years, you're happy with a pile of character designs and set pieces, but if the only way people can appreciate your story is to browse a wiki or your dA art gallery, that's not really a story. JRR Tolkien didn't publish the Silmarillion first, after all.
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May 27, 2015 18:01
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World building is fun, and there's nothing wrong with doing so for the sake of itself, but when you're making one specifically for telling a story you've got to take a step back and think of what you really want to accomplish and what kind of world will allow you to tell a story you'll enjoy telling. After a while things are clear enough that you can start asking what other interesting stories the world allows you to tell, and it becomes kinda self-regulating. One project I'm eager to work on down the line started as a melodramatic vampire vs werewolves thing in my young teens. Between that and me becoming an old teen, I tore down the entire plot and lore several times until all that's left is like, three characters and a monster concept. Even if the lore I cemented was cool in my 13-year-old head, I became a better writer and couldn't make anything remotely interesting and entertaining out of it! This is kinda a specific example, but I think the general idea of building the background to accommodate your personal strengths, or at least the skills you want to develop, is important to keep in the back of your mind before you really commit to something. Rethy fucked around with this message at 19:48 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 19:37
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Another problem with excessive worldbuilding, I find, is that it makes you want to rush your storytelling to get to the good parts, when the good parts in your head are never that good, and never as important as the meat and potatoes stuff you are currently doing.
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May 27, 2015 20:07
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Fangz posted:Another problem with excessive worldbuilding, I find, is that it makes you want to rush your storytelling to get to the good parts, when the good parts in your head are never that good, and never as important as the meat and potatoes stuff you are currently doing. This is a really good point. I've seen a bunch of people get caught up in how clever a part of their worldbuilding is, but it's like one of those things that most readers aren't going to care about unless it actually is part of the story. Kinda like folks who get really involved in crafting a wiki or extras/characters/world/about pages for their comics or making filler all the time, to the point where there's more "supplemental material" than actual story. I like to read people's thoughts on worldbuilding because I personally hate doing it and as a result only ever write realistic fiction. A few times I've had an idea for a more fantastical story and have given up after getting maybe a few paragraphs into it because I realized the amount of (to me, unenjoyable) poo poo I'd have to create to actually support the story. Hell, a few years ago I got around to making a map of the town where my comic started off taking place and that alone, while rewarding, was really strenuous. I'm glad I'm not representative of all or probably even the majority of writers because I've seen people do really cool things with worldbuilding. I can't appreciate it with the depth that someone more excited about it would be able to do, but good worldbuilding only makes a story better.
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May 27, 2015 20:54
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The "A Softer World" crew is doing an AMA, and said this about ending the series: ( bolding mine )quote:But the more we talked about it, the more actual consideration we gave it. We don't know very many people who have stopped their comics. It seems like the expectation is just that it'll go on forever. And when we thought about the comic like that - like something that we would just keep doing and doing, it really didn't seem so appealing. We didn't know many comics that had stopped, but we could both name a ton that had stopped being GOOD, or where the creator was clearly bored of it and just phoning the comics in out of habit and as a job. And we did not want that. We didn't want to just keep doing the comic out of habit or for money.
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May 27, 2015 21:03
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Remember that whole idea that somehow people would figure out a way to monetize internet content into a living wage? Yeah didn't happen
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May 27, 2015 21:15
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neonnoodle posted:Remember that whole idea that somehow people would figure out a way to monetize internet content into a living wage? Thats not totally true, but its an awful lot like any other small business or music group or art form. Sometimes, even if you're good, its just not enough. Have a backup plan.
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May 27, 2015 21:51
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For anyone using Gimp for Windows, make sure to get it from their official site. The devs put out a warning that Sourceforge is bundling it with ads or something.quote:It appears that +SourceForge took over the control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account and is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP. They also locked out original owner of the account, Jernej Simončič, who has been building the Windows versions of GIMP for our project for years.
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May 27, 2015 22:04
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sometimes people will pay you a ridiculous amount of money for little to no content, like Aaron Diaz. but that's pretty rare and Diaz still complains about it like a huge baby.
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May 27, 2015 22:06
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Wasn't A Softer World poetry superimposed over photographs? Not claiming to know their business model but it always seemed like a comic that did not come from a place of wanting to have a business model.
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May 27, 2015 22:17
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I watched Stripped last night, and A Softer World was one of the featured comics. The last act was about the digital revolution and the bright future of web comics. The last act seemed detached from reality, because the only people making a "living" doing webcomics are: 1) Living in a country with universal healthcare/ actual social safety nets 2) In literal poverty 3) Producing lowest common denominator product for over a decade 4) Yeah Aaron Diaz and the Penny Arcade guys too If you count people who are recruited out of webcomics for other fields, the picture gets a little better. But they're not making a living at webcomics. Edit: I don't mean to be so bleak. But literally the only reason to draw comics is because you love to. It's enough of a reason, but let's not pretend there's a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. thousandcranes fucked around with this message at 03:34 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 03:30
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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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thousandcranes posted:Edit: I don't mean to be so bleak. But literally the only reason to draw comics is because you love to. It's enough of a reason, but let's not pretend there's a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. The main reason I draw my comic (other than I think it will be a fun story) is for constant, regular art practice. Self improvement is kind of an obsession of mine, and new pages are a great way to prune the weaknesses out of my artistic skills. Also I want to get rich doing it, but we'll see how that goes.
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May 28, 2015 07:13
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I drew comics because someone paid me to draw comics, it owned.
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May 28, 2015 15:45
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thousandcranes posted:I watched Stripped last night, and A Softer World was one of the featured comics. The last act was about the digital revolution and the bright future of web comics. There was also kind of the weird narrative where a bunch of people they interviewed said their comics "blew up overnight," which, if it was ever a common thing , basically never ever happens in The Year Of Our Lord 2015 E: Does anyone know if the supplementary interviews were....better? They omitted a lot of interviews they advertised by folks who would probably know what they were talking about. FunkyAl fucked around with this message at 22:48 on May 30, 2015 |
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May 30, 2015 22:40
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June is officially unofficially NaNoMango part 2! Nanomango is the comic counterpart to Nanowrimo, but less stringent in the "rules".
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May 30, 2015 22:50
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thousandcranes posted:I watched Stripped last night, and A Softer World was one of the featured comics. The last act was about the digital revolution and the bright future of web comics. Stripped was before patreon.
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May 30, 2015 22:54
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