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smallmouth posted:Does anyone do their inking in Illustrator? Used to back before I had a tablet but ended up switching over to Photoshop, then Manga Studio as the process of inking in Illustrator and making it look good is really, really tedious. Illustrator in general I find isn't great for stuff that uses line (ironically enough) because it doesn't really allow you to vary the width of a single line without jumping through a lot of hoops. I feel like it would be better suited to simple, single colour, lineless illustrations than to anything with actual lines. Also after almost a year of doing nothing except writing I'm finally drawing comics again and want to shove this fact into the face of anyone within shouting distance... 
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Feb 15, 2016 03:28
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Squidster posted:We just opened up submissions for Toronto Comics Volume 4, so if you're in that tiny intersection of goons, creators and Toronto, give us a shout at: http://tocomix.com/?page=volume_four_submissions. Quick question for you regarding content submission guidelines: How tightly do submissions have to adhere to being set in Toronto? I have an idea for two submissions I'd like to bring to the pitch meeting next week but one of them takes place in a fictionalized version of a Toronto landmark rather than being explicitly set in the city itself. Would that potentially still make it eligible for inclusion or would I be better off sticking to something that is explicitly rather than implicitly set in Toronto?
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Jul 30, 2016 02:48
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Speaking of advertising oneself... I recently had a story featured in an online anthology (Not the most illustrious of accolades, I know, but it's something) and have been trying to get it out to as many people as possible. The people doing the anthology have been promoting it to some degree but I sort of want to do some stuff on my own to attract new readers. Been blasting links to it on social media, but I don't really have that many followers to begin with on those. Any other tips to advertise oneself? I'm always bad at it since I tend to feel self-conscious promoting my own work. Like I don't want to be "That Guy" who won't shut up about the thing he did (I said whilst being "That Guy" who won't shut up about a thing he did).
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Dec 9, 2016 00:49
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gmc9987 posted:Sometimes you have to be that guy, though. If you think your work is worth seeing, you gotta be visible so it gets seen - there's no real place where you can put work out there and have it instantly receive the popularity it deserves based on its quality, you have to be willing to yell about it and get attention. Have you submitted your work to any comic/webcomic focused blogs? There's a bunch out there, and some of them are pretty specifically tailored to niche media and creator types - if you fit into one of their categories, they would be more willing to run your submission or write a review of it. Thaaaaaat is a good point. I think I was feeling self conscious about using this thread for self-promotion since I know it's more supposed to be about mutual feedback and helping each other improve. But if people are cool with me sharing some more of my work on here you can download the anthology here. My entry is title "Oceans in the Sky: The Tomb". The rest of the magazine is really worth checking out: There's some really talented people featured in it who all worked super hard on their entries. I've also been posting samples to my Tumblr Also here are the first three pages of mine:    Feedback is always appreciated! The major thing I've gotten back that I need to improve for the next one is to add more detail to the backgrounds: They're passable at the moment but the type of story I'm trying to tell lends itself to more imaginative settings and I need to put a level of thought and detail into the backgrounds to reflect that. KingKalamari fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Dec 10, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2016 02:39
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Squidster posted:
Very late to reply but that sounds like fun and I just might check it out! Anywhere I can get more info on times and dates?
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Dec 27, 2016 01:52
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Alright, I think I've almost got enough content built up that very soon I'll be ready to actually start me one of them there fancy webcomics but there are a few things I was hoping to get some advice regarding:
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Feb 20, 2017 19:10
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Fangz posted:If your 'introduction' is going to take you two years to get through you need to stop and rethink. Well, calling the entire thing an "Introduction" might be a bit of a misnomer on my part. It's really more of the first Arc I guess? Basically I'm doing a "trapped in another world" type story with each chapter being about 20 pages long: I need one chapter to establish what the characters were doing beforehand and how they got to the other world One chapter of them getting their bearings in the other world and meeting up with another major character Two chapters for an introductory adventure where they build up a rapport with the new characters And one final chapter to tie up loose ends and set everything up for further adventures Now that I write it out like that I might be able to work it down to four or so instalments... Fangz posted:Can't you build up a buffer and release at a faster rate? 1/week is very slow for anything with story. I'm definitely planning to have a buffer regardless but my concern is that if I update more frequently than I can produce more material my buffer is going to get smaller and smaller before eventually vanishing. That's why I'm wondering if I might not be better off updating in chunks as opposed to on a weekly basis. Weekly just feels too slow but sticking to more than a once a week schedule feels like it might be beyond my capabilities at the moment...
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Feb 20, 2017 19:34
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Burkion posted:So I've recounted through these threads my quest to get a comic series made and picked up. I definitely agree that your new artist's style seems very well suited to the project from what you've told us. Tell them to watch their perspective a little in shots like the first panel since I think that things look a little off when comparing the elements in the upper right and bottom lefthand portions of the panel relative to one another. That said I greatly enjoy the monster designs and the level of detail your artist has put into them.
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Feb 20, 2017 20:39
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Squidster posted:TCAF is this weekend! Do we have any other thread folks hitting up the show? We're going to be at table 213, on the second floor near the stairs. Come say hi! I will definitely be there! Got one of my comics printed up to hand out to people and everything (Cover is by a friend of mine)! 
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May 13, 2017 01:46
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Well, after several months of work, numerous revisions and drafts and at least one major equipment failure I've finally got the comic script I've been working on in a polished enough state that I'm ready to share it with strangers on the internet for feedback. Please find linked one (1) comic script in Google Doc format for the perusal of anyone with too much free time on heir hands Commenting is on so feel free to leave any feedback, witticisms or general ribaldry you like. One thing to note is that I'm planning on drawing this myself so the panel descriptions have been left at a minimum.
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Dec 26, 2017 19:49
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punk rebel ecks posted:Okay. Here is what I have so far. After a quick read through I think one of the major things you should focus on going forward is thinking about how to break the script up into panels and giving some thought as to how this is going to visually read on the page. Dialogue especially is something you'll need to think about moving forward: You have unlimited space in a script to have characters talk but there's only so much room on the page for dialogue balloons so make sure to edit what you've got so far with an eye for cutting dialogue down to only what is absolutely necessary to convey information, intent and character voice.
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Dec 26, 2017 19:52
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FunkyAl posted:King Kalamari I'm liking your script so far! I'd be interested to see any concept drawings or thumbnails for pages you have. The main thing I think I have to say is that there seems to be a lot of exposition by dialogue, lucy narrating what she's finding in the room and expressing shock when shes in the alien dimension etc, but you shouldn't be afraid to let the comic operate without words and let the environment sink in and do the "talking," especially since I know you're good at depicting detailed environments! Also I thought it was kinda weird that Lucy and the mom were talking about felix while he was in the back of the car/could hear probably. Thank you! The exposition-heavy dialogue is something I'm still trying to get the hang of but I'm hoping that it'll be a bit easier once I start drawing the pages out a bit (It's at that stage I always end up going to my dialogue with a weed whacker to fit it reasonably onto the page) Sadly I've not yet started doing any thumbnails or page layouts yet due to tablet issues (Which, thanks to some generous gifts from my family this holiday season, should be fixed as soon as Amazon gets more Intuos Pros in stock). All I have as far as concept sketches go at the moment are character designs:    FunkyAl posted:But hey yo webcomics inventors thread what was some Literature And Art that influenced you in 2017, heres some of mine I've been getting pretty heavily into classic fantasy fiction over the course of the year and feel like it's been having an influence on my writing. Thus far I've checked out: -Lord of the Rings (Read part of it back in high school but finally got around to actually finishing some of the novels this year. I blame Tolkein's love of elf poems for my inability to finish it as a teenager) -Earthsea -Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series -Discworld I've also been finally started taking a serious dive into the works of Moebius and have been avidly following Kill Six Billion Demons.
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Dec 28, 2017 00:00
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So I've been doing a gently caress-tonne of writing as of late but have found myself seriously lacking on the drawing end of things. It's mostly just a case where I feel like I'm not getting the same level of enjoyment out of drawing that I used to, which somewhat upsets me because I used to love drawing. Anyone had a similar experience and have any tips on how I could rekindle my passion for the art side of things? 'Cause this project isn't really a comic without the visual portion of it...
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Apr 13, 2018 02:08
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So, having been working on writing a large-scale comic project for the past year or so I had a moment a few weeks ago and sat down and seriously assessed my overall concept for how long this drat thing is going to be and realized in the form I had envisioned it I would be lucky to get the thing done in 20 years if I kept to a reasonable pace. For my own sanity I have decided to drastically cut back on the scope of the project to something that could conceivably be completed by one person in less than several lifetimes. I've managed to cut things down to telling a story in roughly four large parts (Whether this actually turns out to be feasible or just a slightly less ridiculous pipe dream remains to be seen). The only problem I'm running into is a general sense of anxiety at having to limit the length of the thing to "finite" and worrying it won't give me the opportunity to explore all the stupid plotlines and shenanigans I've had ideas for. Anyone else ever dealt with this? As well: Anyone know of any good articles on plotting out a long-form narrative? Articles about plot outlines are rarer than I'd hoped and articles specific to graphic novel format are virtually non-existent.
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Aug 14, 2018 03:38
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Thanks for the advice, everyone! Funny, I actually watched that a few months ago. My initial reaction was "Hm, this seems like pretty good advice" but I feel I appreciate it and its relevance to my own endeavors a lot more rewatching it today. Reiley posted:Don't plot your story too far out cuz you're gonna get 1/10th the way through your script and come up with an even better direction to take it just from creating the world and fleshing out your characters and then all the other 90% of the prep work you did is useless. fun hater posted:co-signed, this is the best way ive seen this feeling put. i dont know about other people but i think a story is going in one direction and then it turns out to be a totally different story because i found a better, more interesting direction to go in and decided to chase it. i only have an end point planned out for story arcs, how i get there is whatever I can definitely appreciate this sentiment and am actively trying to keep what I have for the overall plot relatively loose and free to change, that said I do feel that I would at least want to get a basic skeleton of the plot put together before I start getting too deep into things both so I can write the earlier parts with a bit of forethought to where things are going and so I can get a fixed end point and a rough estimate of how long the story needs to be at minimum to cover all the important points I'm looking to include. That said I am definitely planning for a lot of the details and story points to end up changing once I start getting into things. lofi posted:The Webcomic Alliance podcast sometimes does 'longform takeovers' which might discuss a lot of the issues relevant to you. Otherwise, I've been looking mostly at scriptwriting or short story writing advice. Oh wow, I have never actually listened to this before! This looks right up my alley (As does a writing-advice centered podcast they linked to in one of the episode pages I visited), I am definitely adding this to my queue of podcasts to listen: I've been looking for a good writing advice one! FunkyAl posted:Lately-ish my thoughts are to try and pack as much important info into a page as possible, and think about the distance in time you can put between pages. And also, have ideas for future stories down the line but not to rush them, or even make their happening a necessity for the enjoyment of the work. Have many ideas in flux and commit to them the moment you need to write them down. It's always about the journey, even if you have the destination in mind. That's actually very much the format I've been thinking of as I plot this thing out: I've roughly divided the story into four overarching "Parts" that are each divided into 5 or so "chapters" with each chapter being divided into another 5 "acts" that are meant to stand at least marginally well on their own. The problem I was running into up until this point was that I was treating the whole serialization aspect much too heavily like I was writing a tv show as opposed to a comic: The plans I had for stories were ones that would take a significant amount of pages to convey the way I had imagined them which, coupled with the fact that I had planned to have things in a more or less episodic format that lead to a more long-form story arc meant I was looking at an amount of work that was not reasonably possible for a single person to complete in any reasonable amount of time (TV Shows have big production teams for a reason, I discovered...) Either way, I'm hoping that being able to at least set up a rough plot skeleton and impose some limitations regarding length on myself will prevent things from meandering or spiraling out of control.
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Aug 15, 2018 04:28
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I have been hard at work writing the scripts to a series of graphic novels I've had planned for ages (And also trying to overcome my own issues with avoidance!), I've gotten to the point that I'm no longer happy with the working title I have going an want to come up with a better one. I have it narrowed down to a few options and need people's help picking which one to use: Vote for your favorite title option here!
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Oct 19, 2018 03:24
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Hey, I got accepted to exhibit at TCAF somehow! I'm as surprised as you! Well, it does help that I applied with some friends of mine as a "collective". We're doing a small anthology of short comics we've made, here is a sample of the one I'm working on: 
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Feb 2, 2019 00:29
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I've been using Back Issues from Blambot as of late. Blambot in general is a pretty good resource for comic-friendly fonts. The major bit of advice I always give to people looking for a comic lettering font is to make sure you find one with a capital variant of the "I" with crossbars as it looks much nicer when used for the personal pronoun or in acronyms, don't use the crossbar I within actual words, though.
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Feb 7, 2019 04:38
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Welp, I've finally done it: I've started working on a longform comic project! I'll probably have to be at least a little bit scant on some of the specific details as it's a niche erotica (Read: "Weird porn") but nonetheless I wanted to discuss my plans for the project and get feedback from people a little bit better versed in the world of webcomics. I'm planning on starting off small - I've got a script for an approximately 29 page story to start things off, and I'm in the midst of doing the rough drawings and layout for those pages. I'm going to focus on getting this introductory chapter completed as a way to assess just how reliably I can commit to working on this kind of project, and if it's something I enjoy enough to keep working on beyond that point. If I want to continue with the project beyond that point I have some an outline in my head as to how to continue the story for at least 6 more chapters of a similar length and I figure that would be the point in the project where I'd start looking into setting up a domain to actually host the thing. While I know regular, weekly updates were the standard in webcomics back in the day, I'm thinking this is a project that might be better served through larger releases over a longer span of time - I'm thinking something like releasing a chapter every few months as opposed to releasing 1-3 pages a week. I have the benefit that, because I've already developed a small following doing adult artwork I have something of a pre-existing audience to build off of, so there's a little bit less pressure to try to game that content algorithm. Really, the growing issues with social media platforms, especially as it relates to NSFW content, is one of the major reasons I want to set up my own webspace for this project if it gets off the ground rather than post to a platform. The one thing that I'm a bit concerned about is balancing the more pornographic aspects of the project with the narrative-focused aspects. For instance, in the chapter I'm currently working on the "money-shot" stuff doesn't really come into play until about 2/3s of the way through, and I'm worried about how that's going to go over with people who are just looking for spank material.
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Mar 26, 2024 20:14
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Cephas posted:I think you gotta be honest with yourself and clearly decide what the purpose of your comic is. If it's porn, then everyone who reads it is looking for spank material. In that case, there should be no separation between "the porn parts" and "the narrative parts"--the narrative should be porn. Even if nothing graphic is happening, it should have some sort of charge to it, because every part of the porn should be directly building a sense of eros. Thank you! And that definitely makes sense: I think that what I'm going for is definitely something more on the "Narrative first, porn second" end of the spectrum, and I've tried to make a conscious effort to tie the erotic aspects of it somewhat directly into the narrative itself. The model that I'm sort of working towards is something akin to what you'd see in old issues of Heavy Metal magazine or the wave of pin-up comics that were big in the 90s (Cavewoman, Lady Death, etc.) - Something where there's a driving narrative, but one that contains a lot of nudity and provocative imagery. It's just the fact that the provocative elements of the story exist in a more niche fetish space that I think is going to get most general audiences to mentally file this away as porn offhand. Then again, Xxxenophile existed in a pretty mainstream space and that was way freakier than anything I'm doing...
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Mar 27, 2024 22:10
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Quick progress update: I've currently got two finished pages, with three more and a cover roughed out. I've posted the first page up to Twitter to a very positive response, and I think I'm satisfied with how the artwork is coming along thus far. The first chapter is currently slated to be 29 pages total, so hopefully I can keep momentum going and finish things up in a few months.
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Apr 8, 2024 17:41
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Alright, I've got the first 5 pages of my comic (which encompasses the first scene) done! How's it looking?     (No smut yet, not gonna be posting that here when I get to it for obvious reasons...)
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Apr 18, 2024 22:28
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Kennel posted:I like the art. Thank you! Kennel posted:At the first glance I was worried that it was an attempt to be a "normal" comic with the author's fetishes awkwardly on screen, but if it's an actual sex comic, that's not a problem. Yeah, the whole "Author trying to awkwardly insert their fetishes into a non-erotic comic" is the type of set up I'm trying to avoid. I'd describe what I'm trying to do as something of the opposite - Trying to insert a more traditional comic story into a pornographic work. Kennel posted:But yeah, outside the awkwardness of the boss character, those pages are pleasant to look at. When you say "Awkwardness" do you just mean the sexed-up nature of her design, or is there something else you're talking about?
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Apr 28, 2024 04:09
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