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I'd like to NanoMango a 10-page test for a long-form story. Full color, etc.
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May 31, 2015 02:53
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How 2 Worldbuild: -Use Earth map, put magic in -Pick your favorite animal to make big for use as mounts instead of horses -Generate MacGuffins so characters have excuse to trek all over magic!Earth
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Jun 2, 2015 23:55
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Bonus points: Use your builded world to show off a niche skill or obsession that doesn't go on your résumé.
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Jun 3, 2015 18:17
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Geekboy posted:I'm going to have my first table at Galacticon in Seattle (I'm getting it for free. Yay, nepotism!). So. That's kind of a big deal. Any "babby's first convention" advice? It depends. My comics are an easy sell to someone who was curious but wasn't initially prepared to purchase. My prints are not an easy sell unless someone zeros in on it and wants to buy the print, in which case they -sometimes- buy a comic too but usually don't. Are you doing portraits of your own characters or fanart? The former will make your comics an easier sell, but will probably not sell themselves! The latter are fun to make and sell, but will not cause people to be interested in your original comic. Hope you have fun! 
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Jun 13, 2015 21:29
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Geekboy posted:
Oog. Yeah that's going to be tough on your autobio comic, sad to say. The good news is, that doesn't mean it's BAD if it doesn't sell, it's just overwhelmed by stuff that people recognize. Also, nothing that's in-the-making matters, stick with what exists on that table and just go for broke on making good connections.
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Jun 16, 2015 04:07
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That's awesome because the Slack webcomic chat died pretty abruptly, and I miss having a chat room to hang out in on a day-to-day basis.
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Jun 23, 2015 18:52
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I use it, it's great! The music is kind of a liability because it will stop and start as you're scrolling downwards.
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Jun 24, 2015 21:17
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Twitter's #webcomicchat hashtag every Friday and Saturday gets me retweets and favorites on a regular basis, and the majority of my referral traffic is from there. I get most of my interactions through Tumblr and Facebook. Tumblr is VERY good for comics right now. I don't like Facebook very much but for some reason I am doing well there with hashtags and cross-posting into relevant communities.
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Jul 5, 2015 20:28
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It's set up with the intent to spam your webcomic and get exposure, so be as brazen as you want (but try to say hi to fellow webcomickers if they post something you like  )
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Jul 6, 2015 01:22
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HPLovecraft posted:I've never drawn a comic before and could use a brutal critique from people who know what they're doing. I'm lost and dum. More please.
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Jul 9, 2015 03:14
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Keep up? I don't. I don't have a regular update schedule posted for a reason. If I happen to get some pages done, wonderful, if not, it's okay, because if I beat myself up over it too much I'll abandon the project out of dread. I think if I had the entire comic done -- snout to stern -- then I'd promise an update schedule because I could put those pages up and know that my own anxiety about making the comic wouldn't be an issue.
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Jul 14, 2015 14:59
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I knew someone who used to get mad at feminists for not liking his comics about mind-controlling women to grow giant boobs that would snap off their bodies and eat each other. Had these feminists ever seen his comic? No, not at all, he didn't show them to any feminists, he just knew how they'd react and that made him SUCH a victim of the PC police.  ... In case you were wondering why I got to read it and not any of those other nasty feminists, yes, it's (holy crap, Avshalom)
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Jul 23, 2015 20:11
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 if only I had poser then this fanart I made would have been done, but instead I spent twelve hours making this
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Jul 28, 2015 21:52
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Squidster posted:It's one of those weird things in comics - at an early career level, it's all about the artists. Any wannabe writer needs an artist to get their totally-sweet idea in the real world, and artists get the lion's share of respect. As a product takes off, the audience often seems to end up respecting the writer more and the artist less. I wonder if it's because the writer gets to be seen as attached to a new series, and ride on its continuing brand appeal, whereas swapping out artists in an ongoing original series is more common and not a huge deal? I know the Sandman books had multiple artist swaps over its original run, but Neil Gaiman was always writing it. So, his name was the one getting repeated from issue to issue every single time.
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Jul 28, 2015 22:03
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raaaan posted:That's probably It. It's generally not a thing that you see in webcomics as much because people who make them tend to wear both hats or work with the same writer for every project, but it IS an issue that I see spill over on a lot of creator forums and facebook groups in where I constantly see writers looking for artists while at the same time telling prospective artists that they are replaceable so don't expect much/any money. It's actually really entertaining to watch 'writers' who want to pitch their books to Image or Oni foam at the mouth when an artist asks to see samples of the writer's work in advance of accepting a project, which makes it really easy to pick out who is an actual writer and who is an 'idea guy'. Yup, these are people who mistake a brand's identity to the 'importance' of someone's role on a creative team. They probably just know their comic is better than anything those lowly fools at conventions put out, it's just that they can't draw. ...(or write). There are some non-writing artists who have brand identities, but outside of types like Jean Giraud they tend to be really infamous and attract a lot of bashing. It's easy to hide bad writing but it's not easy to hide bad art. Avshalom posted:e: Oh you don't have PMs, my comic is dead in the water BUMMER DUDE!
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Jul 28, 2015 22:38
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Nothin' to say except I love your comic and super congrats on getting a Tapastic feature. Hmm, re-reading it, still love it all but (hopefully this is constructive for you) didn't enjoy the huge string of story revelations getting threaded into the big final showdown fight scene, and the allegiances were too easily changed. Cesar was more sympathetic when he was just a screw-up student. Would also have liked to see more time spent on the Winter Queen's forces being spooky, giant, kinda nonviolent-looking but still irreversably changing the landscape, as well as more character development for the Tiniest Monster Hunter ever. Sometimes it felt like the characters behaved in certain ways for the plot, as opposed to the plot being on the characters' shoulders. Having some space to breathe in between each and every dramatic revelation would have really nailed a lot of the sympathies that I wanted to feel for each and every character. GreatJob fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jul 31, 2015 |
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Jul 30, 2015 19:39
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Kruxy posted:Any advice on a good font size? I'd like to settle on a size now so that the entire story is the same. 16pt is the standard UX minimum for mobile devices, AFAIK. Since the font is in caps that makes it more difficult to read (the eye doesn't have any height variances to help it discern the first and last letter of every word), you may want to test different sizes on the same page to readers on mobile. If you don't care about mobile then 12-14pt will probably be fine. In print you can get away with 10pt. Man, what a nightmare it would be to have to engineer a liquid comic layout to fit all those minimums. Luckily you can aim for the smallest possible layout size (mobile) and it expands fairly well into larger layouts, rather than vice versa!
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Aug 21, 2015 01:23
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Updated RAWR! Dinosaur Friends this weekend...On accident. Tumblr's 'plain language' scheduling UI leaves a lot to be desired. You tell it 'next Saturday' it means, oh, the nearest possible Saturday, SO YOU MEAN TOMORROW, OKAY. Tapastic's is better because it has a clickable calendar.
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Aug 24, 2015 01:17
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sweeperbravo posted:That's absurdly cute Thank you! At first I thought you were talking about my ramblings about queueing UI because my image hadn't loaded.
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Aug 25, 2015 02:14
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Don't let the perceived subjectivity of 'good' stop you from doing stuff. As long as the audience can follow the story and empathize with the characters, they will read. The internet bypassed a lot of creative gatekeepers, don't turn around and be one for yourself (or others).
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Sep 10, 2015 20:43
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I have never heard a complaint about my comic being in grayscale, and my comics are occasionally somewhat popular on Tumblr. I hear more complaints about the subject matter than the style. I don't think color would add anything to my comic. Part of my style inspiration is cheap paleontology textbooks from the 1950's, and then I save a few bucks when I get it printed on Ka-blam, so no I don't think color plays into a comic's success at all.
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Sep 15, 2015 05:14
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JuniperCake posted:I don't think it's easy to make that claim. If you talk to a graphic designer, it's not uncommon for them to say that color is the most powerful tool to catch someone's attention, above anything else. I don't necessarily go that far but I'd definitely agree that color can be a powerful tool. If color made no difference, why would a great comic artist like Meredith Gran hire a colorist? Or why would marvel or dark horse or what have you hire colorists? Why would anyone? Sure, people get excited about color and it is an important part of design. I guess I'm more in favor of using color if the visual language of the comic demands it and if it can be applied in a skilled manner. My experience with clients is that they always want colors right the gently caress now before I can do any of the preliminary and necessary structural work that will make the colors work. My kneejerk response to color discussions that I don't always censor in time is 'CALM THE HELL DOWN, THE COLORS WILL HAPPEN, GOD, LEAVE ME ALONE, I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS LIFE'
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Sep 17, 2015 06:40
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Mercury Hat posted:I finished my western, I'm so happy I'm so happy I got these at SPX today, they are baller! They are good in digital format but I enjoy having them in print more! I think between this, the Candy Fairy zine, and the little kid who gave me 24 pages of hand-drawn Super Penguin comics, this is the best convention I've had in terms of people randomly giving me things.
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Sep 20, 2015 03:57
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. It's an adaptation of an episode of Gunsmoke (you can actually listen to the whole thing 
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There's something kinda personal and anectodal about this comic. It seems like a real zookeeper's experience. (The emu the best dinosaur).
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Oct 26, 2015 03:17
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Updated RAWR! Dinosaur Friends today with a comic for anybody who likes Ankylosaurus. Thanks for checking it out.
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Nov 7, 2015 20:03
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This is rad. I kind of want to make fanart.
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Nov 27, 2015 01:48
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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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I think that if you get the right kinda concept, the world sets itself in place right in front of your story as you make it. Stories exist on a plane of abstraction, they're not nonfiction.
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Jan 24, 2016 08:11
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Retro Ghost posted:I've been updating them daily to my instagram (a little scared to put them on my tumblr lest my ex sees them, but I think I might anyways) but I finished the last 2 comics today! So here it is in completion. You can post them elsewhere if you'd like, I don't mind! I love them too! Especially the deflating phallic thylacine noses, those are the best part.
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Feb 10, 2016 04:24
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Commissions are great for those who enjoy creating them, and I hear overwhelmingly of most people being kind when it comes to buying custom art. I don't do commissions at cons, because I'd have to underprice what I get for contract work, plus it's apparently impossible for me to reliably mail out pieces or follow up and it's just ugh. I prefer tinkering with small press merchandise so that once something sells, it's out of my life for good. 
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Feb 12, 2016 23:08
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Operation Juicebox posted:I think I'm mostly just nervous that no one's going to like my art and that I won't make any sales. Which I guess is a fear most first-timers have. If you attend yourself though I'd love to say hi! Every con I sit at my table for the first ten minutes thinking, welp, that's it, this is the con where I sell 0 things.
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Feb 14, 2016 23:55
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smallmouth posted:Does anyone do their inking in Illustrator? I've found Illustrator to be at its best for the following comic purposes: -The lineart needs to be uniform in weight -I need a specific pantone color in my artwork for printing -I need to define a die cut or other dimensionality for a printed object -I need to pixel-perfect lines for digital display. -I need a single perfect shape to repeat itself according to a line I draw -I need a fill with a seamless repeating pattern I've found that Illustrator requires pre-production to be remotely efficient. In general, it does a thing precisely correct in one fell, tedious swoop. The inking style is very different from doing something with a brush, a pen, or even Manga Studio or Photoshop.
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Feb 15, 2016 02:08
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smallmouth posted:Thanks for the help everyone. Not sure if this helps, but the author of Decrypting Rita is a fairly frequent poster on Webcomic Underdogs, so you can go bug her over there too!
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Feb 16, 2016 20:58
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Troposphere posted:a lot, unless Toby Fox goes the Andrew Hussie route Toby Fox banned fan-made merchandise. The only exceptions are one-off things like sketch commissions. EDIT TO ADD: I would be ecstatic to participate in more SPX-like conventions. The no-fanart thing is very complex and while I don't want fandom to go away since it serves a lot of important functions to individuals, some of whom I know, I would love to see more people feeling confident about their own personal ideas and being represented by those. GreatJob fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Feb 17, 2016 |
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Feb 17, 2016 03:02
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fun hater posted:e: additionally im struggling to imagine how artist alleys at fandom based cons would survive if they only offered original art Artists can do pretty well with generalized fandoms like steampunk, animals, food, vampires, etc. It really helps to set up the booth as a bastion of Just One Thing, Really Well Done, And Variations on That Thing. Also have a pitch that you don't have to pitch... merchandise that explains itself visually is so much better than mindlessly sticking your character's face on a keychain. Some examples I've seen where the artists apparently survive off their own IP: -Plushes and accessories based entirely around cheesy puns -- ie a 'Cinnamon bun' plush that is half rabbit and half cinnamon roll -T-shirts with really weird, expertly-drawn prehistoric creatures printed on them -Vintage retro cartoon animals on a variety of household objects as well as in kid's books and prints -Hand-thrown ceramic dishes that reference folk tales -Realistic jellyfish earrings -Older indie comics, the ones who didn't give up after five years for some reason There's lots of things that people recognize, love, and buy at a glance that aren't already copyrighted. My personal stance is if it's fanart that gets an artist motivated into tabling a convention or working on their career, bless 'em. As long as it's not my personal IP (which it would never be), it's absolutely none of my business to be policing that. But, original art simply isn't the insta-dead profits zone people make it out to be. GreatJob fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Feb 19, 2016 |
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Feb 19, 2016 01:17
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Yeah, same here, plus it just makes vendors so surprised and happy when I buy or trade for something they designed themselves. I love my hybrid shark/donut keychain.
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Feb 19, 2016 20:53
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John Liver posted:I'm gonna go to a couple of cons this summer - walk around at ECCC and table at SwarmCon in Atlanta. Mine are the 'Manga' size off of Kablam! Printing. I sell them for $7/24 pg. Be careful selling...You need a seller's permit for the area, date, and time you're selling. Also not sure if the con frowns or embraces people selling on their own if they don't have a table. Trading is cool though, when in doubt, trade!!
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Feb 25, 2016 04:44
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Anybody remotely considering Silicon Valley Comic Con for next year, check it out, hopefully it will continue as nicely as its first year did. I had a great time vending. It's about time the bay area had a big convention for people who have lots of disposable income!
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Mar 21, 2016 05:16
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smallmouth posted:I finally started working on my comic. Pages take me forever. Layout: Try not to line vertical gutters up so much, you only want to align panels that are directly related to each other or else the eye wants to treat them with equal hierarchy. Perfect equilateral grids are used in UI layouts so that people can scan at will for bits of information. This type of grid doesn't work for panels meant to be read within a certain sequence because there's nothing pulling my eye in any direction. Drawing quality: It's difficult to differentiate between your characters, I though the first guy was a single mitochondria at first and missed that he was a person who stabbed himself on the first read-through. It's possible to do surrealist fantasy in an accessible way, see something like Rice Boy, but you have to be on top of your silhouettes, compositions, scenery, and the metaphorical concepts you're choosing to convey when it comes to character design and body language, cause otherwise the audience has nothing that relates to them Backgrounds: Not digging the blank white background, at least give us something like a petri dish texture :P Color: Why are some things in color and some things not in color Anyway, keep drawing as long as it is fun and you're learning stuff, I'd advocate moving forward rather than going back to correct anything at the moment since that's better for experimenting and figuring out your strengths. You'll need these examples for later as a benchmark for future progression. Pick up some life drawing on the side, too. GreatJob fucked around with this message at 03:49 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 03:45
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I'm doing some print merchandise design streaming related to my comic today if anyone's interested: Stream! How to make screen print ink on acrylic charms in Illustrator with pen tool, eraser, and blob brush.
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May 9, 2016 23:28
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