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Drawing comics is the purest suffering so if you're doing digital lettering out of convenience, or if your handwriting is atrocious, or both, I'm sorry but you are required to letter by hand in order to legitimize your work. edit: One loophole you can use to get around this is using particular fonts in Manga Studio 5 and have it consistently cut off the tops of your exclamation points no matter what you do. It's infuriating and you'll never be happy 
Fortis fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 21:10
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I get everything done by spreading the work out over 2-3 days per page. I usually thumb and ink one evening, color the next. I update Tuesdays and Fridays so normally my working schedule on the comic is Sunday/Monday and Wednesday/Thursday, giving me Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday for additional work time if I need it or hopefully just to chill out. I pretty much write whenever I can, mostly on Sunday mornings and when I would otherwise be spacing out at work. I also thumbnail at work, which has lead to me bringing home a lot of loose notepad pages over the past several years to scan. I have also occasionally taken half days just to work on my comic, because I'm a crazy person.
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Jul 14, 2015 15:47
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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that sometimes I just can't make my schedule work and if that happens I make a post saying there won't be a page that day/any pages that week/whatever. Sometimes you just gotta do that. People understand! So I've got a bit of a weird question from those of you who have done longer stories... Will people just let you know if they're not sure what's going on? I think I might just be conditioned by hanging out online with people who manage to keep webcomic continuities in their heads, because a lot of people have told me that it's easier for them to read my comic in long stretches rather than keeping up with the updates from day to day. Which is fine, but I worry that I'm maybe just not doing a good job telling a story, because I don't see discussions of other plot-dense webcomics having this problem. However, the other webcomics I mention are really popular. Maybe it just requires a super-devoted fanbase of a particular kind of reader, and that kind of reader doesn't actually make up a large part of the population, so with a more popular comic there are more of those superfans but with one like mine there are only maybe one or two.
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Jul 14, 2015 17:08
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Art changing over time is the best thing because you can go back and look at your story from the beginning when you're feeling down and see how far you've come. Plus it just like... Is A Thing. Avoiding it seems like more work than its worth.
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Jul 28, 2015 03:44
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wow lots of dogpiling prudes ittPick posted:I wonder if any artists here could weigh in on a situation where your character requires foot and hand covering but apparently no underwear. Anyone? Anyone here at all? maybe you should try writing something other than false gods 
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Jul 28, 2015 20:48
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Listen comic artists need to be taken down a peg. We don't get owned by our decision to draw comics every god drat day or anything.
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Jul 28, 2015 20:54
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Scribblehatch posted:My good sir, I see you've quite cleverly alluded to something mentioned earlier in the thread! I think it doesn't really mean anything and is kinda silly. I guess the intent is to get people to understand that not every character needs to be likable, relatable, or sympathetic, but... the easy way to express that is to just say that. I agree with FunkyAl on this; characters are stimulus->response. They are their own people, so they respond to stuff happening the way they would. To act like column A and column B are mutually exclusive is a little disingenuous. Compelling, dimensional characters can be likable and sympathetic. They can also be shitheels. They're individuals with their own minds. So... do that. You invent a person and you imagine what it would be like for them to exist. At the end of the day writing a character-driven story is really like running a simulation and seeing what everyone would do when things happen or other characters do things. To top it all off I don't get what's even meant by "False Gods" except "I am overdramatizing the point"
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Jul 28, 2015 21:12
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But that's what I'm saying, first it says they can RUIN STORYTELLING and then basically says that they're fine but can be misused. Oh, okay. You can misuse a lot of stuff, like brushing your teeth with an oreo or making a comic page 99% exposition text boxes. It boils down to "to make good characters, make them good characters, as opposed to bad ones".
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Jul 28, 2015 21:18
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Honestly I think every character should have at least a shred of relatability because otherwise why is anyone gonna care what's going on in their heads? Entirely unrelatable 'characters' are more like forces of nature or beasts.
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Jul 28, 2015 21:42
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Hey you know while people are actually here, I haven't asked this thread for a critique in a really long time (like a good 2 years or so) and I know this is a vague request but if anyone's got any feedback I'd love to hear it. It's always been really helpful. http://www.bsfantasy-comic.com/ to be precise I think the last time I asked this thread for a crit was here: http://www.bsfantasy-comic.com/2013/12/26/page-319/ so yeah basically two entire years ago. I think backgrounds are my biggest problem. Or they were last time, at least, and they have been pointed out to me as an issue for way longer than that. Lately I've been trying to keep them compositionally interesting if not elaborate. Since I tend to do a lot of tight, close-up shots (maybe too many??) this tends to be the case quite often. However I've really been trying to pull the camera back and show more interesting background stuff, but I'm not sure they're really quite there yet. It's hard to get invested in making elaborate backgrounds when all I want to do is convey action. I don't mean that's all I want to do, I just mean it's hard to keep the background train going WHEN I want to convey a lot of action. When people are standing around or I'm setting up a scene, that's prime background time, but I've also been accused of having a really noticeable pattern of leading a lot of pages with a wide (usually overhead) establishing shot. I've been trying to do it less but I'm afraid I still rely on it a lot. I also quit MangaStudio's brush line correction cold turkey a while back. I don't know if that has been to my detriment or not; it's hard to tell when I'm so up-close and personal with the linework all the time. I see all the microscopic jitters and stuff and I just don't know. Also, I alluded to this earlier upthread but some people are having a tough time following the story; if any of you decide to read it, can you tell me if it is, in fact, hard to follow? That's a lot to ask I guess but I think most people in this thread would have some good comic-reading chops and would be able to tell me if the pacing is good. I honestly just don't know anymore; I obsess over it as I write and work really hard on it, and I think that the problem people are having is reading serially rather than archivally. I guess that is a lot of feedback to ask for, but it doesn't even have to be about the stuff I just said. I just love feedback and knowing what I can work on. So if anyone has any I would really appreciate it!
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Jul 28, 2015 22:34
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thousandcranes posted:Hey Fortis, I'm a fan of your work but I'm also not caught up because I was waiting for chapters to end and then I literally do not understand your archive. Actually that's probably something you want to look at. I click on the chapter title and it shows me the pages in the chapter in reverse order? Why??? I've been meaning to fix this forever so part of the problem is that I kept forgetting to. The other is that the setting controlling the archive order is buried where I would never have expected to find it. The other part of it is that showing archives in descending order is an option at all in the first place. Anyway I finally found the setting and fixed it! I am sorry that it took me several actual years to do this. I find that the site itself never manages to become as much of a priority for me as the comic itself, which can be a problem. quote:I like your use of colors for the artwork, but I tend to have fairly mixed feelings on the word balloons and gutters. Sometimes the colors work, sometimes I really dislike them. I think it would work better for me if those elements were way desaturated. I'm not really sure what the word balloon colors are supposed to be adding (other than indicating who's speaking??) anyway. I guess I always liked the idea of colored word balloons and using them is supposed to give every character a 'voice', but I can understand that they could potentially get in the way, especially lately with people having increasingly elaborate word balloon colors. It might actually be weird to completely stop doing it now, but I might look into desaturating them within the next chapter or so in order to make them less distracting. As far as the gutters, do you mean during flashbacks? I do dark teal gutters during flashbacks only, the rest of the time they're just white. I guess that creates a similar issue to the word balloons in that it could potentially mess up the colors (although I try to pick colors for those scenes that work with the gutter color, except for the first flashback I did when the colors were all over the place). If that's not what you mean though I'd like to know more about what I can do to fix up the gutters! As far as meltyface is concerned I know EXACTLY what you mean. It's happening especially frequently with a character who has of course become a prominent part of this current arc so the comic is lousy with it lately. I think I need to get back to basics with laying out faces for at least a while, and probably draw new characters over and over before I actually introduce them to work out the kinks. Thanks for the feedback! FunkyAl posted:I am ~way behind~ on BSF but from the looks of it: I am hella enjoying what you're doing with your panel layouts! The latest page is SUPER dynamic and readable + you're doing good things with color. I actually disagree with part of what radicalwall is saying, I think the harsh shadows actually work really well tonally, at least for this latest sequence. I DO agree with their point AB atmospheric perspective, which is tricky when you're doing flats but if you manage to get that good n readable then that's like the whole Next Level of color. Oh man, thanks. Panel layouts were another thing that people told me needed spicing up, and I've been working on it, so I'm glad it's paying off. I see what you mean about blocking; I had always thought about backgrounds as showing where characters are and that's it, but using it as not just compositional but tonal elements makes a lot of sense. I'm going to try to work that in! RadicalWall posted:I'll just throw out there that the first thing I noticed is that all of your shadows are hard shadows and it makes everything look kind of flat and harsh. Remember, as soft objects rotate away from a light source the shadow forms gradually and just using a soft brush would help your art feel more grounded. Thank you! I've experimented with softer shadows before, although the closest I've come in-comic is to applying a gradient over the same shapes I do for the hard shadows. I was looking at older pages the other night where I did that and everything kind of looked better, so I think I know what you mean. I'll experiment with actually using a soft brush for shadows too; I've never been happy with the results I've gotten when doing that, but I haven't tried in a long-rear end time. With backgrounds I've always tried to focus on contrast between the background and characters, and that's it. But 1) I don't use the trick of desaturating everything as much as I should and 2) you raise an interesting point re: the amount of contrast in the foreground and backgrounds, so I'll need to look into it.
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Jul 29, 2015 01:37
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Has Hiveworks ever actually had an open submissions week? Maybe I just don't check the right places but ever since they instituted the policy of only accepting submissions between certain dates I've never seen it happen. Is it in fact more like a masonic secret society one has to be invited to by a relative or high ranking official? I joke but am also genuinely curious.
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Aug 20, 2015 00:39
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WrathOfBlade posted:Let's say you're doing a regularly updated comic, and you hit a patch where keeping your schedule becomes impossible, either due to Life Stuff or just needing to play catchup. Do you guys think it's smarter to go on hiatus 'til you know you're in a good place again, or to go on an "irregular schedule" and just put up comics whenever you can get them out? I've been doing this since 2011 and have always done the hiatus thing. In my experience, as long as you're up front about when you'll be back and can stick to that deadline, no one really minds. People who are gonna read your comic are gonna read your comic, as long as they know when to go check for a page. edit: that said, I guess I don't know if it alienates anyone. I personally like to know when to check, and comics that update whenever drive me kinda nuts. I can say that going on hiatuses has never had an impact on my readership that I can see.
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Sep 1, 2015 18:31
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kefkafloyd posted:When "great artists steal," It means taking something somebody else has done and transforming it into your own. This is the secret behind my comic, The Legend of Dragon Quest Fantasy: Bowser's Inside Story.
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Jan 21, 2016 20:16
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Reiley posted:Buffers are fleeting, do not depend on them because before you know it, there they go. Yeah, you really need to be sure that regardless of how much of a buffer you build up, whatever update schedule you choose can be sustained without it. One update a week isn't super great but if it's what you can manage it will benefit you in the long run. The general rule I've heard is imagine how many pages you could do per week and subtract one.
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Feb 20, 2017 21:10
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FunkyAl posted:You ever think about how photoshop is a photo manipulation program? is it good for comics? Photoshop has been around for 28 years and has gone through a lot of changes since its inception, saying it's just a photo manipulation program is pretty reductive. You seem to be on an anti-digital kick lately and I understand where that thought process comes from but it is very beneficial to look at Photoshop and its brethren as just another set of art supplies that a person may or may not choose to use to achieve any number of desired effects. For instance I did a bunch of stuff in Photoshop to portray rain a little while back by applying a motion blur to some noise, adjusting the contrast and making it a screen layer, and then repearing that a few times so all the droplets weren't going in the same direction. I also used a basic gaussian blur on some blobs of color to get the shimmery effect of raindrops bouncing off of the tops of objects and the haze.  I'm sure it's possible to have done this non-digitally but I just prefer to work digitally; I still need to know the basics of color theory, composition, etc. to achieve work that looks any good. Even if you don't do that fancy stuff with it, it's real good for coloring. It is not great for inking. Fortis fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 16:23
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"Only?" I think I get like 500 per month on an exceptional month and I've been casting pages into the howling void for 7 years. With that kind of following you could probably actually leverage social media if you aren't already.
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Jun 12, 2018 01:30
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Does anyone know much about the webcomics ecosystem on Instagram? I'm looking for a place to post updates to my comic and boost readership that isn't imploding due to extremely poor decisions implemented by idiots. Basically, what I (used to?) do on Tumblr is post a cropped section of a comic page and link to the full page itself in each post in tandem with the comic's update schedule. I started doing this in 2013 or so, about 2 years into the comic's run, so I started ~200 pages in. But now I'm at almost 800 pages and I feel like starting so late in the story on an entirely new site would just be weird. Would it be a good idea to make posts about each page starting at the very beginning, one page per day, until I catch up with my regular update schedule?
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Dec 3, 2018 23:07
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I started my comic at age 26 in 2011, and yeah... when I'm done, there is a pretty good chance I'm not going to do this again. It is, in the broadest sense, rewarding, and I think it'll feel really good to finish a story, but when I'm entrenched in the process of doing the actual work it can be tough to maintain a sense of perspective, and the lack of people giving a poo poo can really wear me down. I've never really answered the question of "is it worth putting something creative out there when by and large most people don't care?" The only answer I've got at this point is a tentative "I think so?" because hell, I'm still doing it. The work has to be its own reward above all else, I guess. Sometimes it isn't. Usually it is... but sometimes it really isn't.
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Jul 15, 2019 15:13
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Despite the fact that the developer explicitly does not recommend using Dreamhost, I’m pretty drat interested in moving my comic away from WordPress forever. I’m going to assume that the recommendation against Dreamhost is made mainly on the assumption that the average user lacks any web hosting/server knowledge whatsoever. So I posted about this in the General Webcomics Thread and no one seemed to care much, but my comic, Blasphemous Saga Fantasy turned ten years old back on January third. I’ve honestly come super close to quitting altogether multiple times in the past few years, and I’m often unhappy that people aren’t as enthusiastic about my work as I am, but ultimately, I am glad to be telling my story and that this format has consistently motivated me to keep doing it. I guess I’m mostly saying all that because I figure everyone in this thread probably understands that weird conflicting mix of feelings about one’s own work. Hopefully you all still find it as rewarding at the end of the day as I do. If you feel like you’re doing your best work, then keep at it. After a decade my only real advice aside from “keep at it!!!” is... maybe workshop your title a bit more if you’re not super sure about it. I also owe a lot to this thread (and/or the contingent of some ancient general webcomics thread that became the first iteration of this thread back in 2012 or so) for a lot of constructive feedback and encouragement, so thank you, Making Comics thread. Even if the days of this thread being super active are over, I really believe that couldn’t have done it without you all.
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Jan 16, 2021 17:48
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Kojiro posted:Comiccontrol is great but I really would look at a different host to use it on- of the few I've tried dreamhost was the one that was down most often, also I got hacked twice while there. Huh. I've been using them for years and I always figured whatever (relatively minor) problems I had were WordPress related (I also got hacked once in 2011, and it was my WordPress installation that was compromised). I guess I'll keep an eye out for something better moving forward. EDIT: I only just now considered that changing CMSes would obliterate every comment I've ever received. I haven't gotten a ton over the years but I do like the (non-spam) ones I got. I guess this is a bigger decision than usual with a full decade of history. Fortis fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 16, 2021 |
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Jan 16, 2021 18:24
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Truman Peyote posted:congrats! I hadn't come across this before but you can really see the care that goes into it. Thanks! I appreciate that a lot. That's definitely how I feel about it, and if that shows up even a little bit, I'm glad. readingatwork posted:Oh poo poo I remember enjoying your comic back in the day (before I lost track of it like I do with all webcomics eventually)! Congrats! I'll definitely be catching up on it later. I remember your feedback in the first Making Comics thread was really helpful when I was starting out! I hope you still enjoy it as much as you did then when you catch up. And thank you!
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Jan 17, 2021 07:19
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sweeperbravo posted:aaah congratulations! definitely feel that "come and go" of being really all about the work and then feeling really not into it for a while. 2020 was an unusually "on" year for me and then this year so far I haven't picked up a pencil once. But congratulations on that milestone, that's loving huge! Thank you! Yeah I feel the ups and downs really strongly. For me it’s probably a combination of ADHD-induced lack of motivation and honestly just sometimes thinking “barely anyone reads this, why even bother.” In most cases I’ve forced myself to keep going for the most part (if I skip any time it’s like two weeks at the absolute most, unless it’s an announced hiatus) and sometimes that means the pages aren’t super amazing, but it keeps the story moving forward and I generally consider this to be a first draft anyway. 2020 was a dogshit year for me (I mean, it was for everyone, but I got laid off from my day job and haven’t found new work yet) and it was really hard to stay motivated, but I did manage to finish out an arc I’ve been plugging away at since 2018. That alone gave me the motivation to actually build up a buffer for the first time since 2011. I started with a 36-page buffer, and this one isn’t nearly as impressive at only ten pages, but it’s enough that I don’t feel immense pressure whenever I work on pages, which weirdly enough keeps me motivated to stay ahead. I don’t entirely get why it works that way; if anything, I’d expect a buffer to motivate me to dick around and put drawing off since it’s already scheduled, but I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth.
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Jan 18, 2021 16:35
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I am continuing to plug away at BSF and based on current trends will continue to do so until I am dead. (I really want to finish it sooner rather than later, but like, properly.)
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Mar 24, 2023 06:08
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