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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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Good luck to everyone partaking in the challenge.
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Jun 10, 2015 23:24
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RobinPierce posted:Music on websites is the absolute devil if you're not expecting it! The rest sounds potentially interesting though... Gotta say, I've never felt that music has enhanced my web-browsing experience, particularly with comics. For one thing I typically have my sound off so it's usually a non-entity anyway, but to me, IMO, adding the music to a comic page seems kind of a hamfisted way of trying to make the experience more multimedia. It's not part of what I expect from my comic reading, where I expect I will be reading the comic at my own pace and rhythm, with only visuals to add atmosphere. Some people love it obvs so do what you want, I'm probably in the fading minority anyway, and I'm stupid so I'll probably end up changing my mind on it in like 3 months anyway if I see it done really well. I mean I could already see myself theoretically liking a page where, like let's say it's supposed to take place in somebody's spooky backyard in summertime and you have like the summertime sounds playing with like a creepy windchime and crickets and poo poo, I would probably dig that. I guess I'm envisioning it more people trying to rely on on-the-nose-lyrics of songs they personally like in order to make up for lack of their own writing prowess. However I'm also really critical and grumpy so again IMO YMMV etc.
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Jun 26, 2015 14:55
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neonnoodle posted:This but serious. This is an awesome idea I'd forgotten about. Especially easy for people working digitally. Just make a layer with the typed text and then trace over it and then delete it. It's great for people for whom the rigidity and "separate element lookingness" of a font is really jarring next to a really rough, organic art style.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:04
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I'll come at it from a party pooper perspective and say that for me I just had to realize that my comic is a hobby and outlet for me, but trying to make it a scheduled, regulated part of my life just failed every time, because even if I got a good momentum going, sooner or later something always comes along and knocks me off my game for a long time, longer than a buffer would sustain, if I even was ever able to have a buffer. I am seriously in awe of people who manage to really and effectively be able to make time for their comic on a weekly or at least regular basis and who are able to put up even one comic a week regularly, let alone update multiple times or daily. A lot of that is will power, which I generally lack, but I think some of it just comes down to natural tendencies and there's people who just are not able (for internal or external reasons) to work on their comics at regularly scheduled times. I know a lot of people who set aside time every day to just draw, whether it's comic work or other freeform kind of stuff, and that does seem to help people get over the hurdle once you make it a part of your daily habit. For me though the act of even trying to get into that habit caused me more anguish than it was worth, so I just go with the flow these days. If I can work, I work. If I can't, I don't force it. Used to be a lot more productive about it, but I needed less sleep when I was younger and my simpler style meant I could produce a lot more quantity-wise in an hour than I can now. I'll share a small optimistic thing while I'm here, not necessarily related to this particular topic but kind of. For the past few months I've been going through a lot of out-of-nowhere, unprecedented anxiety that basically paralyzed my creative part of my brain more or less. I was doing sketches of my cast on occasion but scriptwriting for my next chapter came to a total stall. By some miracle, last night the anxiety mostly seemed to lift and today I was able to write, wholecloth, two more scenes.  It's too early to say I'm "back in the groove" yet but just being able to have the mental capacity back to sit and fiddle with a line of thought long enough to come up with something meaningful was very comforting.
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Jul 13, 2015 20:31
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I hope that when I actually am able to get back to making pages after my script is done that I'm not going to go insane on it and wind up burning out after like 4 days of manic drawing. I might break one of my unwritten rules and start working on drawing the first few (written) scenes of the chapter while the script is still unfinished  It feels kind of risky but I would really like to start updating again by August and who knows whether everything else will be done by then.  This used to be a lot easier.
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Jul 14, 2015 14:29
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FactsAreUseless posted:Drawing will change your script. You'll decide a page is boring, or you don't like how it looks or you hate the pacing. Do some pencil sketches of your pages, then you can make what script changes you like. FWIW I mean I have certain scenes already written and some aren't. I was planning to start drawing the scenes toward the beginning that are already finished/already written (I think it's like chronologically the first three scenes are good to go) while still working on writing the later scenes, not necessarily changing/editing the ones that are already done. I have some whole arcs that are essentially good to go, one that is practically entirely unwritten, and one where I seem to be working in reverse chronological order which doesn't really help me much. The thing that is disappointing is I had played these arcs out long ago and knew what was supposed to happen but didn't write it down because well I'm super cool and I'll like totally remember what was supposed to happen right?!?!? GreatJob posted: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. 
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Jul 14, 2015 16:36
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Cuchulain posted:I'm doing an autobiographical comic to help work through some stuff and I settled on making everyone look like little owlish matroesjka dolls. 
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Jul 15, 2015 15:01
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himajinga posted:I read an interesting opinion about this sort of thing as a response to the recent Jerry Seinfeld PC Police thing that applies to all entertainment I think. The gist of it was that it's not the audience's responsibility to like/get/laugh at/be entertained by/understand your art/comedy/story/whatever, it's your job as an artist/comedian/author to get the audience there, and if you do the legwork to understand your audience and take them along on the journey with you and build context, you can do whatever you want but you have to work for it and make it worth their time and be willing to learn and grow. There are no absolutes in entertainment or storytelling that work 100% of the time for everyone, it's your job as a creator to balance between "purity" of intent (whatever that means) and understanding the audience that you're trying to reach with your work. People don't understand that comedy (or in the case we were originally discussing, writing in general) takes time, practice, honing. In other words, work. Like, no one is going to stop you from sitting down and just ~expressing yourself, free of restrictions and limits~ but that might not actually be all that valuable depending on what it is you're doing. To take Seinfeld's field as an example, stand up comedians sure as hell aren't doing the same routines, same jokes, same timing as they were when they started out (at least nobody you're going to want to pay to go listen to, anyway). One learns the art of one's craft and how to use that to advantage, rather than blaming the audience of the medium for not stepping up to grasp the masterpiece. The latter just makes you look like a petulant teenager. To contribute more on topic, I think pre-censorship can in some ways be a positive creative force. There are topics I want to address in my comic that I am being very slow about introducing until I feel I've researched them enough to present them respectfully. I know that even with all the efforts I plan to put in, there may still be people who react negatively to my representation or who are offended by it, and who may swear off reading anything by me entirely. That's okay, that's their prerogative, it's their right to decide what they enjoy reading and what makes them too uncomfortable to enjoy. It's my job to make content that may appeal to them (and the greater audience at large), not to whine about people being too sensitive or lamenting my misunderstood creative genius. If it weren't for that worry about people reacting really badly to my writing, I might have played fast and loose with such topics without hesitation, without bothering to give them the amount of forethought and care that they deserve. My writing would be worse for it. That being said, it is difficult to compare my situation with that of Rod Serling or anyone whose work is in some part produced through others with a financial incentive. My precensorship is almost entirely internal, coming from me anticipating what I have to lose as a writer for offending, misrepresenting, or alienating people. I am not in a position where I have to worry about my lifeline to publication either altering my message or silencing it entirely based on something that to me seems shortsighted or stupid like Serling's Lassie example. I imagine others here who have worked for actual publishers (or even commissions) have a different experience and view. sweeperbravo fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 22:12
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FlyinPingu posted:edit: it's because you keep bringing it up and making it a weird thing that's why a friend IRL had told me about The Meek and the nutidy wasn't even something I knew about until I was looking at a poster she had and was like "Wait is the girl not wearing clothes" and she was like "oh yeah that's a thing in the comic." I actually don't even remember if I knew the character was a girl based on the poster so there's also that. It wasn't "NAKED CHICK, AWW DUDE SO COOL" it was "unclothed human for narrative purpose."
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Jul 24, 2015 02:42
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Delta Echo posted:Before that, my art was improving too fast. I'm extremely confused by this sentence
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Jul 28, 2015 01:51
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Seconding the posters before me. I can understand wanting to maintain consistency to some extent but if your style is changing and improving, then that's a good thing and no reader is going to look at your recent pages and be thinking "Man I really would like this comic if only it had stayed the same lovely art style it was at the beginning." And if you hate drawing that much, I really think you'd either be better off working in another storytelling format, or even just, like, doing comics *in* Poser, which isn't something I ever thought I'd suggest to anyone but if drawing pictures over and over isn't for you it might be worht a go if you still are determined to work in a visual static medium. Out of curiosity, I know you mention having taken art classes, how long have you been drawing for? Are we talking years or like decades here? I just really can't get past the idea of actively *not* wanting to improve just for the sake of consistency. I love looking even at the beginnings and ends of my own chapters to see how much progress I made within each. We're humans, not programs. edit: Oh, just to throw a small personal anecdote. I had a comic I did as a hobby in high school that was done in the super simplistic style I had at the time. The style suited the writing because it was all gag-a-day stuff. Eventually I got to where stylistically I found msyelf wanting to do new, more challenging things, and found it wasn't possible for me to do that in that comic. So the natural inclination to improve- despite not actively really *trying* to- drove me to move on from the project, rather than trying to fight myself to continue slaving at a project that wans't fulfilling to me personally anymore. sweeperbravo fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Jul 28, 2015 |
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Jul 28, 2015 04:06
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I guess it just seems weird to me because you keep talking about minimizing effort and time put in, but beyond typical artists going "Man I wish this would go faster, well here's a technique I can use to speed up part of the process." You said right there in your first line that you love drawing but everything else suggest someone who says they love cooking but buys a lot of premade or microwavable dinners because that gets food on the table faster and with less effort, you know what I mean? I guess I just can't relate to what you're doing at all, Maybe someone with more digital experience can step in and say something more useful. This is probably a nitpicky question but how come with the first set of pictures you have there, why did you move Elsa's left leg over like that? Her leg looks like it's supposed to be a little bent at the knee toward us but then that means it doesn't connect to the ankle/foot correctly and as a result it looks a little off.
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Jul 28, 2015 05:23
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Holy poo poo did this thread ever blossom since I went to bed. I love each and every one of you
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Jul 28, 2015 14:04
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Pick posted:You'd think somewhere in those 12 hours you'd have noticed Elsa's braid is on the wrong side. That's to show that the crotch is ironic.
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Jul 28, 2015 19:48
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Scribblehatch posted:Does no one read the southeast-most post-its in that image, or what? I read it, it doesn't make the rest of it seem lest pretentious though  To each their own etcFlyinPingu posted:Stop defending the dumb post-it note picture that makes vague vacuous statements that ultimately say nothing. Man the Zen Pencils guy is just getting lazier
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Jul 28, 2015 21:19
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Scribblehatch posted:I think it's a fun image that does what it's meant to do: Spark discussion. I'm glad the thread is getting a lot of action but the discussion itself is actually kind of dull, I liked it better when people ITT were talking about making their comics :/ Also I doubt that "sparking discussion" was really what the image was meant to do? I think its intent was to guide writers but w/e
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Jul 28, 2015 21:46
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FunkyAl posted:Man I GUESS, but you posted em up there like they were all the big cheatsheet to writing comics As the "dumb moves in advertising" thread would say- BUT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT IT SO IT WORKED or something
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Jul 28, 2015 21:47
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I think Reiley means that you are acting as though it's everyone else's problem for not automatically knowing what you mean or what your intentions are rather than an issue of you not making it clear in the first place. Idk, when I see actual discussions happening (here, in other threads, in other fora) I rarely see anyone have to ask the OP why they've brought something up. There's something about the way you post those kinds of things that makes it seem like there's some implicit topic you want to address but are beating about the bush over. I'm afraid I can't explain it better than that. It's just one of those things where if it seems like everyone around you has a problem, that might be a sign that it's actually your problem. In this case, being clear in terms of tone and meaning. And yes, subtle wit/banter tends not to be conveyed easily in a text-based medium (ie these forums), which is part of why emoticons became so popular.
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Jul 28, 2015 23:16
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Ok, that's fine then, but just be aware that tone is really difficult to convey through text, and you can't blame your intended audience for not magically knowing you weren't trying to be pretentious/a jackass/bitter/aggressive* because this is the internet and sometimes people are actually those things. *I'm genuinely not using these words to describe your posting here, just picking adjectives to make the point.
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Jul 28, 2015 23:24
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Colon Semicolon posted:please stop trying to tell everyone what subjects they are allowed to draw in your eyes, hope this helps! Idk this conversation is pointless sweeperbravo fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jul 29, 2015 |
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Jul 29, 2015 03:43
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Colon Semicolon posted:Hello my name is Troposphere i butt into threads about art mediums I don't practice and hyperbole all over the place. also I make everything out to be jackoff material because wowee I love to find sexuality in everything The forums "ignore" feature may be of interest to you if you find Troposphere that despicable
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Jul 29, 2015 04:22
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I recently bought a variety of books about clothing styles, as Puppy Time mentioned, from the period my story actually takes place and then going back a little bit. Sucks to be doing this so late in the game but it's better than never doing it at all. This one is particularly divine with regard to my needs, but search around as mentioned- there's a lot of free stuff you can find online (I mostly wanted print resources so that I don't have to turn on my laptop/tablet every time I need a reference picture because I'm way too easily distracted by it once its "on" and "available to be used"). In general for design advice listen to the other people in this thread, they're smarter than me & looked before they leapt.
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Aug 3, 2015 05:54
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These are cool!!Mercury Hat posted:Consistency of action and direction. I like this. The 180 degree rule shouldn't be broken, but it can be steered.
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Aug 18, 2015 03:06
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I did say shoudln't and not must never  That's a good example though where the context of the scene and setting make it possible to break the rule without causing any confusion. It is *so* clear what is going on that people "switching sides" really isn't going to confuse any viewers. I wonder if the fact that the tilt also changes affects our perception of the rule. I think the rule may also be more important for scenes where in some panels we only see one character or some of the characters, ore where a vague background may make it difficult to follow. In the star wars example we see everybody relative to each other so we can follow where everyone is and therefore where the camera is (even if we ignore the fact that we can see the background and make the same assumption from that).
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Aug 18, 2015 04:00
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GreatJob posted: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. That's absurdly cute
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Aug 24, 2015 02:06
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Hiatus is probably kinder to the readers, but like Fortis said, people who read will read as long as something is there to be read. My update "schedule" is kind of a mix of both hiatus-based and updates-whenever. I take breaks in between each scene to work on the next, so that way when it's done I can have a few pages ready to update for a few consecutive days. It spares my readers from waiting a week to get a resolution to something mundane. Trouble is I take too long in between scenes and can never correctly estimate when I'll be able to return/update again.
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Sep 1, 2015 19:10
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hackbunny posted:I have a question about tools: do you guys use any particular software for script writing? One peeve I have about comics on SmackJeeves is that by default, the site displays any pages in the default "unchaptered" folder at the beginning of the comic archive, so like before Chapter 1. Unfortunately a lot of people post their fillers, gift arts, "THANKS FOR 500+ FANS" images, etc, in "unchaptered," not realizing that although usually the archive displays chronologically, all of those extra and useless images wind up at the beginning of the comic so you have to navigate around them or wade through them before you get to the actual start of the comic.
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Sep 5, 2015 19:00
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Pick posted:Yeah, I think I have to periodically move them to the end of the most recently-complete chapter. Even that isn't a *great* spot. This is what I tend to do, too. I end up then putting them up on a separate page on the site just for fan art so they aren't in the middle of the archive, since like you say even if its' between chapters it's not something that's really meaningful to a new reader. I've also never really done a proper splash/"thanks for X fans" filler though I imagine that would end up in the neglected gallery section after whatever point. I think a lot of people just never go back and look through their archive or pay attention to anything like that, so they never realize that the first 12 pages a reader would chronologically see are "Thanks for 100 +favs!" "Thanks for 200 +favs!" "Happy Valentines day! Here's two characters you haven't had the chance to read about yet looking bashful at each other!" "Thanks for 250 +favs!" "Here's some fan art of a joke you don't get yet!" I mean one could figure it out quickly enough to use the drop down menu or archive page to jump to the story but it's one of those "more work for the reader" things that's just generally not a good idea.
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Sep 5, 2015 20:03
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Seconding the above people. Don't let perfection get in the way of great.
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Sep 10, 2015 02:21
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It will also lead to disappointment when, if you use a stat tracker, you notice that even the pages you poured the most detail and effort into crafting are still going to get looked at by the average reader for however long it takes them to read any present text and glance around for a gist of what's going on, so a few seconds. This isn't to say you don't want to make pages you're proud of or that effort is only worth the audience's time spent evaluating it, you still want to do each page to the best of your current ability but within reason- stressing over a background character who came out with arms too long or something is not worth your time as an artist. Stressing over a main character looking unrecognizably off-model would be a reasonable concern. Perspective a little wonky in one panel? You can probably let that one go. Perspective so wrong, Escher would need help decoding the action? Yeah, that's worth a redraw. edit: The above doesn't apply if you are being paid to do something for someone (and getting a buck from 50 subscribers on patreon doesn't count), but I think it's reasonable for those of us who are hobbyists. sweeperbravo fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 14:15
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thousandcranes posted:The thing with black and white comics online is that the artists tend not to push the contrast far enough and so the page can come out boring looking. That's a good point. I've seen a lot of grayscale comics where I kind of lose the action of what's goign on because the artist just made everything darker in order to make it more atmospheric and accidentally wound up shrouding everything in mystery in the not-fun way. Doing a comic in grays or black and white means thinking more critically about the meaning and emploiyment of light and shadow, and especially negative space, in a way that's not necessarily intuitive the way it is when doing something photorealistic or even just in color.
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Sep 14, 2015 03:48
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It seems like whenever I have little free time is when I most want to draw. Though I'm sure it's just a wanting-what-you-can't-have type of thing. Or maybe it's because drawing helps me manage stress/wind down, so when I have lots of free time i don't feel a mental/emotional need to do it, but when I'm busy with work/school I start imagining how soothing and wonderful it would be to just sit and work on a page. My sketching has improved a lot IMO in terms of speed, accuracy (getting what's in my head down on the page as near as possible), and still having some flow to it, but I really need to work on inking because I keep making dumb mistakes because I'm not watching what I'm doing, sucking the life out of the sketch to some extent, and struggling with creating depth. It sucks though because it's really one of those things you only get better at with practice and I just haven't had the time.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:41
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Last night I colored for two hours and it was ok
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Nov 3, 2015 00:52
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I don't think I understand what you are asking.
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Dec 11, 2015 13:29
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Operation Juicebox posted:A question from a comic making newbie. Did you guys have some serious art shifts in the beginnings of your comic? I've only got up three 'real' pages (I suppose five if you count the cover and chapter cover pages) but every time I start a new page I seem to find a better way of doing a thing and I feel like even in that short time the pages have improved noticeably. I still have a massively long way to go and lots to learn, but I guess for now I'm just settling in and trying to find my own rhythm? I feel like such a noob in comparison with everyone else's work. It's because the more you draw, the more you learn, and the more you show that AS you draw. It was one of the main things that made me stop working on my old comic- I was working in a certain style and finally reached my limits with it, like I wanted it to be more expressive and have more potential for drama than it did. So I took a few years working on my current comic and going through different styles before I settled on what I do now. In those years I also wrestled a lot with what I wanted to do with the comic from a narrative perspective, so all those early chapters wound up getting deleted/removed from the canon storyline when I finally had things pretty well founded later. My oldest pages in my comic that survived the culling are from 12/2009. For me changes in the art aren't really noticeable on a page-by-page level but you can see it at the beginnings and ends of chapters and following chapter breaks. But since this is your first time really starting in on a comic it's normal to have the art vary wildly on a more noticeable and condensed scale.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:59
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FunkyAl posted:When I read a comic, I really want to know what's grinding the author's gears this week, so i like for the landing page to be a longform essay about whatever they have to complain about. Also, if you can find the time to make additional content like videos or brand awareness-rallies, it's best to put those in a place of higher prominence than your comic. As a reader, I like when a comic contains more filler strips than story content. Especially when the fillers thank me for being a fan of the comic, it makes me really feel valued. Double especially when the fillers take at least half the effort an actual strip would have taken, because it shows me the artist takes their craft seriously and cares about the comic and site.
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Jan 15, 2016 00:31
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neonnoodle posted:Unfortunately I'm fairly convinced that these days we all have to just work diligently without any expectation or assumption that anyone besides a few friends or fans will ever care one iota. Do it for yourself and no one else, or do it for a friend or family member who reads and likes what you do. poo poo does happen and some people do get "discovered," it's true, but some people also win the lottery. I've come to peace with this lately. (edit- I typed all the rest of this up and then realized we're talking about running ads to get more visitors, not hosting ads yourself to make money, but I'll just post it anyway) I run adblock but I disable it for sites I want to support, like SA, webomic hosts, and sites by individual creators. The trouble with the latter is sometimes I fall upon a site, think it's really great, read a whole mess of pages, and then realize I had AB on the whole time. I turn it off as soon as I realize, though, and sometimes I'll even go back through the archive again even if I don't reread it just so they still get the hits, because I'm a weirdo I guess. I've also come to terms with the fact that I'll never make back probably even half of what I spent on PW ads. It was an embarassing sum, tho thankfully not in the triple digits (I don't think so anyway... geez... well w/e putting it behind me now). I think in my most fabulous year I made between 3-4$ on my PW ad slots. Unless I suddenly get a windfall of readers (and, you know, actually update the comic again  ) that's probably the peake I could hope for.
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Jan 17, 2016 20:09
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Subliminally advertise by adding an image of a coca-cola can at 5% transparency over each of your comic pages
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Jan 18, 2016 00:34
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Vermain posted:My suggestion is to de-emphasize its separateness as much as possible. Walk to a field with tall grass and take a good look at it. Do you see individual stalks of grass, or a mass of grass that blends together? It's an easy mistake to make. I used to do the same thing with trees, trying to draw in every single leaf, but they honestly look better if you texture the contour (to give it a "leafiness") of the leaf clumps and then use small incidences of color to suggest leaves to the reader. see also "bricks on a brick wall." You don't need to draw every single brick, because a) that gets tedious and isn't a good use of your time and b) the more (unneeded) details you add, the more opportunity you have to gently caress up and then all that work is useless. Well, I guess if you're working digitally you can just keep going back over it until it's perfect, but that shouldn't really be your goal as a comic artist. Better to learn a lesson and apply it to the next piece, or rough it out on a scap of paper to work it out first, than to just keep scraping over the same panel/pose/whatever. I was stuck on the details for the same reason I was stuck on making everything "its true color," which is that I thought it lended my work an air of authenticity, of photographic realness. Then after a while it finally sunk in that I'm not even drawing in a particularly realistic style, so why pay lip service to it with that tedious stuff? At which point I started trying to do mood colors, simpler palettes, determining which details in a scene ADD to the mood and meaning and which details SUBTRACT and DISTRACT from that mood and meaning. edit: FWIW grass still drives me up a wall, too, I havne't figured out a method that works for me yet. I just keep experimenting, eventually I'll figure it out. I don't beat myself up over the inconsistency. This is a hobby and I'm learning.
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Jan 26, 2016 22:05
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