I bought your Confessions of a Small-town Priest comic, and I loved it so much!!
I can't join Patreon, but I'll keep reading the story through Tapas, and whenever there's a second compilation volume I'll buy it too :3
Btw, I don't know if someone already asked you this, but do you have any advice for an artist that's interested in making comics but is scared of not being "good enough" for it? How did you begin?
Thank you so much for the support!
Honestly I don’t know if anyone ever feels good enough, I know I don't! You just realise that if you don’t make the things you’re excited about you’ll probably eventually stop wanting to, and what a waste.
I had been making art for a long time before I made comics, and I don’t know where you are in your art journey so you might have a steeper learning curve, but I still think it’s just worth starting even if you think it’s bad.
You’ve probably heard this advice from other people, but it's smart to make something small and low stakes. And then. Keep doing that. Make some zines or something. Personally I started out strong, I wanted to see how I felt about making 'proper' comics by doing a couple of tiny comics- like 10 pages- But then I got ballsy and jumped into a webcomic I thought would be short and it was 450 pages and took 5 years. And tbh I regret it! I wish I had more time to experiment with style and methods before I committed to it, because I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it ate all my time.
I think doing something like I am now (with mini comics) would have been Great for starting out. I can change the style if I like- if I decide I want to not use colours for a bit, or I want to use a different shading method I can do that, if I want to draw a random idea that doesn’t fit neatly into a plot arc, I can do that. Etc. At first it wasn’t that important to me whether or not I reached an End, or how cohesive it was as a whole, and I think it was good to not have that pressure (now…that’s changed, I made it my job, but I don’t recommend that unless you’re ready to be in it for the long haul)
Personally I also think it’s important to work out how many words you usually cover per page before you start writing any kind of substantial script- I talk about my process a little here. Basically just so you know what you’re getting into, instead of starting a 'short' comic and it taking 5 years. Again with the making some mini things so you have a ballpark.
Below is! too much info! but I like to talk. and maybe it's helpful to see my actual starting point.
To actually be honest about where I started it was gradual, and I did a lot of sequential stuff before I really sat down for real to make 'proper' comics. I think learning to draw motion is tricky, and these helped ease into it.
This was my first real comic, which I didn't think went well lol (it was for an anthology spread so this was...it.)
After that I did loads of little tiny things like these:
and then a load more, getting more speech in. (the rest of the first... it's painful to read now tbh.)
I also ran an askmic blog lmao.
and THEN I did 'proper' more finished and formally laid out comics-
I hate this one so I'm not linking to it LOL.
Link to this one, the precursor to the webcomic and a style test.
And yeah...my first tries were clunky and cringy but I had to make them, or I wouldn't have gotten better. And tbh looking back even just art the start of the confessions comics I'm like 'eek', so. It's never ending. Ya gotta just do it.
