#comic tips

Thank you so much!! 🤗🌷

I’m no profesional when it comes to comics, so all I can say is what I personally like/value in comic creation but I hope it’s still helpful! Honestly you learn all your life and I’ve learned a lot by creating „Who’s the faker now?”. Here are tips on how I like to draw:

1. I like to start any comic I create by writing it out first. I go to my notes app and write down all my ideas, so I can think the story through and not forget any detail. I like to write it like an actual book, with all the dialogues and characters’ thoughts. That way it’s easier for me to turn it all into pages later.

2. Fonts - YES!! That was a big lesson for me, actually. I find the fonts I’ve used at first outrageous 💀 It’s VERY important to choose readable fonts, so it’s comfortable for the reader. They shouldn’t be too thin or fancy, in my opinion. Especially since a lot of people read comics on their phones, which are small.

Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.

Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!

This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)

So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.

I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.

I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.

Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.

Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!

This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.

But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)

I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.

My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!

Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!

panels that look like this in scroll format...

can look like this in print!

because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.

Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!

Enjoy!

Characters are unique and have certian things that may make them special! I portray this with their dialouge and how i write handwriting for them!

This can even be in books! Not just writing!

Hii! oh no worries at all! I'm also self-taught so I had to figure out how comics work on my own too. I honestly started drawing them before I knew all the rules and it wasn't a good choice so what I did later was reading some tutorials and taking notes in my sketchbook to memorize it better. I was reading most about paneling rules and speech bubbles placement, I don't have all the tutorials saved but I managed to find a few that were really helpful 🥰 and of course I wish you good luck!!

https://blambot.com/pages/comic-book-grammar-tradition

https://manga-with-stef.com/manga-panelling-basics

↓ These I believe are in many parts so you might want to check it from the beginning, but I'm linking few I remember reading

↓

https://globalcomix.com/news/details/198/creator-tips-and-tricks-clip-studio-story-feature

https://globalcomix.com/news/details/254/creator-tips-and-tricks-9-basics-of-komawari

out of sketchbook paper so i had to draw this in iphone markup 💔

Thank you 💖

Yeah... It Is. It can be a very long, frustrating and sometimes really ripetitive job, if you do all by yourself. But what can I say? I love It.

I'm not that arrogant to say I'm good at It, but every time I think on a new story, it's already separated by scenes. It's simply how my imagination works, and It's like that since I have memory. I should have done something like a storyboard artist or such in my past studies 🥹

For the tips you are asking for, my very first one is to collect a lot of material, and study them. This helps to get your artstyle and your narrative too.

Second tip: start small. A short story Is the best for the start. Because finish it, will give you a nice boost to start another one! (And also Is easier to sell, if that's your plan)

The rest Is really on your way of writing and coordinate your hand with It. A nice looking comic Isn't by force a well written one...

As I said It's a hard job, that requires a lot of preparation, and sometimes we are talking about months or years (for printed comics at least) but, omg It's so satisfying!

A few, let’s see what I can come up with.

Okay number 1: If you are doing any kind of comic, DO THE TEXT BEFORE THE BUBBLE! Do not ever draw a bubble and then try to cram three long sentences into it. It doesn’t look good and the text ends up being illegibly small. Example:

- Number 2: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE ONE BUBBLE! Sometimes when you’re character has a very long dialogue segment or you want there to be an audible pause, you can break their dialogue into pieces connected by tails.

This is a good tool for making sure people actually read the dialogue. A lot of people (myself included) have a subconscious reaction to big blobs of text that makes them want to skip it or just skim it. By breaking the long exposition into smaller chunks, people’s brains won’t see it as a ton of effort, and will remain focused on the story, even though it’s literally the exact same number of characters.

This works because of the way we perceive time in a story. Because I want this scene to feel like a slow tense moment, I split the dialogue so it takes longer for the reader to read the dialogue and thus, feel as though this moment is longer.

Number 3: PLAN FOR YOUR SPEECH BUBBLES! This is something I have had to learn the hard way! Do not draw the picture and add the speech bubbles later. The way you draw a picture without speech bubbles and with is very different. Example:

This is not good! The speech bubble is cutting out your picture! Now, everyone does their speech bubble differently, I do mine at 90% opacity, some don’t do any bubble and just draw the speaker’s tail, but many do 100% opaque speech bubbles and this is not good! How to fix it:

Plan where your speech bubbles will go and purposely leave empty space there or something that you don’t care about as much, like the tips of their hair, or their bandana tails, or the end of their scarf, etc. Just make sure that your image is small enough that you can still see it with the speech bubbles on top. If you can’t shrink the image enough to fit it and the speech bubbles, then you need to consult rule 2.

Alright, I think that’s it! As a recap: Do the text before the bubble, The text doesn’t have to be in one bubble, and plan for your speech bubbles!

Hopefully you found this helpful, if you have any further questions, I’d be happy to help!

Giving comic tips is a bit hard because theres so many tips to give! (And i'm still learning myself).

Something I've learned before even starting a comic making, was learning to decode other comics I enjoy. Learn why I like them. The page format, page lining, dialogue boxes, character designs, and story development are things to look at and understand. Try and replicate the things you like (and things that are reasonably achievable of course).

Treat each page as it's own mini cliffhanger. You want the momentum to flow through the comic. Keep your audience on their toes! What's going to happen next!? OH MY G-