#ghostkittenz

It depends! A lot of my simpler one-shot joke comics are done in pencil in a sketchbook I keep by the bed, then I scan and color them later. More elaborate comics like the recent Undertale ones I’ve been doing I tend to do entirely digitally, since it makes it a bit easier for me to visualize the whole thing at once and move stuff around or edit the script or extend the canvas as I need to. Although, with the last handplate one, I actually did the thumbs for that in pencil, then referenced them later. Here’s some examples:

Pencil and scan: sans sleeping when getting picked up, seeing their own deaths, pulling the tablecloth, papyrus fetching sans out of grillby’s, papyrus and the milkshake, papyrus and the nightmare, papyrus’s caution while rough-housing, toriel moming sans, the happy green glow, papyrus’s party Entirely digital: the first handplate comic, gaster threatening sans, papyrus wondering if he’s dumb, spinning around, the amalgam comic, attacking the amalgam, hotdog betrayal, roughhousing indoors, googly-eye gaster blasters, the shyren concert, papyrus’s special attack

Sometimes bits and pieces of ideas show up in pencil first, then get smoothed out in a digital thing once I pin down what I want. I go back and forth a lot. |D

I don’t normally do too many crazy things with panels I don’t think. |D For dumb quick jokes it’s usually not necessary! But lately I’ve been trying to experiment more with different shapes and layouts for different effect when things are serious. Basically I’d recommend taking a look at a lot of other comics or reading some books about comic theory, just to give you an idea of what can be done.

For the recent serious Undertale comics (and this is a new development, I haven’t done this before but i just have too many COMPLEX IDEAS I HAVE TO WRITE DOWN UGH), I usually write out a very very simple script of the dialogue I want for a scene in a text file while trying to visualize certain key actions or poses. For example, here’s some snips from the amalgam comic script.

hey, alphys? who is this? is this sans? how did you get my number? lucky guess, look, i need help- i need your help. i need help right now. are you- you got any room in your schedule because it's urg- it's pretty urgent, if you get me slow down, sans. help with what? it might be easier if you just see, is that alright? you available? well... yeah, i guess, where are you- /knock/ so, you see what i mean about it being urgent, ha ha. ha. [...] /entry/ god, what have i done? what have i done? -later- [walking] heh.... nyeh heh... [corner turn] [name] blocks the way.

It’s not capitalized properly or in its final form but you can get the idea. There are barely any visual details, since the majority of that is in my head. It’s mostly to iron out the dialogue, edit plot points or details, firm up the concept, yada yada. Anyway, once I’ve got a good sense of the dialogue and flow of the idea, I open up a file and start doing some loose thumbnails for the panels. I refer back to the script a lot to get an idea of how many balloons a panel will need, or how many panels I’ll need to get through the script, and I start matching pacing to action to dialogue. It’s kind of hard to describe I guess? Here’s a shot of the amalgam comic in the thumbnail stage as an example.

Here I wrote out the text (badly) to keep track of what went where. You can see everything is SUPER vague but my mental image at this point gets pretty clear for what I want a given panel to look like.

In other ones I just have empty balloons to mark where I want the text to go, which I fill in later when I do the panels and text.

The staggered panels at the bottom here came about for an interesting reason - mostly I wanted to convey several things at once, but didn’t have enough room I felt in a single horizontal row to get through them all and I didn’t want to split it into two rows. Staggering the panels as slices helped me fit more things in a smaller space and it broke up the flow in an interesting way, haha.

Anyway I dunno how helpful this is really, but panels really depend on what you’re doing. A lot of my panel decisions come down to trying to conserve space and pace the dialogue around evenly, though the jagged panels in the amalgam comic were definitely meant to get across panic and fear. But I’m just some dork. |D You should check out some books on this kind of stuff!