Hey everyone so in today's video
I'm gonna be working on some little comic strips so the other day when I was working on my sketchbook slam challenge
I was filling up pages in my sketchbook, and I decided to do some little comics, and they were really rough nothing special
But I decided I wanted to take them a step further and make them nicer
I just wanted to establish
a more concrete look to my comic strips so that I could make more down the line if I ever feel like it
It's not something I plan on doing on a regular basis
But if I come up with an idea I can whip up a comic just as something fun to do
So before I jumped in to recreating his little comic strips
I decided to hop onto Skillshare and see what kind of videos they had related to creating comics
I'm sure many of you have heard me talk about Skillshare before, but if you don't know what it is
It's an online learning community. They have a bunch of video tutorials about a bunch of different creative things like photography, drawing,
designing things... all kinds of topics
Skillshare is actually sponsoring this video and the first 200 people to use my link in the video description
Will get their first two months for free then after that it's as low as $10 a month
Or if you decide you don't want to continue you can choose to cancel at any time
So when I hopped onto Skillshare? I was actually really surprised to see some lessons from some comic artists
I
recognized
one of the classes was by Sarah Anderson who does the Sarah scribbles comics and her video was called creating web comics from sketches to
Final comic then there is also a lesson by Shen from Owlturd comics called
Happy, angry, Awed:
Drawing faces for web comics so I watched those two videos plus a couple other ones and then I decided to dive into
creating my little comic strip so the first thing I had to do is revisit the character design because I wanted to tweak it a
Bit for my original one because I didn't like her round bowl cut head
So I drew the character multiple times playing around with different facial features
Playing off the hair trying to figure out what I wanted it to look like what kind of clothes would she wear? how tall would the character be?
What would the limbs be like how many fingers does she have just little details like that
I was trying to hammer out and then once I was somewhat satisfied with the design
I drew it several times so that I could draw it consistently
I got down a system where the heads a circle, and then I draw the hair around it
But just the basic shape and then draw the curliness of the hair in afterwards just so it's more consistent
And I practice drawing the bodies just so I could draw her the same height every time
I mean is not perfect my character is not gonna look exactly the same from comic to comic
But that's something that hopefully I could nail down going forward the design is pretty simple
So it's not too bad so after I had the design down
I decided to practice some different expressions so something I got from Shen's lesson was this
downloadable expression chart that you can print off and this is what it looks like I
Decided I didn't want to draw directly on the chart, but instead I would draw a little bit bigger inside my sketchbook
But I still followed the same categories that he had laid out one of the interesting tips
I got from Shen's video was that when the eyes are farther apart the character seems more dumb
Especially if you have the mouth lifted up as well whereas if the proportions are more realistic. It makes the character look more smart
That's why I was like okay. I need to make sure my character's eyes are at least somewhat far apart
I want her to have a dumb look. They're like not really dumb, but just kind of a little bit dumb
Just goofy just so she looks a bit silly. I don't know someone someone's done with the expressions
I decided to move on to the digital side of this because I had
the original versions of the comics sketched out on ballpoint pen in my sketchbook
And I had to then translate it to a digital form if you want our comic strips to be serialized and be
similar to each other even though they're their own separate little comic strip and separate joke you want all of your format to be
Consistent so I was thinking okay the size, I'm making these boxes
That's gonna be my standard size the thickness of the black line of the box
I want that to be standard across all my comics
I was even considering having a set number of panels for all my comics
But it's just hard because it depends on the joke sometimes
You need more panels sometimes you need less
So I actually have a few different formats that I saved off like a three panel
version a two panel version and a four panel version
And they're just blank and I can just open those Photoshop files to create future comics in them one of the little tidbits
I learned from Sarah's video is that you can add a stroke to a selection like when there's nothing there?
nothing selected is just blank space and you got the marching ants you can add a stroke to that I
Didn't know you could do that. I knew you could add strokes to things
I just didn't know you could add it to a blank selection so that was her tip on making
Their little panels is that you just create your selection and then add the stroke I had no idea
I'm like 'oh my god. This is life changing. How did I not know this?'
Another thing that I'm ashamed
I didn't know about Photoshop that I learned from Sarah's video is that you can add a grid to your artwork
I didn't know that I knew you had the rulers and I knew you could drag out little lines from the rulers
But I didn't know you could just make a grid pop-up, so if you hold down the control key
And then press the key that has the quotation marks and the apostrophe on it, then it will make the grid pop-up
And if you press it again, it'll make it go away. I can't believe I didn't know about that I feel so stupid
I'm like wow
These are really great Photoshop hacks that aren't probably hacks, but to me. They're hacks because I didn't know about it
Yeah, once. I have my panels. I then sketched in a light color, and then I went over top with inks I decided
I just wanted to keep my comics black and white just for the sake of simplicity
They'll take less time to make and I think it'll just be more consistent
I was toying with the idea of maybe doing partial color like maybe everything's black and white
Except the characters in the scene like maybe they're their shirts are colored
and their pants unless they're colored in solid black just something like that but
Ultimately I decided to just keep it simple and not add any color, but because there's no color
I wanted to add
Some black areas to the character because I don't it all to just look white you don't the panels to just look pure white so
I made the hair black
And then I also made her leggings black initially the leggings weren't gonna be colored in and the shoes would be black
But I just decided to reverse that because the shoes didn't add enough black to kind of balance out the hair, so
By making it the leggings there's more black on the bottom to balance out the top half of her body
It just makes your comic look more appealing and it helps your character pop out from the background so yeah
If you're doing black and white color some things in black so when translating my initial comics over to this format
I made a few changes so for the one where she's decluttering I realized the middle panel was not really necessary
It said 'one hour later,' and that didn't even need to be there
I don't need to show passage of time by inserting that so I brought it down to just two panels
And there's the before and after I think that gets the point across a little better
Then there is the 'Artist Alley' one really the only change I made is that I made her signs bigger
Because when I first sketched this in my sketchbook
I did it as a full-page comic strip
But that's dangerous because you have so much space to draw in that you end up drawing some details smaller than you should
Because if you scale it down you can't read those details, so initially there was that sign aside 'prints $10'
But then there was a little '10 dollar' sign on each of the prints
And it was so small you couldn't really read it so I had one big 10 dollar sign in the corner
And then I added a banner on the front of the table that said "prints $10"
And then the rest of it is pretty much the same then for the self-checkout one. It's pretty much identical
I didn't really change anything except
I updated the character design so after moving on from the first comic and working on the second two I
Realized I started drawing the eyes
Too small and I wasn't keeping
consistent with the first comic so I had to go back in and try to fix it although with the 'Artist Alley' one in the
Final panel I want her pupils to be tiny her eyes are meant to be bigger about with tinier pupils
Just because it's a funny expression but for her more
Neutral expressions. I had to go back in and make her eyes bigger another thing I tried to keep
Constant was the thickness of my line because not only was I using the same brush throughout the whole thing
I was trying to keep it at the same size which was 10 pixels
but there were some things that I made it a little bit thicker just so it would stand out more like the
Text on the 'Artist Alley' sign and the text on the print signs at the table
So I would sometimes go thicker
Especially if it was a close-up of the character like I think that final close-up in the final panel
I went a little bit thicker on the line just so that she would look more
normal? like how she normally looks because if you draw the character bigger, but keep the line, width skinny
It doesn't look like the same character design
it just starts to look more off models, so yeah, it's something to keep in mind, then when I saved off the
I saved off a full res version
And then I saved off a second version where I reduced the resolution to a hundred dpi
I thought 72 was just a little bit too small too blurry, so that's why I went with a hundred
It's a low enough resolution that if you try to blow up the image
It'll be blurry, but at the same time it reads nice and crisp and clean when you're seeing it at a smaller size
That's just to help prevent art theft and prevent people from having a full resolution version of your files
so I keep the high resolution for myself in case I ever wanted to print it off on something and then the low resolution is
The one I upload to the Internet
And I also made sure to add a link to my website in the bottom corner
You could just put your name whatever you want
I figured why not link to my website because it is my name, and it just gets more traffic to my website
Maybe who knows I'll have to add a page on my website where I put my little comics, but like I said
I don't know how
How consistent I'm gonna be with this it's just gonna be
Occasionally when I think of a cute idea because I have done this in the past
but my comics were not consistent with each other and
So now I have a little a format nailed down right so I think
That that'll be nice if I think of an idea I can just whip something together although it does take more time than it looks
Looks like a really simple art, but it took me a while. I wanted to make sure the lines were clean and
Make sure it looks all good so that took some time if you're wondering at the thing in the corners. That's lazy Nezumi Pro
It's a line stabilizer it makes my lines
Smoother drawing the circles for the eyes is still hard though
Sometimes you get a nice round circle, but then when you close the circle the lines don't even touch and you're like
Oh well rip
it's handy if the pupil is touching the edge of the eye because that's where you start is where the pupil is so if your
Lines don't perfectly match up. You can't even tell cuz it's hidden by the pupil, but every other time
It's a pain in the butt, but anyway. That was my little foray into
comic strips using lessons on Skillshare for
Inspiration and for tips like I mentioned the link is down below for the first 200 people if you want those two months of skill
Share for free thank you so much skill share for sponsoring my channel again because it really really helps
Thank you guys for watching, and I'll see you in my next video
