Hey everybody, it's LavenderTowne, today
We're gonna be talking about making good comics and, basically all the mistakes that I used to make that made my comics bad
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Now, there's nearly no wrong way to start a project or a comic but there are some ways that make it easier in some ways that
make it harder in my experience.
So the thing you want to avoid usually and what a lot of people fall into, is
When you have this sort of vague idea about what you want your story to be
Maybe you have a few characters
You have a couple scenes that aren't connected, that you know
you want to be in there and you just really want to start so you sort of just start pouring ideas out and
You don't really cut any of them back or anything like that and you don't really know where your story's going to go
You just hope to sort of cobble it together as you go on.
Now, well you can do that in my experience that ends up with a comic that you will not want to finish because when you get
To those certain scenes that you really wanted to get to it might not even make sense
because you didn't figure out how they're going to be connected, and then
Most importantly if you don't know where the story is going to end
It can be really hard to keep going because you're trying to figure out how to write the ending while you're working on the middle
And it makes it really difficult.
It also especially in case of like a narrative story and narrative comic,
you could end up in a situation where you're creating mysteries
You don't know the answer to and then inevitably when you have to answer the questions that you brought up
They might end up being kind of silly or not very satisfying for the reader
So what I recommend is finding your story's skeleton, your skeleton is the best of both worlds
You don't have to write out a complete script with all the details already decided which is something that a lot of people don't want
to do and even if you do do it a lot of the times you're gonna feel frustrated because
You've taken all the fun out of actually making the comic after that point
It'll be just mindless execution and there really won't be any wiggle room if you want to change anything
whereas if you go the other direction and you don't plan anything, like I said
There's all kinds of problems that erupt out of that
but if you find the stories' skeleton
You can find the core of what your story is supposed to be.
That'll keep you on track and making sense through the whole story while still giving you a little flexibility
To change it around if things aren't working or if you have some inspiration mid development
So here's how Pixar's story skeleton goes "Once Upon a Time" is the beginning
Just wherever you want to start your story
the "And every day" section is telling you what the daily life of the character
is like and where they're at right now at the beginning
Then of course "Until one day" that's the point at which you have to fill in
What the catalyst of the story situation is going to be.
the three "Because of thats" are basically just
You filling out the meat of the events of the story that will happen before the final climax
"Until finally" is the climax where they solve the problem somehow or the problem overcomes them. Whatever... type of
story it is. And since that day is just showing how things rolled out at the end
The moral theme of the story is not necessary if you don't want it to be but having some sort of thematic
Backbone can also keep your story consistent
so the next step after you have your story planned out enough that you can actually start the thing, is
motivation. A lot of people ask me about this and...
Motivation is a tough thing because it has to come from within yourself
However, there are a few ways to keep motivation up and prevent sort of the slow despair of running out of motivation
So here are the tips I would give you
First of all, you want to keep the snowball rolling.
Motivation becomes a bigger problem for at least for me when I have missed a few updates
That's when I have the hardest time picking up the pen to start
doing an update of Unfamiliar because I feel like a failure and I feel frustrated and sad and
Whatever the reason is that I missed updates, it makes me want to avoid the project altogether
So what I recommend in order to keep yourself motivated is to do whatever you can to make sure that you keep to your update
schedule
It'll make you feel proud when you think about it, your consistency, and that will help you stay motivated
Also, it just seems easier when there's less gaps between your pages. If you're doing pages a lot it doesn't seem so difficult
Whereas if it's been a while it's gonna seem like a bigger feat than it actually is
The stress of it just makes it feel like a bigger task
The other thing you can do is just make sure that you're not pushing yourself too hard
If you have like.. school and another job or something like that, don't expect yourself to be making a page every day
It's just not realistic..
Secondly, if you have a style that's really really detailed and delicate you have to give yourself more time. I
Intentionally picked a style that's relatively simplistic when I started making my comics because I wanted my updates to be frequent
Lastly make sure there's accountability
Put it up online and make sure that your update schedule is
Clear to your viewers, whoever they might be
Even if there's only a friend or two looking at your comic it will still make you feel more motivated
To get it done on the update schedule if you know that people are waiting for you
It's something that helped me out a lot for sure
so the last thing you need to do before you really start is
To design your characters and make sure that they look exactly the way you want them to
Before you get started on the other hand don't beat yourself up too much if they're starting to look a little different
You don't want to fight progress and you are going to get better at drawing really quickly if you're drawing so much for your comic
So don't don't freak out too much as you can see
Planchette looked really different in page one than she did in the more recent pages
Because my art style has been evolving and I've been making little changes to her. So it's not too big of a deal
So now I'm going to go through step by step and show you exactly everything I do to make my comic and these are
Steps that you can do whether you're a traditional artist or a digital artist
Now the first thing a lot of people ask me is, "What size do I make my pages?"
So my pages are seven inches by ten and a half inches
And that was just something that I looked up
To see basically what good sizes are if you want to do printing like, for books in the future
so the first step that I take on the actual execution process once I've gotten my empty file is I
want to make thumbnails. Now, what a thumbnail is just a super tiny version of the page and
This is not a sketch because you're making it so tiny small
It's basically just like, the quickest possible sketch that you make it a really small
Size because you want to be drawing in a such a way that you don't worry about erasing
When you do nice sketches, it can feel very painful to erase pieces of them
But at this point you're just plotting out
Where the word bubbles and where the characters are going to be and you want to be able to erase a lot
This is the main way that I figure out the flow of the page and this is a really crucial part
This actually takes a really really long time
It's surprising but.. even though the thumbnails really look crappy and like they're not very fancy art
This is where the meat of the comics look is actually decided now after the thumbnails are done
I blow up the thumbnail to a very large size
I make sure it's within my guide which is basically like a half inch all around I think and
That just makes sure that there's like a bleed area where if I do ever get it printed
Where the bubbles aren't too close to the edge. Basically I don't let any of the bubbles get in to the guide
so the way to make sure that your bubbles aren't crowding your characters and
your words aren't crowding your bubbles is to start with the text
While it's still a messy messy messy sketch you want to type in all the text.
So once you've typed in all your text, then you know
how big of a bubble you're going to need.
Now, you draw out those bubbles and then you can see if there's any places where your art's getting crowded
Now after this is the laborious inking stage a lot of artists would have an additional sketch stage after this
Usually you wouldn't ink on top of a thumbnail. This is kind of a weird quirk of mine and I don't necessarily recommend it
It's just the way that I do things
it makes it so that I have to figure out a lot of details on the fly and I personally like that but for a
Lot of people that's a lot of stress in the inking stages. You don't really need
so this part takes the longest by far and
I would also like to mention that this whole comic page
it's just one comic page and my art style is relatively simple, but this took me four and a half hours to make and
This is literally all I worked on during that time. So like I said comics are a slow business
So all the while while I'm inking
I'm making sure that everything is still looking right because, you
definitely want to catch any final mistakes in this part before you put any color and once you've added in the color changing something is
Infuriating if you're not doing color then you'll be doing grayscale at this point
so this is a colouring stage and my number one tip for coloring at comic is to
Make sure to limit your colors. Comics are very very
bloody when it comes to colors
You'll often find yourself
wanting to find more and more colors and then after a while you look back at your page and you're like
This is a mess. Like there's just too much going on when I first started Unfamiliar
I only allowed myself to use 7 colors and it is since expanded wildly
I used to only have really different shades of blue and orange and
Now it's all kinds of crazy colors and I'm suffering because of that
I wish I had kept it restricted because it actually makes things a lot easier and weirdly enough if
You get used to that color palette as you're reading it. It doesn't look weird at all
Even though I have like some blueish trees and stuff like that cuz I didn't really have greens in my color palette
It ends up looking really unified and beautiful so learn from my mistakes kids
Keep it keep it restricted if you can because it makes it so much easier in the future
After the flat colors are in I am shading and doing some basic like
Light effects, I would say like just trying to give some atmosphere to the whole thing and doing gradients and stuff like that
This is very digital
So if you're doing your comics traditionally, you might skip this stage altogether and have done the shading sort of during the coloring
Area and with that we're done
So that's exactly how I make my comic. Obviously only take the advice that you think would be helpful
And I hope you guys have good luck on your future
projects and endeavors
Feel free to tell me about your comic in the comments below if you have one or if you have any questions you like me
To answer in a future 'Do This, Not That' please
let me know another big thanks to
Wix for sponsoring the video. Check the link in the description if you want to try Wix for yourself
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