#OC (mention??? Kind of???)

[deoidesign]

How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist

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!

Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!

[bunnieswithknives]

Gore, Violence and Blood under the cut

What a mess

[puppppppppy]

I can teach you how to be just like me

crying all night, sleeping till three

[apticho]

my hope, my star

[just-null]

I have never seen or read Demon slayer (and tbh I don't really plan to). And I've also never even heard of the clones up until your blog, so my only knowledge and understanding of them is almost solely formed on your interpretation. You made me want these guys in ways that are concerning feminism. I can't even think about picking up the manga because if the canon is somehow different by your interpretation I fear I would feel as if the canon ones were ooc. Like, no, Null never said they would do that🤨 does this guy Koyoharu even know what she's talking about??🤨🤨

Your cult leader loves background characters and tries give them as much love as the popular ones!!

bUT I TAKE A CHARACTER AND TRY PUSHING THEIR WORST QUALITIES ACCORDING TO MY DELUSIONS, SO THEY COULD BE JUST A LITTLE NICER OR WORSE.

sighs.. but tysm.. I try my best to make them in character as possible even if some qualities might irk you, but isn't that what makes them even more loveable? I hope I can bend the perception of more characters in due time.

Even if you did watch/read demon slayer, you wouldn't see these jerks until season thREE and EVEN THEN. SLAMS HEAD AGAINST THE WALL. WITH SO LITTLE SCREEN TIME. That's also probably why you haven't seen them around. they don't have much content or focus on their backstory, so the Fandom didn't get as attached. and I make it up with the scraps given.

holds your hands. I do recommend at least watching the scenes with the clones in the anime. their VAs did such a good job, I love both sub and dub. Sekido's grunts, Karaku's laughs, Urogi's laughs (and screeches), And Aizetsu's WAVERY VOICE all echo in my head constantly. I miss them.

[!!DEMON SLAYER AMOUNT OF BLOOD!!]

[chocodile]

Small character detail I have no good excuse to mention: Hyden hates anything remotely similar to "fast food". This applies to all AUs. He finds greasy, cheap, oversalted/overly sugary food disgusting. Additionally, he hates--HATES--messy food. The only foods he will eat with his hands are ones that are very clean and dry and leave no residue. Getting some sort of sauce or grease on his hands is one of the worst sensations in the world (doubly so when he's a bunny… to be fair, can you imagine eating barbecue while wearing fur mittens? Ew!)

When he was younger, he was slightly more flexible on these limitations. Here he is eating a "ham burger" normally to show how normal he is. He is fitting in with the common man. He is pulling it off. He's got this. Look how relaxed he is. You could almost miss the Rolex on his wrist.

Of course, every rule has its exceptions. As has been mentioned before Hyden often has no idea where food comes from or what goes into it. At some point, somebody failed to mention to him that Cinnabons come from kiosks at the mall and cost less than $100 each. Therefore, they escaped his "fast food is disgusting and I hate it" filter, and, in a modern AU, became one of his favorite desserts. He has a pastry or two each morning with his coffee and then wonders why he never seems to lose any weight.

[invinciblerodent]

Honestly, the more I talk to Teia and Viago, the creepier the Crows feel to me. They are so clearly yet so casually hiding their agenda in plain sight, beneath this... paper-thin veneer of respectability and kindness.

I just revisited Treviso for the first time after recruiting Lucanis on Marcus' run, and in that first conversation about the Butcher alone... Viago says at least twice that the Crows rule Antiva, with those words.

There is no standing army. The entire country is in the pockets of a handful of shadowy figures posing themselves as masked vigilantes who kill for both influence and profit, constrained only by gold and a fairly obscure moral code they don't make anyone else's business, until it'd become necessary.

Not to mention that the king's bastards are encouraged to join their ranks, with one of them being one of the leaders of the entire organization, and that coupled with all that we have already known about their corruption and training/recruitment practices from Origins and Inquisition, it's really not so surprising that there are guild leaders on Antivan currency rather than royalty.

The Crows are fucking terrifying as a faction if you bother to think about it more than five bloody seconds, and they're made only more so by just how personable they are in their presentation of themselves.

[soundwave-radioandbroadcast]

So, despite loving the characters from it, I! have! NEVER! Read the IDW comics lol sooo, here is literally ALL i know about it thanks to tumblr and the wiki!:

-Doomed Yaoi

-Brainstorm has his spark in a briefcase

-Brainstorm legit invents time travel to save his not boyfriend, while ignoring the fact Preceptor exists

-Kill your gays trope

-“Pharma? MORE LIKE HARMA!”

-Pharma should also get his medical license revoked for theft of organs and invasive surgery-

-Whirl can be more or less described as the Nepeta of the IDW comics /j

-Ultra Magnus is just some guy’s fursuit

-Prowl commits crimes!

-Prowl sucks at relationships so bad that Primus himself had to intervene and give him a polycue that would keep him in check

-There is canonically two relationship that can be described as “Tiny rabbit obsessed with big gf” meme

-Shockwave is Satan

-Rung is GOD????

-"And nothing could go wrong!" "OH NO IT ALL WENT WRONG!"

-Bastard (Getaway)

-Skids VC: Can't have shit in this universe

-Pharma also becomes God???

-Pharma may or may not also be like ratchet's ex

-Rodimus, Brainstorm, Preceptor and Whirl are all kind of hot ngl

-First-aid is levels of unhinged I did not know was possible

-So many people die holy shit

-Whirl has a kid

-There's more but I currently cannot remember what else there is lol

[prettyupsetnerd]

did someone say GOTHCLEATS FUTURE FAMILY HEADCANONS? no? oh-ok.....

[godbirdart]

if there's one [1] thing i will be forever grateful for in the internet era it's the vast variety and availability of pose / anatomy references supplied by photographers and models

i can go online and find PERFECT references for how fat folds crease the skin or how muscles wrap around the body and as someone who habitually draws most of his OCs ~modestly lean~ and wants to hone his skill in other body types, it is literally a godsend to have those refs so readily available

seriously, thank you all models and photographers for providing me the resources i need to expand my art skills i owe u my life

[acanaryscry]

What supernatural creature would you yourself assign for your detectives (or ocs) if they weren't the detective™ of that worldstate but like apart of the agency? or something idk

[spagheddiesquash]

jawfizz doodles… actually maybe ill work on that ship name idk if i like the name i said.. anyway i mentioned before that my plan was to ship fizz with jawbone and so thats what i did!! never drawn anything like this before but im really liking how it turned out :^DDD

liked this? maybe u want to see more?? i dunno. but anyway if you liked it feel free to reblog!!

tracked time + kinda crappy bonus doodle under the cut

tracked time:

(do keep in mind this is elapsed. it really took me the past 3 days, on and off)

bonus doodle:

(i used up all my good art juices coloring the doodle sheet so unfortunately this one is noticeably not as good of quality. i at least got the idea down tho!!)

[raiiny-bay]

but I can't wait until I see your face and my brain thinks that it's looking at a stranger

[puppppppppy]

the heaven and earth siblings

[atlasas45]

I kinda want to make a may be a long post of my headcanons that other creatures / animals also exists in the world of sky other than already existing creatures (such as manta, fish, crabs, etc) but I kind of a bad explainer in English ahaha- but here is what I am thinking about anyway-

Like for example, a cow or goat. Perhaps that can explains how the spirits (like belonging grandma and tip toeing brewer) can make cakes and breads because they have MILK as one of the main ingredients? (as for other thing like eggs and flours, eggs are probably from birds or there are also chickens in Sky and flour uhh I think I will explain this one while also explaining the farm and environment in my Sky AU or my fan-season concept) And I kind of remembered that there is a spirit who is lactose intolerant and other spirit that really loves milkshake in some spirits hint announcement ?? I forgot which spirits again were those but these also gives me hint that MILK exists in Sky and helped me with the idea of other creatures may exists (not really counting Nine-Colored Deer here since it's a 'magical' creature and a season collaboration with Sky) Other animals like a bear and a sheep and other animals with fur and wools may also exists since that helped the spirits to make fur-based accessories, clothes, capes, etc. Some of the masks from spirits also represents animals like yknow, something like bull mask, because they KNOWS the look of those animals as they exists.

[laugtherhyena]

Treating her like a barbie doll to put different clothes on