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!
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WOW, THANK YOU FOR 100+ NOTES AND ALMOST 40 (38) FOLLOWERS!
I'm really glad you guys like him a lot!! here's a for-fun piece I did today of them!! Thank you so much!!
It brings me so much joy to bring an enjoyed creature to the table, and make pieces that i like that other people also like :)) !! you guys are the coolest!! handing you all little gold stars, jellyfish charms, and glowsticks of your choosing
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What's Nymrod and Raphael's relationship like? Feel like there's much to speculate from the glimpse in your recent comic
Ahh yeah, so it's not exactly a realistic or healthy dynamic. Nymrod is purely pet to him at first, romantic and sexual tension only happened with some time afterwards, which is still evolving. (He purchases Nymrod from another devil a few years before the events in bg3, timelines with DIA are a bit messy so I won't comment on that.)
Raphael views Nymrod as someone he OWNS, he's quite literally property to him, but he also views him as a person he can converse with and trust..
Unlike his staff, which he beats and abuses both verbally and physically (or psychologically) Nymrod gets favored treatment. This doesn't mean he's infallible to Raphael's wrath, he simply has never done anything to give Raphael a reason to hurt him.
Suppose if you have a pet you truly favor, you'd rather keep it close for comfort than to scar it, yes?
Well.. Then there's also the fact that he's a devil, even as a half-devil I don't think 2000+ years being Mephistopheles' (disgruntled) nepobaby would make you view life the same way a regular mortal character would.
If anything, I was personally surprised by how violent he apparently is revealed to be once you enter the house of hope in comparison to his romanticism in your first three+ encounters with him in the game. Then again, his debtors and staff have probably given him reason to hurt them. (I don't remember if Korilla is amongst those who get abused, let me know?)
So in short, Nymrod is a favored pet who has the potential to become more than a pet. Raphael is definitely getting a bit attached to the twink disaster of a ''tiefling'' he is.
As for how Nymrod feels about him, I wouldn't say ''stockholm syndrome,''
He's been through a lot and by the time he's living comfortably in House of Hope he's long since developed romantic feelings for him. In Nym's eyes, Raphael is his savior not his owner. This is why I say it isn't exactly a healthy dynamic, haha.
He also doesn't refer to him as master, which is a privilege granted that Raphael is fine with.
Otherwise do know they're both BRATS who match their freak. Nymrod looks cute but he's.. Uh, not a good person. He wasn't a good person long before got where he got.
Raphael (cambion form) Is much taller / more buff than his human form, so.. Nymrod just looks tiny here.
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the thing with Alex is that he's not stupid. He's generally a very smart guy. He just has a learning disability and doesnt do well in academic studies, which given how people make assumptions based on schooling:tm: often leaves for heavy judgment. Combined with a heavy accent and his gruff exterior people often tend to make wrong assumptions about Alex, and some stuff is unfortunatly internalized.
But in the right context and the right situations, Alex has his own strengths (and not just physical ones lol)
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i'm just saying that somewhere out there, there is a bizarro regis that is a human guy that sits in caves in complete darkness alongside five vampires and communicates through telepathy with them. whose eyes have grown to the size of drachmas and twists his head and scampers in jarring ways. and he also drinks human blood. in human terms, this guy would be so fucked up.
we would be like, what the fuck. this guy is no longer human - he has ceased to be human, he has become a vampire. (though he would still be undeniably human, able to do human things if he hasn't forgotten them, and also unable to do many vampire things)
so i'm saying this to illustrate a point, to try and illustrate regis in vampire terms. to live in a house (or palace) in daylight with five humans and speak with spoken word. to walk on the ground and have facial expressions and nod your head and sew with your hands. and to not drink blood, of course. so what would other vampires think of him. yeah. that's right
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