#but this is kind of tedious anyway

[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!

[waveoftheocean]

06.10.23 happy birthday iwa-chan!! sorry for inflicting paperwork on you for your bday but at least you have oikawa to help (coughdistractcough) you 🥰

[wedding-shemp]

In the 2014 Ms Marvel run they showed Kamala writing fanfic about superheroes presumably to make her relatable to the target audience of teen girls who also wrote fanfic about Marvel characters. But Kamala LIVES in the Marvel universe where those are just real people. So we have to imagine that Kamala got into some very tedious RPF discourse on the 616 equivalent of Tumblr

[samarecharm]

Cant believe they wont let me farm that fucking teddy bear

[youredreamingofroo]

something that I realized WAY too late into my tumblr "career" is that when you click on a post and have it pop up, the blog post color turns white, if you dont know what i mean, heres an example:

Here's how I see my intro/navi post (on my blog dash thingie):

But if you click on my page/blog (by clicking my name, not going to youredreamingofroo dot com), here's how anybody else would see it (aka not on dash):

which is VERY annoying especially since I like to make transparent images/banners/gifs and means I have to rebrand my banners- and I can't make the text darker, bc then it'll be hard to see when your just viewing it on the dash :/

I also didn't realize this when I make colored text and thus meaning the text on some posts w/ colored text will be/are hard to read

[cheriafreya]

this was painfully slow to go through, please don't ever do this again Hoyo :_)

[torchickentacos]

Me: "I should take one more art class for my final elective credit, it'll force me to experiment with new mediums and techniques that I wouldn't otherwise try."

Me when I then proceed to have to experiment with new mediums and techniques that I wouldn't otherwise try:

[aroacettorney]

perhaps the reason why aup ended like *that* is because it was not supposed to have a happy ending in the first place, but sayren didnt have the guts to deal with readers' backlash for when they finally kill off the main character so a half baked happy ending is what we get 😔

[clown-eating-pig]

idk if this is controversial or not, but I HAAATE the season five statements 😭😭😭 they are too abstract for me or something. I need a plotline to follow.

[crowcryptid]

my job is also paying for photoshop, illustrator, lightroom, and indesign subscriptions for every employee..

why

Edit: never mind it is actually the entire adobe suite? WHY??

[doebt]

You guys i was sleep deprived and like borderline suicidal and on the verge of tears all day today no idea wtf happened to me. like maybe moving is more stressful than i realised or maybe i was just hungry and tired but wowww ummm... glad thats over *slept and ate and feeling mostly better now*

[robotpussy]

been thinking about how sometimes i stay up for days braiding my hair and I wonder why i put myself through this every month... and its literally just because i don't want to do my hair more than once a month ndjwsnfjwe. if my hair is braided/twisted/i have crochet locs i can just throw my bonnet off in the morning and go outside. even when i had my hair out in an afro i had to comb it and pick it all the time like 😭😭😭😭 i don't want thisssss i missed throwing my bonnet off in the morning and not having to worry abt having a lopsided afro

[dockaspbrak]

Have you guys ever listened to the soundtrack of Phantom Thread? Like 4 songs on that album make me want to cry. Sandalwood I in particular rn. Jfc

[throwawaytabs]

man, i dont wanf to be treated like a doormat but i dont want to be feared either. i just want to be loved.

[rubberduckyrye]

Google how do you draw faster without losing quality--

[stellacendia]

I used to think that the only thing I learned in photography class is that I don't like photography as much as I thought I did, until I started going through old pictures from (years) before that class and I realize I did learn something else after all