#comic making

[paperwingscomic]

Chapter Zero

The comic starts with this short teaser episode, the script has been slighty altered since.

This illustration has a speedpaint video as well.

Oh and if you are wondering what that butt-shark was, it���s called a Legfish, and Boti likes to doodle it everywhere. Webtoon banned it once.

[greykolla-art]

have you ever shared your comic making process? im super interested in seeing how you go about everything from start to finish!

[tawnysoup]

Finally now that the comic is fully public on comicfury, I get to share it with all of you here, too <3

If you enjoyed, please consider supporting by buying a PDF of the comic on itch.io: https://tawnysoup.itch.io/home-in-the-woods

[pink-onyx-au]

90% sure you've been asked this before but do you have any advice or resources on how to like. Plan a long term comic like this? How to write stuff out before getting to drawing and all that jazz

That’s ok! My best resource is just practice, and a tip from Rebecca Sugar about making a ‘roadmap’, basically the idea of what you want to do.

My advice for any story-maker is first know what you wanna accomplish for the comic/story you make. Do you want silly pointless action? Do you want deep topics? Both? Do you want a moral? Get that idea established first.

Once you know what you wanna do with the comic/story, plan the big picture. Point A to point B stuff. "I want protag to talk to antag and they fight, but verbal, no hitting. They agree but on one condition. Make it about X or Y" (that is literally how this comic was pieced together more or less. If your big-picture makes sense, you can fill in the journey to those points so much easier.

Once you get into the finer details, do a roadmap for the episode. Bullet points. Even write a short story. I do a mix of both. If I want something to happen but i dunno how, bullet points. If I can see the story already? I just write it down with prose and all.

Then, STORYBOARDS~

My sketching process is a hot, steaming mess, but that is because I sketch just to get the vibe, not perfection. I go in with the idea that it can -always- be changed.

This is episode 13 as we speak. I just finished sketching all the positional stuff so I can start putting the dialog in. Making sure it visually fits. If it doesn’t, then I’m not editing a huge picture into something. It is still flexible.

After this stage, I draw my roughs, then my lines, then color and background, and then post! I like to work on a whole episode at 1 time for consistency purposes and if I go ahead 4 pages I can look back and go ‘Ah crap the cup is in that frame but i forgot it on page 9’ or "oh shoot he isn’t supposed to have his jacket in page 12 because he got rid of it in page 3" long before the episode goes live.

Hope that helps!

[paintedcrows]

They do this every year...

Happy 25th to Dipdop and Lebam!! and Happy 17th to Hatsune Miku!! 🎉🎉

(comic continued: The M&M stands for...)

[gretashand]

I really love inking guys. all the stress of getting things drawn is gone and all the joy of making things pretty is here.

[igotthis-egg]

Doing page dimension tests before I begin inking bunker of the bleak, here’s a little N doodle I made to make sure my resolution is okay!

[legayllyblonde]

so close! the correct answer was "I love you most".

[thecompostpile]

New issues of Punks At The Beach 20 pgs b/w hmu if you want a copy

[oonaluna-art]

always “When is the update, Oona?” but never “How is the update, Oona?”

[My Ko-Fi] [Patreon]

[criiitter]

how did sonic even get him to take that?

[theghostavocadoe]

i wanna try making comics but I need to get comfortable with making fast, imperfect sketches before I start. I have a bad habit of needing everything to be PERFECT which means I take way too long on simple doodles. if anybody has any tips I'd greatly appreciate it.

[xfangheartx]

I ask because I've been thinking about how to make a comic easier, but I just wanted to see something.

[foxs0x]

Just some screen caps of what I’ve been working on this week lol

I’ve basically been learning the hard way on the importance of thumbnailing I’ve been making this comic one page at a time, drawing full versions of what I want, instead of rough sketches to plan it out. It has taken a long time per PANEL.

I don’t know why, but I find it really hard to draw thumbnails. I keep getting stuck on details. For example I spent 5 hours drawing Kerry last night — which is still not finished. I posted a preview of that last night before I went to bed. 😂 I spent forever mainly on his mouth / nose and expression. But luckily I exhausted myself enough doing this last night that I was able to do some rough lines without caring about details!

[thephooka]

Happy Webcomic Day! My webcomic White Noise is a labor of love--according to Procreate, this page took me 15.5 hours to complete.* Here's a look into that process!

Some other notes:

The thumbnails are done on graph paper and I script while I do them--there is no separate written script for White Noise. I usually spent a couple hours on weekends as needed thumbnailing, sometimes at a coffee shop or at home listening to records.

I then set up the file in Photoshop, so I can lay in the text and use the template I have with bleeds already set up. The text is rasterized and I shuttle the file over to my iPad via Airdrop.

The bulk of the actual work is done in Procreate, which records timelapses that I sometimes share to my Patreon. I usually spend a couple hours most nights after my day job or on the bus commuting doing this.

Once everything art-wise is done, I shuttle the file back over to my desktop to re-set in the text, add a stroke around the speech bubbles (Procreate doesn't have that took fsr) and do the resizing/exporting for web.

On Sunday mornings I get up, queue the page and write the page descriptions. I don't spend any time on the page descriptions outside of that.

Also, this process goes for the whole first arc of White Noise. I'm done with that arc (which means you can binge the whole thing I'm js!!) and am experimenting with some different methods these days, but my workflow is still generally the same.

*Some more talk about the labor (and burnout) involved below the cut:

This particular page (and most of the pages I did in 2023) took a lot longer than normal because I was heading into a burnout period that I'm still lowkey in/recovering from. It's obvious to me now in retrospect watching the timelapse here and seeing how much noodling I'm doing and how much I'm struggling with the process, but at the time I was just very frustrated generally. When I'm not burned tf out pages take maybe 10 hours max.

2023 was a pretty stressful year--lots of big life changes, uncertainty, pet death, health issues--so it's no wonder it propelled me into burnout, but it just goes to show that even the slowest and steadiest pace is not sustainable forever. I've been doing one page a week following this general process for over a decade! And I stuck to that pace because I knew it was one I could maintain. But even so, by the end of this arc I found myself working more and more slowly, not really looking forward to the work, feeling anxious about being behind, unhappy with the finished work, and extremely annoyed with myself for not being able to give it my all right there at the finish line.

I did stop for a while after the epilogue and took a more or less complete break from drawing for about a month--the longest I have EVER gone without drawing, much less working on White Noise--which did help, but these days my ability to work is...inconsistent. I should probably take another total break, but I'm reluctant. What if my passion never comes back? What if people forget about WN? It's already pretty obscure, and with the general social media collapse, it's harder than ever to get people to read my work. Now that I've left Hiveworks, WN doesn't even get the benefit of being linked to other comics (although objectively very, very few readers actually got referred to my comic that way.) And frankly, I'm also just too proud to go too long without comic updates. I've always told myself, I might not be the best artist or the fastest worker or make a popular comic, but I'm consistent. Difficult to let that go.

This is all to say that webcomics are hard. We do them because we love them, we have stories to tell, we are seized with the human compulsion to create. We spend hours of our time, almost always on top of the paying work that allows us to eat, to make something that we then give away for free. It has consequences on us that the reader doesn't often see, no matter how careful we are about it. If you ask me, webcomics deserve to be valued more.

Happy Webcomic Day! Read webcomics!