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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Okay but what if the skywing dragonet actually survived?
Yeah i'm going to yap about my own AU about this.
But who said the Skywing dragonet is normal?
:)
(more yapping under the cut)
So bascially, in the first book, in the prologue specifically, most of everything is the same. Hvitur is trying to escape with the Skywing dragonet, gets caught by Burn, Burn makes her little speech yeah y'all know that part
But like. After she drops the egg, Hvitur actually manages to escape from the guards and her, and runs to grab the egg. He manages to do so, but he was SO desesperate to save that egg that he forgot he could fly, instead he used his wings to shield the egg and avoid it from getting damaged from the impact. In the end Hvitur still dies in this au sorry not sorry
Kestrel finds Hvitur's dead body and the egg and was quick to grab it before Burn's soldiers arrived, taking it to the caves.
The DoDs hatches in thr brightest night (Starflight still doesn't get powers privileges btw) and yay they (the guardians) fullfilled the prophecy!... Welp, since all of the DoDs are weird af (affectionate ofc <3), so is the Skywing dragonet.
The Guardians did not expect the little female dragonet to be 'odly white', aka albino. They thought her feathers and scales would get its colors after a few months or years but nothing seemed to change. And worse than that, she's partially blind.
Meet Swan, everyone!
(second image is a sketch of a more 'canon' take on her! Just a silly thing to check out my skills in drawing dragons :))
(more yapping coming soon don't worry, and y'all are all free to ask questions about the au!)
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Been thinking about how I engage with media knowing I have autism versus how I used to engage, before I understood why I felt everything so damn much, too much, all the time, why does it seem so easy for everyone else but I crumble when my shoelace is tied wrong. It’s the first time in my life that things have made sense.
(So.. yeah. Maybe logically I know that Bowser would be a sensory nightmare to be around, but like, if you slap on some headphones and stay away from the lava moat so you don’t overheat, you should be good, right. …right? 💀)
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Hi, Tumblr folks. For the first time ever, I'm opening up emergency comms via Ko-Fi. Long story short, less hours at work, but not less expenses in life, is a BAD combination of things. Any & all help is appreciated, whether that's thru commissioning or reblogging!
I've never taken commissions, and I'm not exactly a prolific/active artist, so I don't have a comm sheet or any idea what to charge, soooo the current plan is: tell me what you want & make me an offer, then we'll go from there.
A few quick rules:
1. No proship content and no sexual stuff of underage characters. You ask me for this, your message is getting deleted and you're getting blocked.
2. No "draw a real person or animal from this photo in *insert cartoon or anime* style" requests, please. If you have a reference image of an already cartoonified version of say, yourself or your pet that you'd like art of, THAT I can work with.
3. I don't draw explicit content, but suggestive/some NSFW is on the table. It's on a case by case basis, and I will refuse anything I'm uncomfortable with. But generally speaking, if it's something you'd see in say, the non-edited versions of Tenchi or Outlaw Star, I probably can & will do it.
4. Please don't try to take advantage of the "name & negotiate your price" thing by, for example, offering me $2.00 for an idea with multiple characters, full color + shading & a complicated background. Please just... don't.
Now that the rules are covered, let's talk contact & payment info! My Ko-Fi link is above, and you can either message me there or send me an ask here on Tumblr. 😊 If you prefer sending payments through PayPal, Venmo or CashApp, those are as follows:
PayPal: @ MissLisaMiray
Venmo: @LisaMirayHayes
CashApp: $MissLisaMiray
If you've read this entire long-ass thing, THANK YOU. Your uh, reward is me shutting up & showing you some examples of stuff I've drawn/what I can do. I apologize if downloading stuff from my not-updated-in-4-years deviantArt account then uploading it to Tumblr kills the quality. I am currently away from home (where my original drawings and the files on my computer are), so I'm working with what I've got access to. 😅
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sorry to everyone here from my educational testosterone post. i actually post art of gay people. ANYWAYS BUCKSHOT ROULETTE OC AU-
i don’t even know what this is i just got a little obsessed and drew a bunch of shit it’s not even accurate to the game but I DONT CARE ALRIGHT someone send help
shoutout to @mooneggtarts’ hazbin hotel au for getting me obsessed with the idea of this game as an au (ive been thinking about it nonstop I’m not well)
what if we made out on the buckshot roulette table (they’ve each been shot in the prefrontal cortex several times)
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man the thing about beauty standards and being ugly and being pretty and being insecure is that ultimately you do just kinda have to Decide that youre pretty. like ultimately thats how you become pretty, or hot, or sexy. you have to just Decide that you Are. you have to recognize that its made up, its arbitrary, its subjective, and that people might disagree with you about it, and as much as you are able, you need to completely and utterly disregard their opinions on your appearance, and decide that youre pretty now. and THEN.
you need to find beauty in "ugly". you need to recognize that ugly is made up, that its arbitrary, that its subjective, and you need to be able to find the beauty in it all. and this means you cant bodyshame people. you cant body shame shitty celebs or politicians. you need to base your criticisms on the substance of their character and misdeeds and unhinged horrific opinions and not give a shit about what they look like. you cant go calling people ugly for being shitty. you cant go calling people ugly for looking A Way You Dont Like.
and then if you wanna really galaxy brain this shit you start using ugly as endearment. OBVIOUSLY do not fucking call other human beings ugly. that shit is far too loaded, its just Rude. Dont call specific features of people or even characters ugly cos thats also too loaded. as a term it has baggage. but you can see the ugly in tacky, loud, garish clothing, and it can be Good. you can see the ugly in a distinctive, horrible tiny car from the 90s, and it can be good. you can see the ugly in animals that have evolved to look the way they do, without a single thought of what humans find appealing. you can see the beauty and the freedom in "Ugliness". you can break out of this shit altogether and feel nothing but disdain for anyone who stoops to insulting your appearance if they disagree with you about shit. you can get completely out of the cave of these beauty standards. you can find it so freeing to revel.in letting yourself be ugly. in recognizing that the way you look and exist might be ugly to some people, and youre out of the cave enough to simply recognize. thats just your opinion and it doesnt matter. didnt ask.
you can look at ppl arguing about the correct amount of skincare products to use daily, the Correct Amount of makeup, and whether or not its radical to conform to beauty standards or defy them and argue about is it really conforming if visible makeup pisses men off, and you can say, well I dont care about any of that, I recognize the societal pressures of flawless skin and all that but you see,
I just want to look like a silly little clown :o3
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