#my brain is working again!

[moonspirit]

Armin with accepting gifts: 2/10, overthinks, visibly struggles

Annie goes, "So hey, your birthday's coming up, is there anything you want?" but the silly boy just says "hehe nothing, I have you!" Which is honestly, an expected response, so she asks, "I saw that silver pocketwatch you've been wanting badly... The one with ocean waves engraved on it. I can buy it for you."

And you know what? Mentally, his puppy dog tail is going WILD. His girlfriend! Buying him a gift! Buying HIM a gift!!! His girlfriend buying him a gift!! HELL YES!

But he's also having a mini mental breakdown, because oh god??? If he says yes, is he making her buy it for him? Of course he's making her buy it for him, he's forcing her to buy it for him, he's mooching off his girlfriend when he should be buying her cute stuff oh god OH goD he's mooching off his girlfriend!!!!!

Annie with accepting gifts: 9/10, absolutely stellar recipient of tens of thousands of soft toys and hoodies and other stuff, drowns in them before she can even get a word out

"Annie!!! These earrings reminded me of you, so I bought them (〃 ω〃) I think they'll look so pretty on you. And um-I-I really want to see you wearing them and... huh? Your cheeks are so red-" - Armin

"Annie!!!! Here's a weird-shaped stuffed squirrel I found, it's got stupid fat cheeks like you have when you eat!! hahahaha!" - Connie

"Annie! Here's a hideous thing. I don't know what it is. But it reminded me of the day I saw your titan the first time. Brrr. Shivers. Anyway. You can have it if you want. But you don't have to. You know, just throw it away if you don't want to. I totally won't be sad or anything. I don't care, ya know. I-" - Jean

"Annie! Uh- hahaa, so I saw this cute pink frilly frock thing from the medieval ages so... you like these types of things right? frilly pink frocks? Right? I think you'll look great in it. Wait, why do you look mad-wait-" - Reiner.

"Annie! Here's a hoodie. I know you have about 124216483 of them already but a girl can never have too many hoodies. Love you~" - Pieck

[hansoeii]

crowley!

[beautysnake]

What he doesn't know wont hurt him.........

[chibigaia-art]

desire

[lotus-pear]

mourning black and the death of ideals

[hinamie]

domain expansion

[wardingshout]

alttp ish tegaki dump

[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!

[cangrellesteponme]

wife

[archiepelago]

alternate surface au inspired by a few ive seen around on tumblr :3

[a-writer-on-elm-street]

still behind on the christmas blurbs but i'm confident they'll all be out by the end of the year so that's something 🤷

[xxplastic-cubexx]

chair + helmet for funsies

[acmelab]

questionable priorities 😑

[expelliarmus]

[thebibliosphere]

"This is great; I think this is the first time I've managed to not let a hyper fixation get out of hand," I said to myself while opening up another blank Word document, only for my CPU to tell me in no unequivocal terms to fuck off as it made everything on my desktop hang for a solid minute and a half before resolving itself.

"Huh, that's weird," I said, "I'm not running anything intense. I wonder what caused that..."

Reader. I had 33 different Word Documents open, and 32 of them were Batman-related.

My brain's really just skittering around in the background, jotting things down on new Word documents like writing ideas on the back of discarded candy wrappers.

I hadn't even named any of them or turned auto-save on. They were all just there. Vibing in concept purgatory. One crash away from being lost into the void forever.

Anyway. I condensed them all into one giant "BATMAN IDEAS" document and pinned it to my taskbar next to Hunger Pangs stuff because why not. Might as well. But also, is this why my fucking hands hurt so much?

On the plus side, writing no longer seems to be triggering deeply harmful depressive episodes, so... yay? I guess?

[hiding-under-the-willow]

Had a. very silly au idea while I was sick