#my brain just doesnt always work

[schmorpthe]

I wish Splatoon had a "Sorry" button.

Sometimes I'm a fucking idiot and do stupid shit and I want to own up and apologise for my actions 😭

[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!

[frobby]

I think it would be really funny if rin was the more helpful one around his house. Like u would think rin would be the disrespectful one who always bails on housework or mass but its actually yukio who would always have an excuse not to go or forget about chores to the point that rin just does them instinctively now

[triglycercule]

hhhhidea...,,,, CUTE idea (kinda?) dust reading to phantom papyrus during night to lull him to sleep,,,, but really its just a way for him to pretend that everythings not really that shit (as if phantom paps isn't just dust's denial incarnate) and to help him NOT wake up because of a nightmare again or something

(and just because i can't resist now im imagining this with mtt. not that dust stopped reading to paps in place of killer and horror (because he wouldnt he simply wouldn't) but now the two join them for storytime. horror knocks out pretty damn fast and eventually dust falls asleep too after he makes sure that paps is satisfied with the amount he read and then killer's just left to sit there. maybe he tries to fall asleep maybe he doesn't,,,, maybe he picks up the book and continues reading but EITHERWAY,,,,,, this scene in my head so 💥💥💥😇😇😇)

[ganondoodle]

a panel from the rough draft that i like alot (hes catching hylias punch with his own hand, in case its too scribbly to see)

(comic wip)

[samarecharm]

Love being able to write. I can do whatever i want. I can make Ryuji interact w Lala-chan and u literally cant stop me.

[b4kuch1n]

ough brain is doing SO bad but sometimes. there are colors

[icewindandboringhorror]

sometimes looking at like Self Help Strategies lists for the symptoms I'm having is always just like:

thing that I already do

thing I have tried 10 times

thing I already do

thing that I don't have the money to do

thing I already do

thing I've been doing since I was 10yrs old to no avail

thing that is impossible given my situation

thing that doesn't apply to me

thing that I already do

thing I have already tried

hrmm, oh wait, maybe finally- OH, yeah.. okay. thing that I already do but it was just phrased slightly differently

thing I have already done

[badlydrawndedkidz]

hello there! it's me, Tortilla, known mostly as Mod by the people who have been following this blog for a While!

if you've ever scrolled for a bit here, you've probably Seen that I've tried a few times to get back into posting more often and failed comically as i grappled with the dreaded Mental Eel Nesses and Executive Dysfunction, among other things. especially since ask blogs aren't as popular as they were back in the day when i made this blog (2015! turned 9 years last aug 15th! that's an entire child. jin owes me a lot of child support,)

(before anyone gets scared, no I'm not deleting anything lol gimme a sec to word this thought)

okay so like. cutting straight to the point not gonna get sentimental right now I'll save that for later: i want to keep this blog active REALLY bad, but as much as I'd like to, for multiple reasons i cannot draw as much as i did back in the day, which is like... the main thing i usually post here. so I've been pondering for the past year or so What to Do about it

my one idea is to turn this into a general kgpr blog and reblog other people's art and official stuff and the alike here, instead of keeping it Just My Stuff

but the thing is, if i DO that i would want to change my url, because reblogging art to a place that's named "badly drawn--" whatever is. i Don't Want That y'know? it's disrespectful lol

the thing is that that's soooo many links that would Break. among other things. (+ i have nooo clue what id change the name to but that's a different issue)

so like, my question here is,

[skunkes]

original colors

[bunnihearted]

🫖🐭☁️🍚

[n0bluev]

Theres a fine line between everything and nothing at all

[dnangelic]

btwwww even if you have nostalgia for the series or think you know my muses because of it please don't try to project that onto my portrayal... there's been this phenomenon over the past few months where occasionally people seem to forget that i'm still an actual person(tm) behind all the dnangel stuff and therefore feel i should be obligated to entertain or write with them (as a mun, and having had many, MANY bad experiences on tumblr, i can in fact be extremely selective, things are happier when they're smaller but intimate for me) OR people don't pick up that my portrayal is in fact only semi-canon and is therefore unique and hand-built. if you come in constantly swinging with your own idea of my muse without being willing to ever actually actively listen to me about how my portrayal actually is, (even just a little or in general, i don't ask for total understanding!) i'm not really going to be happy about the difference. especially when 99% of people who go through dnangel don't actually pick up on some of the details (this is ok btw the manga is somewhat sloppy and esoteric and most people only read it in middleschool) or they haven't gone through the other formats of media (drama cds, light novels) for it. let me do my own thing but also recognize it as my own thing too!!

[phagodyke]

the masculine urge to take a saucepan off thr draining board and bash myself repeatedly over the head with it until I pass out and no longer have to experience feeling Bad 😍

[alchemiclee]

been trying to figure out what exactly it is about aventurine that feels perhaps relatable, or what it is that makes me want to study him like a bug...

and camr to the thought that he's pretty pessimistic for am optimist...but also ob the other side of the same coin, he's optimiaric for a pessimist. kinda both at the same time,.or depending on the day or how you look at him maybe.

he's an optimist becuase he knows he's going to win. he always wins. he has always won his gambles. he knows it will happen again and again. his luck, or gift, or blessing, or whatever you want to call it ensures that. but he's also a pessimist becuase he knows that "win" also always comes with some kind of suffering for him. he wins all his gambles, but at what cost? a lot, actually. so is it really a win? he knows he will win, but he also knows he will be used, abused, sacrificed, broken, or in pain. he expects those to be a consequence of his winning luck, to the point of making sure it happens and becomes self-destructive because of it. he acts calmly like it's ok and is the outcome he wants and calls that a win because it's what he plans and expects. he bets on it and it happens.

but at the same time, he's slowly breaking and seems to want it to end. he tests the limits of his luck to see if it's a real "gift" or if it is all a coincidence and has an end. he probably wants to meet the end to end the pain and suffering, but knows his "luck" won't allow it. he wants to be against the luck and see if he can win. a whole contradiction it itself. his luck kept him alive so many times and continues to do so. it will always do so, unless perhaps his end is the goal. what if he bets on losing this time? bets in meeting his end? he needs to get lucky enough to achieve that goal. flip his lucky fate by turning his luck around, make his end the final lucky win.

but it seems like he either lost for once and didn't meet his end....maybe his luck truly does intend on keeping him alive...or he changed his mind in the end and got lucky enough to get out of meeting his end once again...

he's still a bit of an enigma to me and i'm not sure exactly what happened. but he's for sure a complex and amusing character (even if I still want to put him into a snow globe and shake it as hard as I can) and this whole penacony story is too complex for my soggy trashcan brain lmao but i'm enjoying the ride

[bueris]

okay maybe I should seriously reconsider my path in life and sell my soul to marketing or journalism instead