#i've had that panel visualised for months

[pitchblackespresso]

Spring of Power

For @zelinktines 2025 Day 16 - Faith

Comics master post

[kimtaegis]

gifmaker / cc wrapped ✦ every month of 2023

thank you so much to my favourites @raplinenthusiasts, @jkvjimin, @starcatching, @cordiallyfuturedwight, @sevencoloredstar, @rjshope, @hyunsung, @loversmore & @ye-xiu for wanting me to look back at my creations from last year, I love you!!

January 🌙 most popular: fluffy haired jungkook comp 🤍 my favourite: jimin x satellite gfx for my sweet mona; one of my most favourite things I've ever created, actually! I love how the textures turned out, and how I visualised the lyrics

February 🌙 most popular: yoongi-centric ot7 comp (😔😔😔) 🤍 my favourite: gradient taekook comp; the PLANNING that went into this agdhhj I was super proud of how this looked in the end! plus I love making gifts for others <3

March 🌙 most popular: yoongi's signature smirk comp 🤍 my favourite: jimin FACE gfx; I don't even know what had gotten into me, I made that so comparably fast?? I was just obsessed with the water theme and the new effects I used - the fact that I made a moving water reflection? hell yeah

April 🌙 most popular: Road to D-Day comp (my most popular from this whole year, actually) 🤍 my favourite: gradient jimin FACE era comp; probably my favourite set from this whole year, I'm beyond proud of how this looks, so vibrant and prettyyy lmao also Jimin and FACE were definitely the highlight of my year, I was so happy while making this)

May 🌙 most popular: jinminkook comp 🤍 my favourite: I love all three comps I made that month, but I think it's still gonna be awi's birthday jimin gfx, simply because I love her so much and the middle panel had my back in PAIN lmao, I love animating doodles even if it's a lot of work

June 🌙 most popular: the tannies being bad at sports comp 🤍 my favourite: they connect to 7G comp; unfortunately I had no ideas for a festa post this year, but I still made these two sets to celebrate them a little bit. I just love comps that have me smiling the whole time while making them!

July 🌙 most popular: jctpmwsmlastilmmtu pt. 1 (mimi series) 🤍 my favourite: yeah it's this one too :((( I love jimin so much y'all and that comp series is so self-indulgent and comforting and healing it literally. makes. me. tear. up. just look at him oh my god

August 🌙 most popular: jungkook for calvin klein 🤍 my favourite: yoongi's final concert; broke my heart into a million pieces, but his smiles glued it somewhat back together. I will forever be sad and miserable about this tour so let's not talk about it

September 🌙 most popular: jctpmwsmlastilmmtu pt. 2 (mimi series) 🤍 my favourite: ...yeah that one again :( but I also made so many nice taehyung layover gifs <33

October 🌙 most popular: the tannies sweeping yoongi off his feet comp, but the threemin suchwita comp literally just has one note less lol 🤍 my favourite: that one's tough... it was mimi month and so much good stuff got released + vicnic... ah I'll just go with blond jimin in his fluffy green sweater 💚

November 🌙 most popular: my sweet boiled dumpling pouty yoongi :((( 🤍 my favourite: the sweet boiled dumpling running excitingly; it was missing yoongi and the tannies month (still ongoing)

December 🌙 most popular: jimin backstage in his purple Filter outfit (while y'all saw the gender demon I saw my slayful colouring...and the gender demon) 🤍 my favourite: moon/ the astronaut seokjin gfx for my love kayla; it was nice to make an edit without time pressure for once, and I love the references I put in, also the colours and textures!

I'm tagging @avizou, @agustd3, @magicshop, @dasisugarun, @jung-koook, @jinstronaut and @taetheists, have fun!! 🤍

[brosencrantz]

OUBLIETTE: Reflections on Year One

I've been making a webcomic for a year now; here are some things I've learned.

Mosaic from one of the very first pages. These have aged alright, I think.

Making a webcomic isn’t one skill, it’s a bunch of different skills flying in close formation.

Obvious really, but a shocking amount of effort when you’re actually learning them all from scratch; you realise why the credits for most successful pre-internet comics had one person doing pencils, one inks, one letters, one colours… Writing is a skill; art is a skill (and drawing expressive people is a totally different skill to drawing plausible mechanisms or cityscapes); visualising a scene and segmenting it into panel layouts is a skill; inventing and applying colour palettes is a skill. All of these I’m essentially teaching myself from a baseline of zero (except writing fiction, from a baseline of ‘I worked hard at this ten years ago’).

Added to all this, webdesign and website management are another skill (of which more anon) and trying to get anyone’s attention about The Thing I Made in the hideous algorithmic nowhere-land of 2020s internet yet another, which I mostly can’t be bothered with. Learning is fun, but it’s A Lot, especially when this is a hobby for fun and the minute it stops being fun I don’t have a reason to do it.

3d model of Erewhon St flats. Another thing to learn how to do.

Accordingly, workflow matters a lot

I have found it quite difficult to mentally jump from one skill to another, and have found it easier to apply each skill to ‘batches’ of pages than to apply each process to a page in sequence. I try to script out an entire chapter at once (though changes invariably come later), and then draw it in blocks of c.4-5 pages, first with rough sketches and panel layouts, then working out props (including 3d models to help with perspective, and 2d patterns that can be distorted into backgrounds), then lineart, then colours, then shading, then speech bubbles etc, to a block at a time.

I have adjusted the ‘stages’ of design (this is what I’ve been using in the last few months) and while I still don’t have this nailed, I think an update schedule and drawing approach based around batches of a month’s worth of pages is currently feeling easier and more time-efficient.

The very first comic page I did – embarrassingly crap in itself, but a helpful reminder how far I’ve come. A Remastered version will appear in the comic in a few years, and it’ll feel good to compare the two.

Practice (and process) makes my art both better and faster, but there’s always something new to learn

This project was partly a learn-by-doing approach to teaching myself digital art, and I’m getting there. My art is still very much Not Good but is visibly improving as I discover shortcuts and become more practised and comfortable. These improvements make my drawings look better but also make it quicker to churn them out. I have found a relatively consistent way of drawing faces (which were definitely my weakest point and I hope are now merely weak), and various tools and technical techniques to make things go faster (without, hopefully, being quite as obvious about it as all the low-end high school romance webtoons out there assembled from the same prefabricated Clip Studio assets.)

However, as soon as I get comfortable with one thing I discover I want to get better at the next (I’m still rubbish at clothing, for instance). It might be one day I’ll reach a level of ‘fundamentals’ such that, rather than going through complex processes, I can just pick up a stylus and bash out what I want to. But that feels a long way off.

The temptation to go back and fix things is strong

A lot of the story was formed before I started drawing it but a lot more of it has emerged over time. As I get better and more comfortable with all this, I’m realising I have accidentally boxed myself in, or missed opportunities, in early pages, and now have concepts and parts early on that I want to change. I also note little infelicities in writing and art that are worth fixing.

I’m conflicted about what to do here. Chats on various sites (Spiderforest discord, mainly) have been helpful with the sense of a webcomic as an early draft. Kill Six Billion Demons reset itself fairly early on to make a bunch of Early Episode Weirdness line up with the massive plot that Abaddon later delivered. I am tempted to make tweaks – but I am also worried that way leads endless tweaking and no forward progress. Hum. Better to resist for now.

A great pleasure of doing your own world is just inventing random things. Here’s a cable-car station, with apologies to Otto Wagner.

The net is awash in art tips – lessons on specific things are what work for me

There are an infinity of drawing guides on the internet and I have found almost none of them helpful. The same search term will get you Fine Arts degree stuff and dudes who just want to get a perfect lensflare on yet another sameface anime girl in an incredibly beautifully over-rendered background. There are also generalist “teach yourself from scratch” sites which I also find unhelpful – I tried drawabox on “fundamentals” and stopped after drawing a bunch of boxes because I don’t care about drawing boxes and the exercises were doing absolutely nothing for me. I can only really learn by doing and I can only consistently make myself care about doing the thing if there is something specific I’m trying to do – that’s been the whole point of the comic.

Where I have found a particular thing sticking is when I have a specific object or concept I’m trying to draw and there’s a guide to help with that. The Etherington Brothers’ guides are great on individual things (although in the most unhelpfully diffuse format possible – please for goodness’ sake sell me an ebook, I’m not buying a massive stack of £25 hardbacks); individual Clip Studio tuts are also often good, although also often obviously targeted at people who aren’t me.

Website management hasn’t really got any easier

I wonder if one of the lesser reasons for the decay of the internet into its total capture (front end, back end and finances) by a handful of hideous megacorps – social media being the big one – is that it feels like far more of a headache to do your own website than it was a decade or two ago. I learned my WordPress skills for uni websites circa 2010, since which I’ve forgotten most of them, and while the backend of that hasn’t really changed at all (this horrible Gutenberg thing aside), finding hosting and making it work is the same amount of a faff as then and setting up SSL certificates even more of one. Generic ready-made site builders like Wix are crap and the bespoke webcomic plugins for WordPress exist but need a few technical skills to make work; Toocheke was a struggle for me; Comicpress is great and well-documented but hasn’t been supported in yonks so one day (The great Erin Ptah has had a better time with Toocheke with than me, here are her reflections). CSS and WP theme design is yet another skill and one I now have essentially no interest in learning again except to get a viable website.

I’ve only glanced, and might glance again, at Tapas/Webtoon, but last time I did they seem to be forcing a vertical scroll format, have rather worrying TOS, and absolutely awash with indistinguishable romance manga slop. Which might be where the readership is but I don’t care enough about the numbers to make that compromise. A much more appealing and more old-internet solution seems to be the site Comicfury which does most of the hard work for you. If there’s a next time I would probably use that, like my pal Crow-Caller.

Momentum is essential, but so is time off

From the beginning I’ve tried to do something with OUBLIETTE every single day, on the basis that keeping good habits and keeping the comic in my head are positive and self-reinforcing. I think this was a good approach with two main problems. One, when I fell off the wagon (usually due to a holiday or some other full-time commitment) it was really hard to get back on it. Two, it was getting exhausting and increasingly conflicting with non-comic things which also matter to me (like a job, partner and life). I found that giving myself one day off each week made it much, much easier to keep the momentum up but I haven’t found an answer to the first problem yet. I had a huge amount of personal and work commitments pile up and basically had to write off late November through to Christmas. But I’m back in the saddle!

Audience feedback: not obsessing over numbers is essential, but positive feedback is incredibly motivating

From the endless variations on “please review!” on fanfiction.net back in 2004 I have seen creative friends who associate their self-worth with online audience feedback to the point that a lack of it actually hurts them, and am determined to avoid that. It helps that I’m older and have less to prove; I don’t care about ‘number goes up’ and I don’t want a big following, that’s far too much grief in this day and age. But the sense of howling into a void can be thoroughly demotivating and the occasional comment from someone who is actually reading and appreciating things a powerful antidote to that. I have several loyal and regular commenters who really raise my spirits whenever I see something from them. And a very low point in motivation late last year coincided with a good friend – who I hadn’t even realised read the comic! – dropped me a message about one page. I think it’s safe to say without that positivity I might have given up.

See you in a year!

My next plan is to keep on this to the end of 2025, at which point – once again – I’ll consider if it is still worth the effort I’m putting into it, and I’ll also decide if it’s worth going back and fixing some early stuff. At current rate of Narrative Unfolding I can see the planned story lasting 500 pages, which if I don’t speed things up a bit is going to be ten years of my life. And, I’ll be honest, it’s a colossal amount of time and effort to produce something I still really hesitate to describe as “good” rather than “passable, but improving”.

But the time will pass anyway.

[dryspaghetto]

Another Love Story. Performing Intimacy, 2022, by Karla Hiraldo Voleau

"Another Love Story reveals' her most personal work to date. Initially, the project was conceived as a romantic tribute to love, describing how the artist and a previous partner (known as 'X' for anonymity) found their way back to each other after a four-year separation. The project was then radically reimagined when she discovered that X had a double life and was living with another woman. The revelations prompted a profound disruption of her inner and outer world. She was left confronting the difficult reality of finding herself dispossessed in her own story. "Things were starting to not feel right, " explains Hiraldo Voleau. This led her to call his ex-girlfriend, (in the script 'Elle'), out of the blue. "It was one year after we got back together, and I wanted to ask her why she was still in contact with my boyfriend". She replied, 'Well, he's my boyfriend too. I live with him. I've been his girlfriend for four years. We are trying to have a baby'." In an attempt to reconcile this trauma and reclaim her story, Hiraldo Voleau metabolises the break-up by retelling it. Using a combination of original images and re-enactments created with an actor, she visualises the transformation from the couple's initial explosion of love and sensuality, to the painful distance and tension as things fall apart. Together these fragments of the relationship become proof of its existence. Hiraldo Voleau initially worked with an actor for legal reasons, but the act of making the work together ultimately emancipated her from her former lover. Discovering that your partner has a double life makes you question everything. You start wondering who's who? Who was this man? What was real? My only way to move forward was to reclaim my voice and my narrative by making this project."

Another Love Story is presented chronologically in 13 panels of images, one for each month of the rekindled romance. Mimicking an Instagram feed, Hiraldo Voleau reflects upon the staging of love and photography's slippery role as the unreliable witness. It lays bare the social contract to memorialise our relationships online, the pressure to perpetuate perfection and the chokehold of keeping up appearances. In the spaces between each panel, we gain access to Hiraldo Voleau's dramatic and revelatory conversation with A. Presented as a script, it complicates and contradicts the images while reinforcing the performative nature of romance. On the surface, Another Love Story is about unlikely personal transformations and what drives people to heal, reclaim themselves and bounce back after heartbreak. But the project's real work teases out the visceral and vital agency of women's desire and pain and how talking about it is perhaps the primary way to survive it." Extract from the British Journal of Photography Love / Ukraine issue, 2022 - written by Gem Fletcher.