Any tips for a newbie trying to write a comic?
maybe...
Start now!!! Perfect will never come. A year from now you'll have learned more than you ever would have by waiting to be good enough to let yourself start in the first place.
Starting small is generally good advice, but really you should start with the story you're actually excited to make.
Every scene is there to accomplish a specific goal, and that goal CAN be accomplished in more than one way. Don't go ahead with a scene you don't love because you "need" it. Plan ahead, and edit with a machete.
If you don't love a scene, your readers won't love it either.
You have to be your number one fan, keep your number one critic to yourself. Putting yourself down doesn't make anyone want to read your comic.
The process that works for you is NOT what will work for others! Be patient with yourself as you figure out what does work, it takes a long time.
Clarity is far more important than anything else. Your comic doesn't need to be gorgeous, what it NEEDS to be is clear, direct, and effectively show the reader what they need to know.
Characters need to show their emotions and actions
Backgrounds need to tell us where we are
Paneling needs to show us which order to read things in
Using photos, 3d models, or copy/pasted assets is all perfectly fine and acceptable. As long as you own the rights to use the images or models, you're allowed to use them however you see fit. It's not cheating.
Do not start making comics for money
Don't start making comics for fame
Comics aren't a stepping stone to adaptations. If you want an animation, make an animation.
Get into comics because you love comics and you've got a story that you simply can't go another day without telling.
Make comics!
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Something I try to keep in mind when making art that looks vintage is keeping a limited color pallette. Digital art gives you a very wide, Crisp scope of colors, whereas traditional art-- especially older traditional art-- had a very limited and sometimes dulled use of color.
This is a modern riso ink swatch, but still you find a similar and limited selection of colors to mix with. (Mixing digitally as to emulate the layering of ink riso would be coloring on Multiply, and layering on top of eachother 👉)
If you find some old prints, take a closer look and see if you can tell what colors they used and which ones they layered... a lot of the time you'll find yellow as a base!
Misprints can really reveal what colors were used and where, I love misprints...
Something else I keep in the back of my mind is: how the human eye perceives color on paper vs. a screen. Ink and paint soaks into paper, it bleeds, stains, fades over time, smears, ect... the history of a piece can show in physical wear. What kind of history do you want to emulate? Misprinted? Stained? Kept as clean as possible, but unable to escape the bluing damages of the sun? It's one of my favorite things about making vintage art. Making it imperfect!
You can see the bleed, the wobble of the lines on the rug, the fading, the dirt... beautiful!!
Thinking in terms of traditional-method art while drawing digital can help open avenues to achieving that genuine, vintage look!
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people are drawing Steamboat Willie Mickey doing all this crazy shit and whatnot, but you could always do that. you can do that now, with current Mickey, just fine. it's fanart and it's legally protected. hell you could take Disney-drawn Mickey and put a caption about unions or whatever on it and it would still be protected under free speech and sometimes even parody law.
what is special about public domain is that you can SELL him. you could take a screenshot and sell it on a tshirt. you can use him to advertise your plumbing business. people have already uploaded and monetized the original film.
you could always have Mickey say what you want, but now you can profit off it.
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lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)
if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.
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no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.
I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.
I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.
If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.
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