10 Mistakes New Comic Creators Make

I got a question from a viewer and I'm gonna be better about saying your names guys because I do a lot of videos inspired from things you've asked in our comments but I never say your name so you never know if I'm answering your question so frenchie and a minis asked what are mistakes that young comic artists should avoid there are lots of mistakes you're gonna make as a young comic artist or as a beginner comic artist you don't have to be young to be new at it I would say you're gonna make a lot of mistakes it just comes with the territory of starting something new right and it's totally okay to make all these mistakes that I'm gonna list cuz it's just gonna be a part of your art journey you're gonna learn and grow from it so don't be terrified about like messing up it's gonna happen but it's gonna be okay so here we go I have I have a top 10 list in no particular order number one and I think this is like the the piece of advice I give out most to new comic artists it's that your first comic should not be a 1000 plus page epic like if there's a story that you've been dying to tell for years and you know that it's gonna be like 20 volumes and it's got like a massive cast of characters and it's gonna be amazing and the next Lord of the Rings and it's gonna be beautiful save that until you have a little experience under your belts because you're gonna disappoint yourself it happened with me and bones and I've talked to other artists for the same thing has happened to them it's best to start small so with your first comic when you're learning things do something that's under a hundred pages if you put out two pages a week that is a little over one year of working on a comic right that's a long time and that's only for a hundred pages if you're doing something that's gonna be like thousands of pages you're gonna be working on this thing for like a decade so for your first comic start small test the waters try different things out make lots of mistakes and then you can move on to your big epic once you've learned all this stuff and make it the most beautiful epic thing that's ever gonna happen because you're you'll be awesome and you'll have all these small projects on your mouth so yeah small project a lot easier to manage you can get all your mistakes out as a new comic artist and the stakes won't be as high it won't matter so much that you're making mistakes cuz it's gonna be small and you're gonna be done it in a year number two when you are making your comics be be very careful not to use low-quality working files this is a mistake I personally made early on with my first comic I will never be able to print the first few pages of sovereign and that is because I worked with super tiny Photoshop files they will never be print quality they were like 72 dpi and they were tiny tiny canvases I will never be able to get those to print quality without redoing them so if you ever think that you want to take your comic and print it use high-quality working files you use like 300 dpi or if you're planning to print use large canvas sizes like you know that are several thousand pixels wide and tall I usually do a canvas that's about like you know two thousand something by three thousand something I don't know what the exact numbers are I'd have to double-check but yeah work big it'll save you a lot of pain and reworking pages in the future when you want to print your book number four avoid having an inconsistent update schedule for your comic have you ever like had a comic that you loved and suddenly it goes on hiatus or it just does an update for like six months and you check back every day and there's no update and you're always wondering when they're gonna update the comic because you're really invested and you love it and then eventually you stop checking because well it's never gonna update again they've disappeared so you forget about it because you know there's more comics popping up on your feed that are actually updating have you ever been through that if you've ever been through that you know how frustrating it is don't do that to your readership you're gonna lose readers if you don't update consistently and post your comic pages consistently and it'll probably cause yourself a lot of anxiety because when you go for a really long time without posting a page that anxiety builds up and you feel like it has to be like super extra good because you haven't posted in a long time so my recommend is now it depends on how much time you have to work on your comic I think the optimal update schedule is like one to two times a week so like Tuesdays and Thursdays or something every week that's a really great pace to keep it'll keep your comic fresh in people's minds and you get your pages out quicker however if you just don't have the time to do that or it takes you a really long time to get your pages done it's totally ok to post them once a month or maybe every two weeks as long as you're doing it consistently so that people know when to come back to your comic to check for an update did I say number four last time this one's number four expecting overnight fame this is another thing that bones and I did when we first started comics we posted our first comic and we expected it to blow up we were like we are gonna be like superstars of the comic world and like everyone's gonna read our comic and they're gonna love it because it's so amazing and yeah I just expected us to like have a following out of nowhere the our comic would be super popular it didn't happen and I was really silly to think that that's how it would go if you go into your first comic expecting to be super famous you're just gonna disappoint yourself and that sounds really sad and really disappointing but you'll build a following over time every artist or famous person that pops up like they seem like they pop up out of nowhere and they're super popular they've probably been working on their career for years you just haven't heard of them until you know this project blew up or they finally gained a large enough following for it to trickle into your feed that's what happened with bones and I we worked on our comic for like four years before people started reading it and we even had to start on a new comic before we really got any traction so don't expect it to be instantaneous you'll save yourself a lot of heartache just be very thankful and grateful for the readers that you do have even if it's just like one or two people treat them good and the one thing that'll also help with getting to that point where you have lots of readers down the road is make sure you reach out and network with people that is something that I've always struggled with I'm a very shy person I find it very hard to reach out and make friends with people especially online but you gotta make sure that you do it even when it's hard and when it's scary it's just reach out to people engage with other artists work and make friends in the comic community because that will bring you more readers and friends who will support you so number five stop avoiding hard things especially backgrounds just because something is hard to draw doesn't mean you should avoid it when something is really hard and frustrating to draw you should probably focus on it because the more you practice it the easier it'll get because if you have a comic always make sure you're pushing yourself to improve your work try new things keep keep working at stuff even when it's hard and frustrating because you don't want a comic that is only ever shots of people from the waist up and you never see their hands and there are no backgrounds in your comic you don't want to have that because it makes for a really boring comic make sure you practice the hard stuff put it in your comic that is like the easiest way to force yourself to do it if you hate drawing cars put them in your comic you'll have to learn how to draw them so yeah stop avoiding hard stuff it'll make your comics better number six unreadable speech bubbles and typography this is something that personally drives me crazy with new comics not as a new as in recent this has always been a thing with web comics but I nothing makes me drop a comic faster than what I can't read it make sure there's enough space in your speech bubbles to hold the words that they're in and make sure that they have a little extra room in the bubble so that I can read them comfortably don't have your letters spilling out of the bubble don't squish them into a tiny bubble so they're all mushed up together and overlapping the lines of the speech bubble just don't do it also use a comic font you can find them all over the place blam bot is a great place to go it's a website that has lots of amazing comic fonts for free and if you can't find a comic font you like use something that's very legible and at a size that people can read and they don't have to squint at tiny prints and if your handwriting your typography make sure that it is and clean test it with friends number seven another mistake I see a lot of new comic artists do is forgetting page flow and not planning their speech bubble placement now I'm a little forgiving on this because when you're new to comics you might not know everything and that's fine you can learn as you go but if you're listening to this make sure you plan where you put your speech bubbles in your pages don't be afraid to cover up your pretty artwork with speech bubbles plan them in from the start and don't shove them off into the little corner where I can't read them don't put them in your gutters be nice to your speech bubbles they are part of your composition and they need to be respected and make sure that you're paying attention to the flow of your comic flow is just the way your artwork leads the readers I from one panel to the next the job of each panel should be to get your reader to the next panel and then on to the next page so as long as you're keeping that in mind I have some other videos on this channel about comic flow go check it out if you want to learn more about it but always make sure to keep flow in mind it gets really annoying when I'm reading a comic and it throws me off the page and I am frustrated and I don't know which panel we'll look at next so make sure you're keeping your flow in mind number eight another mistake a new comic artist can make is not doing enough prep work nothing will make your comic go on hiatus faster then they're not having any of your work prepped now I am like notoriously bad for doing prep work just watch my vlogs if you ever want to hear me rant about that but if you're going into making a comic make sure you do character reference sheets make sure that you are doing thumbnails and storyboards for your pages make sure that you have a solid script all that stuff it'll save you so much pain in the future it'll stop you from having to you know create new character designs on the fly the night before you need to post a page and it'll it'll just make your life way easier because creating pages takes a long time and it's great to have just this foundation of prep work ready to and along the same lines number 9 another mistake I see all the time is when artists don't have a script or an outline your work will suffer if you are way too on the fly with your pages if you don't have a script if you don't know where your story's going you're gonna get stuck you're gonna hit a plot hole or you'll run out of ideas cuz you're having a hard time whatever it is it just makes work harder for you now I usually recommend for new comic creators to write their whole script before they start however I know that's a little unrealistic because that doesn't work for everyone however if your first project is like a hundred pages it's pretty easy to write a comic script for that so just start with small projects get in the habit of writing your whole script if you can it'll save you a lot of pain in the long run if you don't think you can do a whole script it's like if that ruins the fun for you or that's just not how you work at least try to have a detailed outline so that you don't get stuck and you know where your story's going if you have you know room to foreshadow your story and plan it out really well by having a script like that is so amazing to have and it'll save you a lot of pain like I keep saying it'll stop you from wasting pages with like you know random fluff or you don't know where things are going it'll save you from wasting pages and it'll stop you from getting stuck and number 10 I think one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of new comic creators face is that they never actually start working on their comic if you never start working on it you're always gonna be a beginner and I know that starting a comic and posting it is really scary and overwhelming there's so many moving pieces to a comic especially if you're doing it all on your own if you have to write your own script do your own artwork do your prep work and your marketing and post the pages all that stuff it can be really overwhelming and scary however you just got to start stop just talking about your comic and how great it's gonna be start working on pages start designing your characters and your set designs and start writing your script even if it's bad you can always do another pass at it you have as many opportunities to redo as you want so just start yeah so I remember when I was like a teenager I always had a million ideas for comics and I never started any of them until I started working with bones and it's just been so amazing since I started making comics and posting them having a consistent schedule posting stuff now working with the comic community having bones handle the script stuff was amazing for me because that was something that always overwhelmed me oh yeah just since dipping my toe into the the water of web comics it's just been great so don't be afraid to start make your dreams come true follow your heart I feel like this video is done really long so yeah I hope that helps guide your way a little bit if you're starting a comic like I said it's super scary it's super overwhelming but you can do it I believe in you it's okay to make any of the mistakes that I've listed here that's just part of the learning process I went through most of these like if you look at my early work it's full of terrible mistakes with flow and typography and I had a huge a huge head about things I thought I was gonna be so cool and successful and I mean I guess I got there I'm at a really good place with my art career now it just took some time try new things don't worry about making mistakes I guess just keeps them in mind it might save you some pain either way as long as you're making pages and having fun that's what's important there we go I think that's all I have so if you have any questions or if you'd like to request a video topic please leave a comment down below if you'd like to see more videos about making web comics and writing web comics and cool art comic stuff please make sure to subscribe and if you want to check out any of my work with comics please check out our tick tail store there's a link for it in the description down below yeah thank you so much for watching I'll see you guys next time go bye

Channel: McKay & Gray

Views: 286,744

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Id: Ns2JFByemSk

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 09 2018