HOW TO GET YOUR COMIC NOTICED | webcomics FAQ

hey everybody it's lavendertown and recently my webcomic unfamiliar hit a hundred thousand subscribers and a million likes so to celebrate i wanted to share with you guys everything i've learned from making this webcomic um to help you guys out if that's something that you want to do so before i jump into the really complex advice i just want to run you guys through each step that i take to do my comic now um so the first thing i do is i take my really really rough thumbnail that i've drawn very very small and i blow it up and make it the right size in my digital art program which is currently procreate that's the one i'm using for comics and then i draw a refined version of those drawings over top of them usually in red or pink it just helps them sort of bounce out from that thumbnail background then i put in my panels and my text and bubbles and then finally i can get started on the finalized art the inking stage is usually what takes the longest followed by flat colors and that's because it requires the most precision and it requires you to know the most detail about your characters and environments which you can kind of skip over when you're sketching i highly recommend that you hand draw your bubbles it just makes them look a lot more uh fun and full of character and then i like to do the coloring flat step um if you are not coloring and you're just using tones like black and white this will probably be the last step but for me this is only the beginning of the coloring once i get all of the flat colors down i have to go over with a multiply layer and shade all over the place and especially if you're having a moody scene like the scene in this moody classroom i play with a lot of like gradients and things just to see what makes it look the most atmospheric and nice and then there's highlight layer that just makes things pop out and makes her eye look like shiny and glossy and that's basically it now that you guys know my basic steps to making my comic pages i'm going to get into more detailed answers for frequently asked questions i get about making web comics one of the first questions i got was about the font i use in my comic and this ties right in with one of my biggest suggestions for new webcomic creators i suggest that you make your own font out of your own handwriting it'll just look really good with your own drawings and it always makes your comic look a little more yours it's surprisingly easy too so don't stress there's a website i use called calligrapher this is obviously not sponsored and i use a free version of it even though there's a paid version the free version works just fine um so all you really have to do is put in the characters that you want built into your um your font and then they'll make you these templates that you can either print out and write in um in real life and then you take a photo and upload it um i did mine in clip studio but it's very simple you write in all the letters that you need into the little boxes um you just need to make sure that you carefully study those very faint gray lines and make sure that everything's kind of in line you don't want it to be perfect again because you want it to look sort of hand lettered this gives your comics a really like homemade feel um and it just makes the like text in the comics not like pop out the way that they sometimes do when people are using like a helvetica right next to their like hand-drawn art um it just makes everything look really smooth so the top one is the one i just made and underneath it is the one i use for unfamiliar the unfamiliar one is a little chunkier which i find works well with my comic style in unfamiliar but feel free to play around with the styles before you commit to just one font next up i got a bunch of questions about how far you should have your comic planned out before you actually start drawing it honestly there's no right or wrong answer to this so all i can speak to is things that i've tried um so the first thing that i used to do when i was about 14 15 and first getting into uploading my comics online i basically didn't plan anything out all i had really prepared before i got started on the first page was the character designs and from that point forward i just sort of randomly decided what would happen each page um trying to get to certain scenes that i imagined up in my head one way or another um but that didn't really work for me long term it caused me to write myself into a corner and just throw in a bunch of random stuff it's it's kind of a fanficky way of approaching your story and i think a lot of people find it less satisfying just because there's no real way for you to like foreshadow anything or like set things up in advance because you just don't know what's gonna happen so to answer this question about my script writing process and also this question about how far i have unfamiliar planned um basically i do a sort of mixture between like like a point between having nothing planned and having everything totally nailed down for whatever reason i don't find myself being very motivated when things are 100 planned out and i'm not allowed to deviate from them because sometimes i like think of jokes or i think of clever little like plot twists or things um that i feel like would be better in the story and if i feel like i can't put those in because i have it planned out like so far in advance that like changing something now would like destroy you know pages and pages of scripts and thumbnails that like totally messes me up and makes me feel sad um but on the other hand like i said i you can't build a story from the bottom up and just like hope that the story ends up satisfying coming up with you know your story page by page so what i do for unfamiliar is basically all of the um beginning was very detailedly planned out like very carefully planned out um the end is very carefully planned out and all of the character arcs are also planned out pretty strongly however unfamiliar has an episodic angle to it with the fact that planchette is trying to get a variety of different ghosts to leave her house and so the stories of those ghosts and what their problems are and the ways to solve their problems are episodic so i don't actually plan those out until i reach that chapter and then i basically plan out the entire chapter i know exactly how it's going to go before i start that chapter but i don't have to know that like before i start the comic for example um so the whole chapter with alice and um her whole deal um was not planned when i first started the comic that was something that i came to and i developed before i started the chapter but it was not developed when i was writing uh planchette moving into her house this next question i really like and it's how do you know if his story is good enough to be turned into a comic now my first gut reaction was like well you know if it's if it's a story you believe in you should just go for it but i want to give this a serious like answer and not just a fluffy answer and truthfully the the internet makes it so that no matter how good or bad your story is you can start to make it a comic and you can upload it online but i assume you're asking like how do you know if this is a story that you're going to want to stick with and that really deserves your time and effort and it's true that comics take up a shocking amount of time and effort even a comic with a very cartoony style like mine takes hours and hours and hours to draw and i'm certain that is the case for almost everyone who makes comics so truthfully i think the best way to try to figure out if your story is good enough for you to embark on making it into a comic is if it's sticking with you like if you feel like you can't forget about it and it's something that you think about regularly for example this is how much stuff i made for unfamiliar before i even started uploading it online i took this picture i remember when i had decided that i was going to actually start uploading it so i had three finished um fully colored pages of unfamiliar that are exactly as they are uploaded now um and i have a bunch of like dummy scripts that i tried i did a full floppy booklet of um like a test chapter of unfamiliar which is like i believe it was like 9 or 12 pages-ish um of comic art that never even went and got uploaded i ended up redrawing that entire chapter and changing some things um and of course tons and tons of sketches character art and planning stuff and it took me about a year to amass all of that because i was in school and it was just something that was kind of like chipping away at for for a whole year and by that point i knew that this was a story that i was going to be able to commit to because it was something that i wasn't like forgetting about i just i just kept wanting to work on it um and i think it probably you probably shouldn't wait a whole year like i did i probably only did that because i was so busy at the time um but if you know if a couple months are passing and you still want to keep chipping away at whatever like binder of stuff for your story that's probably a good indicator that this is something that you're going to be able to stick with and that you're going to really be able to make something special this next question is about how to schedule um doing your comic into your daily life and this is something that is really important for basically everyone now most people are not going to be able to start their comic as a full-time job um even professional comic artists aren't really able to do that usually you have to make some some comic pages before you can even pitch it to a publisher so chances are you're going to have to be jamming comic pages into your daily schedule wherever you can when i started unfamiliar i had six hours of studio classes every weekday and work on every day of the weekend and it was uh it was almost i honestly don't even know how i i did it i wasn't really sleeping very much i don't recommend that and i was doing three pages a week for quite a while actually um now i've switched it to one page a week and i recommend in general do less pages a week like promise less pages a week than you think you can do it's always better to consistently upload in like smaller amounts rather than promise to upload more or like the absolute maximum that you could do and then sometimes miss updates you want to build trust with your readers especially when you're first starting out um and they don't really know you yet so i really recommend yeah just like try to figure out how much time you have that you can dedicate to this comic and do the like lower estimation of what you think you can do and that's gonna probably be the best this next question is about pacing like how much stuff should be happening on each page and by this point i've done nearly 200 pages of unfamiliar so now i'm doing it just based on gut feeling but when i was first starting out the way that i basically decided the pace was um i wanted every page to feel substantial enough to justify the week or so that people had to wait to see it so usually that meant i wanted there to be at least one joke or one plot advancement every single page um now how you arrange it is going to depend on a lot of different factors like your update schedule and what genre your comic is in but i recommend just experimenting and making sure not to do any more than a couple sentences per panel and the pacing will gradually become second nature to you now these next two questions are similar they're basically about how to keep your characters and your story consistent to what you planned so to keep your characters personalities um consistent i think the most important thing is for you to know where they're coming from and what they want those two things are going to be the major factors that sort of decide who they are and having a strong introduction for them in your comic too will help both of you and your audience really have a concrete vision of what they're like i used to really love doing long like character questionnaires where you would write down every little detail about everything they like like their favorite breakfast food and like everything um but now i've really come to believe that the most important thing and the only thing you really need is to understand what they want and what they're afraid of those two opposing forces the sort of carrot and stick in their life are going to make it really easy for you to imagine what they would react to and how they would react to each situation every character has weaknesses every character has strengths and the more that you write them the more you will know them and it will become easier and easier and staying consistent to my story is basically just a balancing act of again like i just described earlier giving myself enough freedom where i feel like i have some control over the story even as i'm actually executing the pages while also having certain things that i've just told myself i'm not ever going to change um and having that balance has really helped me keep my story consistent this next question is just one of many that i've gotten about how to stay motivated and how to stick to a project while you're having tons of new ideas and things that um keep interrupting you and making you want to switch to something else personally i am definitely one of those people who has new project ideas all the time and it is true it's always a little bit seductive whenever you have a brand new story idea that you haven't really explored at all that's always going to seem more appealing than the you know the comic you've been working on that has you know early pages that you think are ugly and story problems that you're going to have to painstakingly figure out um but when it really comes down to it if you really love the story that you're telling and you really want it to be finished there is intrinsic motivation in keeping that momentum up and keeping the pages going i find every milestone i hit with unfamiliar makes it easier to continue like as soon as i cracked 100 pages i felt really really um a lot more motivated to keep going just because it's something i'd never even come close to before also it's important to remember that sticking with things and being able to work through a lack of motivation is actually a skill it's a muscle that you can train so if you gradually increase the length of your projects starting from something as simple and short as like a two-page comic and get used to like finishing things and continuing things past the point that you would normally feel like doing it it might make it easier for you to dedicate that time to longer stories it might not actually be the story's fault it might just be that you're not used to pushing yourself in that way and that's fine nobody nobody's born being able to do that it's just something that you can really train into yourself can you make a living off of webcomics um yes you definitely can however you have to be pretty aggressive about it i do think things are going to get easier and easier for webcomic artists and their prospects especially with things like tower of god getting turned into an anime and true beauty getting a live action drama these are all really good signs for webcomics becoming more mainstream not only in korea but also like around the world which is huge but currently at this time at least for me i am only making enough on my webcomic to cover like one or two of my household bills um not enough to cover like rent and groceries and all of these things but if instead of devoting my time to youtube and twitch and all the other things i do with my time i spent all of that time on unfamiliar it might very well be able to be my full-time job but i would have to make a significant gamble to dedicate that much time to it so it's really hard to know but if you are interested in making this your full-time job my best advice to you is to start a webcomic as quickly as possible and build an audience as fast as you can i have more videos about building your audience and more videos about making comics if you are interested thank you so much for watching i hope this was helpful and i'll see you in the next one thank you so much to my patrons including shawn davidson gracie rose i am gender fluid salt deadly nightshade maria vazquez astral fox art munch munch mcgee draft tranic the expressive poker face morrissey axel model big mclart's huge chris draws tsubaki snow white the becky liliana hammond mia lavali angelfile hugh mosgrove nicole ludwack nicolette queen rainwater pearls ice cream pal best kaiju lion natto kamagire eleria louis nora cronielson cola your boy has t jj jade and of course libelo

Channel: LavenderTowne

Views: 569,039

Keywords: art, lavender, towne, lavendertowne, digital, photoshop, cartoon, webcomic, unfamiliar

Id: yG5Wwq8FfrQ

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021