Hey everybody, it's LavenderTowne, today We're gonna be talking about making good comics and, basically all the mistakes that I used to make that made my comics bad But first, a quick shout-out to the sponsor of this video: Wix. Wix is a service where you can make your own professional-looking website in just a matter of minutes I have a website with Wix and it was both super easy and it made a really professional end product No matter what you're trying to do, whether it is launching a webcomic or maybe promoting a restaurant, anything like that They have all kinds of tools that you can use, you can upload videos on it very easily, it hosts images, you can book clients through it it's an all in all great service. Wix is hugely helpful to me because I need to have a place to put my Professional portfolio and every website I tried to code by myself did not look very professional So I really appreciate Wix and I appreciate them reaching out and supporting the channel. It means the world to me Check it out guys If you need a website and you don't want to learn how to code HTML and CSS from scratch because... I sure didn't want to So let's get started. Now, there's nearly no wrong way to start a project or a comic but there are some ways that make it easier in some ways that make it harder in my experience. So the thing you want to avoid usually and what a lot of people fall into, is When you have this sort of vague idea about what you want your story to be Maybe you have a few characters You have a couple scenes that aren't connected, that you know you want to be in there and you just really want to start so you sort of just start pouring ideas out and You don't really cut any of them back or anything like that and you don't really know where your story's going to go You just hope to sort of cobble it together as you go on. Now, well you can do that in my experience that ends up with a comic that you will not want to finish because when you get To those certain scenes that you really wanted to get to it might not even make sense because you didn't figure out how they're going to be connected, and then Most importantly if you don't know where the story is going to end It can be really hard to keep going because you're trying to figure out how to write the ending while you're working on the middle And it makes it really difficult. It also especially in case of like a narrative story and narrative comic, you could end up in a situation where you're creating mysteries You don't know the answer to and then inevitably when you have to answer the questions that you brought up They might end up being kind of silly or not very satisfying for the reader So what I recommend is finding your story's skeleton, your skeleton is the best of both worlds You don't have to write out a complete script with all the details already decided which is something that a lot of people don't want to do and even if you do do it a lot of the times you're gonna feel frustrated because You've taken all the fun out of actually making the comic after that point It'll be just mindless execution and there really won't be any wiggle room if you want to change anything whereas if you go the other direction and you don't plan anything, like I said There's all kinds of problems that erupt out of that but if you find the stories' skeleton You can find the core of what your story is supposed to be. That'll keep you on track and making sense through the whole story while still giving you a little flexibility To change it around if things aren't working or if you have some inspiration mid development So here's how Pixar's story skeleton goes "Once Upon a Time" is the beginning Just wherever you want to start your story the "And every day" section is telling you what the daily life of the character is like and where they're at right now at the beginning Then of course "Until one day" that's the point at which you have to fill in What the catalyst of the story situation is going to be. the three "Because of thats" are basically just You filling out the meat of the events of the story that will happen before the final climax "Until finally" is the climax where they solve the problem somehow or the problem overcomes them. Whatever... type of story it is. And since that day is just showing how things rolled out at the end The moral theme of the story is not necessary if you don't want it to be but having some sort of thematic Backbone can also keep your story consistent so the next step after you have your story planned out enough that you can actually start the thing, is motivation. A lot of people ask me about this and... Motivation is a tough thing because it has to come from within yourself However, there are a few ways to keep motivation up and prevent sort of the slow despair of running out of motivation So here are the tips I would give you First of all, you want to keep the snowball rolling. Motivation becomes a bigger problem for at least for me when I have missed a few updates That's when I have the hardest time picking up the pen to start doing an update of Unfamiliar because I feel like a failure and I feel frustrated and sad and Whatever the reason is that I missed updates, it makes me want to avoid the project altogether So what I recommend in order to keep yourself motivated is to do whatever you can to make sure that you keep to your update schedule It'll make you feel proud when you think about it, your consistency, and that will help you stay motivated Also, it just seems easier when there's less gaps between your pages. If you're doing pages a lot it doesn't seem so difficult Whereas if it's been a while it's gonna seem like a bigger feat than it actually is The stress of it just makes it feel like a bigger task The other thing you can do is just make sure that you're not pushing yourself too hard If you have like.. school and another job or something like that, don't expect yourself to be making a page every day It's just not realistic.. Secondly, if you have a style that's really really detailed and delicate you have to give yourself more time. I Intentionally picked a style that's relatively simplistic when I started making my comics because I wanted my updates to be frequent Lastly make sure there's accountability Put it up online and make sure that your update schedule is Clear to your viewers, whoever they might be Even if there's only a friend or two looking at your comic it will still make you feel more motivated To get it done on the update schedule if you know that people are waiting for you It's something that helped me out a lot for sure so the last thing you need to do before you really start is To design your characters and make sure that they look exactly the way you want them to Before you get started on the other hand don't beat yourself up too much if they're starting to look a little different You don't want to fight progress and you are going to get better at drawing really quickly if you're drawing so much for your comic So don't don't freak out too much as you can see Planchette looked really different in page one than she did in the more recent pages Because my art style has been evolving and I've been making little changes to her. So it's not too big of a deal So now I'm going to go through step by step and show you exactly everything I do to make my comic and these are Steps that you can do whether you're a traditional artist or a digital artist Now the first thing a lot of people ask me is, "What size do I make my pages?" So my pages are seven inches by ten and a half inches And that was just something that I looked up To see basically what good sizes are if you want to do printing like, for books in the future so the first step that I take on the actual execution process once I've gotten my empty file is I want to make thumbnails. Now, what a thumbnail is just a super tiny version of the page and This is not a sketch because you're making it so tiny small It's basically just like, the quickest possible sketch that you make it a really small Size because you want to be drawing in a such a way that you don't worry about erasing When you do nice sketches, it can feel very painful to erase pieces of them But at this point you're just plotting out Where the word bubbles and where the characters are going to be and you want to be able to erase a lot This is the main way that I figure out the flow of the page and this is a really crucial part This actually takes a really really long time It's surprising but.. even though the thumbnails really look crappy and like they're not very fancy art This is where the meat of the comics look is actually decided now after the thumbnails are done I blow up the thumbnail to a very large size I make sure it's within my guide which is basically like a half inch all around I think and That just makes sure that there's like a bleed area where if I do ever get it printed Where the bubbles aren't too close to the edge. Basically I don't let any of the bubbles get in to the guide so the way to make sure that your bubbles aren't crowding your characters and your words aren't crowding your bubbles is to start with the text While it's still a messy messy messy sketch you want to type in all the text. So once you've typed in all your text, then you know how big of a bubble you're going to need. Now, you draw out those bubbles and then you can see if there's any places where your art's getting crowded Now after this is the laborious inking stage a lot of artists would have an additional sketch stage after this Usually you wouldn't ink on top of a thumbnail. This is kind of a weird quirk of mine and I don't necessarily recommend it It's just the way that I do things it makes it so that I have to figure out a lot of details on the fly and I personally like that but for a Lot of people that's a lot of stress in the inking stages. You don't really need so this part takes the longest by far and I would also like to mention that this whole comic page it's just one comic page and my art style is relatively simple, but this took me four and a half hours to make and This is literally all I worked on during that time. So like I said comics are a slow business So all the while while I'm inking I'm making sure that everything is still looking right because, you definitely want to catch any final mistakes in this part before you put any color and once you've added in the color changing something is Infuriating if you're not doing color then you'll be doing grayscale at this point so this is a colouring stage and my number one tip for coloring at comic is to Make sure to limit your colors. Comics are very very bloody when it comes to colors You'll often find yourself wanting to find more and more colors and then after a while you look back at your page and you're like This is a mess. Like there's just too much going on when I first started Unfamiliar I only allowed myself to use 7 colors and it is since expanded wildly I used to only have really different shades of blue and orange and Now it's all kinds of crazy colors and I'm suffering because of that I wish I had kept it restricted because it actually makes things a lot easier and weirdly enough if You get used to that color palette as you're reading it. It doesn't look weird at all Even though I have like some blueish trees and stuff like that cuz I didn't really have greens in my color palette It ends up looking really unified and beautiful so learn from my mistakes kids Keep it keep it restricted if you can because it makes it so much easier in the future After the flat colors are in I am shading and doing some basic like Light effects, I would say like just trying to give some atmosphere to the whole thing and doing gradients and stuff like that This is very digital So if you're doing your comics traditionally, you might skip this stage altogether and have done the shading sort of during the coloring Area and with that we're done So that's exactly how I make my comic. Obviously only take the advice that you think would be helpful And I hope you guys have good luck on your future projects and endeavors Feel free to tell me about your comic in the comments below if you have one or if you have any questions you like me To answer in a future 'Do This, Not That' please let me know another big thanks to Wix for sponsoring the video. Check the link in the description if you want to try Wix for yourself Thank you so much for staying till the end and I will see you guys later Big thank you to all of my patrons including Gaia Scott Peter Circusy Stewart pain Amal the artsy moose Elizabeth Alvin kalimpong bouncing mcfluffster a sparkle. Anuki Fix it oli neck, Osama. Hope chilsen a Breanna trash Armenia, Micah Dactyl Oh Kimora Matthew Khun Kay lab sergeant pendulum, Nina Christine to sweet 12 with taka lovely Lachlan MD Mystic Enzo Gilbert your boy st. JJ Jade the blahblahblah
