HOW I MAKE WEBCOMICS (part 6)

DIRECTORY

PART 1 - intro, goals, when you should start, comic length

PART 2 - inspiration, ideas, research

PART 3 - page sizes, hosting sites, patreon

PART 4 - characters, art references, promotional

PART 5 - outlining, scripting, thumbnailing 

PART 6 - (here) sketching, inking, coloring

PART 7 - updating, guest comics 

PART 8 - merch, self-care, fandom and boundaries

sketching

what can be said about sketching... there's no wrong way to sketch, because nobody's gonna see it if you don't want them to! unless you're one of those people that skips sketching and goes straight to inks (how the fuck)?!?! if you need to do 2 or 10 sketch passes that's fine! this doesn't have to be your goal, but mine when making comics is speed (ok calm down sonic) as in, i want to get my pages done as quickly as possible without sacrificing too much quality!

people aren't going to spend a lot of time looking at each individual panel, so why spend a ton of time making each one just right? i come from an animation background, and that was something taught to us. each frame in animation is going to be seen for a split second, so it's ok if they aren't all winners. that idea carried over when i made comics. and speed starts at the sketch stage! if you are more comfortable taking your time and making each page a beautiful illustration, that's perfectly fine! i would caution against doing that for webcomics if you're the sole artist on the project and you want to get updates out each week or a few times a month, but you don't have to listen to me! if you can sketch quickly, and figure out details in the inking stage, you'll be able to make pages a little speedier.

my "make comics quickly" advice is going to be a running theme here, because that's my personal motto. but you should make comics however is most enjoyable to you. i feel like it's easier to get burned out if you're spending too much time on each page. but also, if you're pushing yourself to go too fast, you could hurt your drawing hand/wrist/arm/shoulder. "so what's the solution mars" i don't know! art is pain. take lots of breaks and don't kill your body and brain by spending 20 hrs on a comic page if you plan on making 400 comic pages.

drawing quickly takes a lot of practice. doing gestures helped me because the point of them is to capture as much of a figure as quickly and in as few strokes as possible. here's some really good videos about gesture drawing that i recommend: PROKO GESTURE DRAWING PLAYLIST 

inking

i strongly recommend making some "test pages" to try out what style you want to go for before starting your webcomic for real. test out different ink widths, coloring styles, etc. 

i mentioned page sizes and resolution in part 3, and a big reason for making your pages really big and then shrinking them down later is that your inks will appear to be a lot cleaner than they look up close. if you're trying to draw quickly, you shouldn't have to agonize over making each line perfect and clean. at the right page dimensions and resolution, you won't have to worry as much about spending time making your inks really clean.

here's a comparison between a panel resized and at original size.

looks clean enough. passable.

zoomed in you can see how sketchy some of the lines are. GRANTED i'm also biased with a preference towards messy-ish lines, so making sure my inks are really clean isn't a goal of mine.

when inking, there's really no wrong order of doing things. sometimes i'll finish a panel one at a time, sometimes i'll ink the whole page before coloring it. sometimes one will just feel better to do in the moment, so do what feels natural!

coloring

in my experience, coloring quickly is hugely dependent on the program you're using. it would take me 5x as long to color a comic page in say, procreate, than it would in clip studio. the reason is that procreate doesn't have very sophisticated selection and fill tools (yet??), and clip studio by comparison is like.. practically made for that shit.

here's some tips for coloring comics in clip on youtube 

here's a great tool i downloaded for easy selecting sections to color 

when i used to make comics in photoshop, i'd use the magnetic wand tool to select the shape, and then fill in a layer below.

i'm not going to go into too much detail for how to use your art program and how to color in general, you can find plenty of youtube tutorials for things like that! 

as for color palettes in comics, that's another topic that would be best understood first with a basic understanding of color theory. there's also a ton of tutorials and explanations online for that too! so i'll stick to how i go about choosing palettes for pages.

in this page below, the setting of the scene is at night, meaning dark blue skies. but to set the mood for the first panel, i chose a red background so that it would feel more intense and exciting. the third panel i chose a yellow background to show SHOCK, and also because yellow complements the red and blue of the rest of the page nicer than say, green might have. the last two panels are more blue because the tone is more relaxed. an unwitting rival racer not yet aware of what's blazing up behind him

this is something i'm still trying to teach myself, but MOOD should come before ACCURACY, at least in my opinion. if i had kept every panel the same realistic shades of blue like they would be if this were shot in real life, the mood would not have come across as strongly. it would have felt flat and boring.

(also random pro tip: don't JUST use multiply layers for shading! try out other blending modes! layer different ones and combine them! you'll get a lot of cool effects you might not have even realized was possible!)

there's a million different ways to color a comic, and my way isn't necessarily the CORRECT way. look at other comics you like (not just webcomics!) and take inspiration from how they convey mood and drama and lighting across the page!

PART 7 

if you have any questions, ask away below and i'll do my best to answer when i can!