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Feb 2023

This question has been sort of eating me up inside so... I want to know what other people think.

When I started out working on Engram, I took about 20-30 hours per page, doing multiple sketches, careful lineart, then played around with colors until I had the perfect mix, and THEN I hand-lettered my digital comic. My thought process was that I wanted to enjoy the process and the product, not chase deadlines. It's in retrospect all kinds of insane, especially given that I have a nerve injury in my neck that certainly limits how much I can draw in a day.

So when I decided to pitch a different comic projects to publishers, I made sure to scale down the art so that I could maybe do one page a day (again, given my health limitation). At first I found something that took me in the realm of 4-7 hours. Not an obscene amount for a finished+colored comic page, and I was still quite happy with how the final pages looked.

However, I wanted to try finding something that was even faster. I was doodling some sketchy comics for a fandom I'm in - specifically in a way that didn't take me long to draw, because this was my "downtime" hobby, not aspirations of going pro. A bunch of people have told me that they love the style, so I co-opted it and tried to draw a comic page using what I learned from those doodles. This resulted in a drop in quality - but also in production time, with time per-page dropping by a whopping 50% (mostly by not abusing ctrl+z for lines, reducing the number of layers, and using the lasso tool to add blocks of shadows quickly instead of drawing them in by hand).

Older art on the left, new art on the right

And now I'm kind of stuck. I'm happy with the 4-7 hour art. It's less complex than an illustration, but it's got enough going for it to still be interesting. But the appeal of the faster style is that I could get this project done so much faster and with infinitely more comfort. I don't love the finished art, but I don't know if I NEED to love it, if its purpose is to just tell a story (which I think it still does fine).

So, question-time (especially to the people who have finished long-form illustrated projects): how much detail do you drop from your projects? Is it worth it to not love the final art in exchange for being able to get the story out faster? Feel free to drop comparisons between different project styles and such, I'd love to see them.

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    Feb '23
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    Apr '23
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The audience has proven that Wally Wood is a comic artist legend who produced timeless masterpieces
and unique art

The way I see it is: you can get out the story in an unpolished form and polish it up later, but if you decide to polish everything up from the get go, you can't get that time back. So yes, I think it's worth it; because putting out art-you-don't-love does not doom it to stay art-you-don't-love forever :]

(Then again, I haven't finished any long-form illustrated projects, so take that as you will :P)

(Older) 'Back to Bed', 2020

(Newer) 'God's World', 2022

Jk loll. I really prefer the new art. The roughness gives it more energy and textures.

For me, its about the purpose of the work and time management. I know that I have a set schedule and I can only do so much if I want to publish on time and get the story out before I'm dead. I plan accordingly. Through experience I know how much details I can get done. I know where the important panels that require a lot of details are. With time, hopefully I get faster. You just kinda need to figure out how to make the roughness work stylistically.

Summary

And then I have single illustrations that I give more time for because they'll have to stand on their own without a story.

Summary

Personally I always beat on myself for not putting enough detail in my panels, or not having enough backgrounds, and then look at other popular webcomics on the site and realise I frequently use more detail and more detailed and painstakingly created backgrounds than a lot of them do. :sweat_02: Really, I know I'm being unfair to myself. The money in comics just isn't good enough nowadays to justify trying to prove something by eating into your earnings or health to put in more detail than most of the audience will even spend the time to appreciate. Most of them are reading on their phones in their lunch break or whatever, it's really only worth it if putting in extra detail makes you happy personally. Publishers will always take advantage of creators' urge to spend a bit more time than they're being paid for to make it a bit more detailed and finished out of a sense of artistic pride, and knowing when to stand firm and to be like "no. It looks fine, it's 5pm, pencils down and go make dinner." can be a skill in itself!

I tend to think of the level of detail that's "necessary" as "enough to be clear about who is in a place, what they're doing and how they're feeling", and ideally I want the place to be specific-feeling. I'm already putting in enough extra work by setting my comic in a Northern English Industrial city the characters are constantly moving around rather than somewhere generic I can just drop in premade 3D models of or reuse backgrounds a lot.
Some people tend to think of stubbornly sticking to making a more complex comic as a point of pride, but for me it's kind of something I consider an annoying habit; I should really have just set my story in a simpler setting it was easier to get reference for, and I don't know why I keep including stuff I hate drawing like cars... but I had a story I really wanted to tell and I have to pick my battles.

A lot of the time, I'll set up with a nicely drawn establishing shot when people arrive in a place, and then use as little background as I can get away with for the rest of the scene, or only use backgrounds when they're relevant to the positioning of the characters and similar. I also worked out early on that full shading wasn't going to fly. Here's an early inking and colouring test for Errant:


And yeah... it's kind of cool, but you can see I didn't even finish it. I was like "...there's no way I can make a comic like this and make two pages a week while having a job. No way."

So in the actual comic, it looked like this:

Pretty much only faces (and some very light coloured things on characters) are shaded in Errant, and mostly everything else leans on an edge highlight I can quickly throw on there. Yeah, it's less detailed than the above.... but what am I trying to do? Prove I'm a good artist who can spend a lot of time, or entertain an audience with consistent content they can enjoy on their phones? For me, it's the latter. I have nothing to prove, I know I'm a good artist, and that's what gives me the confidence to express things with simple lines and bold colours rather than hiding behind hours of complex rendering.

On a fundamental level, if the art looks finished, and it's detailed enough to read clearly, and has good variety of shots, and it's expressive and dynamic... it's probably fine! I think your example in that opening post looks fine. It compares well with the level of detail in plenty of popular comics, the poses in some ways read more clearly in the less detailed panel too.

That's a really valid question. Personally, I think it depends greatly on the project, and what you intend to accomplish. If your project is very story weighted and has less focus on visual storytelling, then streamlining the art to accomplish your story goals makes sense.
Usually my pages take about 16 hours per page to complete, so I do about 3 1/2 a week. That's not monthly speed, but there are good reasons for that. One of the benefits of being indie is setting our own deadlines, so we get to decide our own quality goals. My pages take a lot of time because I aim for the highest quality I can, all the time, and I lean on the visuals to really take my readers there and do half of the storytelling. That's just what my comic requires, but it's different for each comic. We're also not working in teams the way studio comics are made, which means we have to do all the jobs. Penciling, inking, flatting, painting, writing, lettering, editing, marketing, and sometimes self-publishing and trade shows. All of these things are full-time professions and take a lot of time, so don't be too hard on your speed when you're doing more than one of those.
I guess what I'm saying is, make the comic you want to read. If you feel that the streamlined process is serving your story just fine, then that's ok.

As mentioned above, detail and backgrounds depend on the importance of it in the panel. if a character's reaction is the purpose of the the panel, then a background may not be needed 🤷‍♀️ backgrounds are generally used in a panel to set the location/space/time/large scale events or that's what I tell myself because I struggle with perspective :sweat_smile:
In this pannel i put in detail


but in this i did not draw a background

these are terrible examples :joy: maybe a character's reaction is a better example

less detail here ig
we now conclude that i suck at giving advice :joy:

Yeah, I second this. You're telling the story of the characters, so if the characters aren't actively focused on something in the environment, or you don't need the environment to establish spacial context, then you probably don't need to draw the environment in that panel. We're simulating that character's experience.
Sometimes it even helps sell an idea. Take this set of panels for instance:

The first doesn't have a background because the characters' attention is locked on this horrible creature. The second panel has a background because the character (Nira) is changing locations and interacting with the room, and naturally her mind goes to what she's going to land on. She's aware of the room, so we're aware of the room. The third panel not having a background makes it feel like this aggressive creature is the only thing in the world right now. It simulates Nira focusing only on this one thing. Likewise, in the panel after that, it feels like the second character (Savina) comes out of nowhere like she's flying in from the void, which fits the moment.
Backgrounds are an extremely necessary element, and it's important to draw them to tell the story and keep the reader in the world, but omitting them can also tell a story.

Comic nerds have proven that. The audience didn't give a shit when he was in his prime which is why he blew his brains out in the end.

Definitely on team "If the background isn't relevant to what's happening and it won't look weird without it, leave it off." here... I think only about half of all Errant panels at most have backgrounds depicting the environment, and the rest are just colours and patterns! :sweat_02:

That said, I often use this deliberately to do fun stuff. When characters are thinking about a certain person, you'll see the background is in that character's associated colour, or if a character is dominating the scene, the background will match them, so a lot of pages go a bit like:

So, talking about Jules, purple background, then we have an actual background because the panel is illustrating Crow moving through the environment from Jules over to Rekki. Then two blue panels because the person being talked about is Sarin (blue), and then a background because again we're illustrating movement through the environment, in this case, Crow is walking away from Rekki.

But also, backgrounds tend to vanish in combat scenes unless the environment is very relevant to the action...

Other than being faster to draw, less detail makes a panel faster to read too, so it makes an action panel feel faster. Detailed panels tend to feel like they last longer, because the reader will spend more time looking at them, and it'll take longer to understand the image.

Sometimes, simplicity isn't just for ease of creation, but actually does help tell the story.

i love this idea ! conveying feelings with colored BGs is a nice touch.

Feel free to use it yourself! It's a really fun way to play around with colour and can sometimes add extra meaning to a page. I also tend to integrate it into backgrounds too. So places where a character is comfortable or that they dominate are often tinged in that character's associated colour. I'll often push weather and lighting conditions in scenes for this effect! :smile_01:

I'm definitely pro taking the details down a peg for certain panels or segments, but I think the success of it depends on the quality of the illustration throughout the story at large. Sometimes cutting corners isn't noticeable, sometimes it's glaring you in the face. You have to play it by ear and see what you're comfortable with but I certainly wouldn't feel bad about doing what works for you.

These panels are both from the same page:

Meh. 🤷

Personally I like to leave the background undetailed if there aren't any important objects to display to the reader, and just go ham painting whatever I feel like back there instead of leaving it blank or dropping a gradient or something.

Sometimes I find alternatives to time wasters. I used to shade with every color separately. Now I use just one and it speeds up the process. I love adding backgrounds but one every page sometimes is just too much.

This took me way longer to draw and shade than:


But for the comic I published I just did cell shading and made it black and white. It is much faster than the first comic.


This is my stress relief comic and each page takes 2 hours. It doesn't even have shading and it's the most popular of the three.

Oooof, a hard one XD
I'm still trying to put as many details as possible even after so many months of being hooked on the comic lol but of course not every single panel does come with an extravagant background so there's time you save right there.

This is the part I struggle with lmao :stuck_out_tongue: I find it hard to tell if a panel doesn't-look-weird without a background, because it always looks weird to me, at least when looking at my own stuff XD I envy and admire those who could make a backgroundless scene feel like the character is actually in some location instead of floating in a void :'D

Maybe I should just shrug it off and reassure myself that readers don't notice this stuff when they look at each panel for like 2 seconds, but I'm aiming for an 'atmospheric' artstyle where the point is for it to feel grounded and 'real' so I suspect I have reason to feel paranoid :'D