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May 2022

I use basic comic panel templates but I'm going to transition into hand-drawn panels for better effect. Its intimidating though!

Have any of you guys made any really cool panels? Be it smooth panel transitions, or panel work that directs the eyes well, I want to see panels that reject the conventional!

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    May '22
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    Jun '22
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The first bunch of pages of my comic had generic square and rectangle panels but later I started doing resaerch on more creative ones. Intimidating it may seem at first, I felt a bit of excitement knowing it could enhance the reader's experience.

I like when characters break the fouth wall and walk through the walls between panels, whether they realize they're doing it or not.

Haha okay good, because one of the main reasons I want to create my own panels is so that I can deconstruct the medium entirely. Mwahahahaha

It´s really hard for me to look at perfect, straight, digital lines when looking at artwork
that´s why I draw backgrounds without using rulers, line or other tools and I handdraw
every panel and break things up. I tried a lot of things and this is the style I´m using
for a comic I´m working on right now.

You wrote that you find it intimidating, I can ensure you that it is fun and I think it
makes the artwork come allive compared to the templates. At least for me, other
people maybe think it looks ugly

I think it's intimidating in that I'm not entirely sure how to approach it yet. Like, do you draw an image then put the borders around it, or draw out the panel borders then work within the means?

Realistically, I fully understand you can do -literally anything you want- but you gotta have a vision for it, I think. I'll keep making shorts where I experiment with panel use.

There are different ways to do that. Some people do that for whole page with thumbnails,
I go from panel to panel and in the sketching stage I´m measuring the distances between the panels.
I draw the final panels after doing the inks.
This is how the sketching stage looks like where I see how much space the picture needs on the page

This is a 'collage' kind of panels. Straight slanted outlines would be just sufficient, but here I use wavy panel outlines, to emphasize a flow of harmony of the village life. (and softness)

Personally I only get creative with panels when I really want something to make an impact, like on an action page. I think if you do it every page, it stops having a real impact because it won't be a break from the norm. I think people often overuse wacky panel layouts, and it always reminds me of that famous Roger Ebert quote where he was reviewing the movie "Battlefield Earth" which overuses "Dutch Angles" (tilting the camera on a diagonal):

"The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

The director of that movie tilts the camera because he's seen directors tilting the camera and thinks it looks cool and dynamic... but the actual reason to tilt the camera is to create a sense of unease and to throw the viewer "off-balance". If even your conversation scenes are filmed like this, it not only evokes a sense of motion sickness from always being off-balance, but it means if you want to create a sense of things being uncomfortable or freaky...what can you do? Tilting the camera doesn't work when the camera is always tilted.

So when I make most scenes, like a conversation in a room, my panels are just rectangles with a bleed panel here and there. The next level of escalation tends to be a panel that bleeds on three sides so it really feels "big" and unconstrained, taking up the whole space. The next level is diagonal gutters, which add an "off-balance" feeling or a sense of speed and dynamism, so I usually use them for action scenes. The final level of escalation tends to be when things break outside the panel borders or the borders disappear completely and it's just an entire full page image without them. So one of the fanciest panelled pages I've ever done in Errant was:

And really even this is quite structured. There is still room to escalate higher if I need to if say when the protagonist is ten years older she fights something so massive the impact can't be constrained with panel borders:

So if I ever use an effect like shattering my panels into tiny pieces or having the borders hand-drawn, the reader will know just how completely fubar that situation is, how far beyond normality we've gone that even the panels are broken. I've left myself that space to intensify because we're not at the climax of this comic yet.

In summary: Use simple panels as your baseline and you'll always have a place to increase the intensity. You can't raise the volume for the big climax if even your regular conversational panels are loud.

I also have little experience with panels, but after a while I started played a little.
From the uploaded ones, this is one of those that I like more. A couple of characters looking at each other, then the coin in the air, without panel, and the hand that is throwing the coin inside a panel below, giving the effect that the coin has been thrown just above the panel. Simple and clean.

But if we talk about proffesional work, I like to refer you to the work of James H. Williams III. I know him from his work on Batwoman's run on Detective Comics, and her solo book, and he us just incredible! If I got to do something as good as that someday in my life, I will die a happy human.

Thanks! We're hoping it fits the traditional when we convert it, but it does give incentive to read the webcomic version lol.

I'm not experienced with drawing with comics, but here's a few panels from the one comic I did draw.

(1) Ground splits the rectangle too for whoever to appear from shadows

(2) It's just pretty. that's it.

(3) The panels are normal, but the speech bubble is hesitant and unsure.