Everyone Give An Art/Comic Tip

[scythe]

Get to know and hang out with other artists. Support their work in what ever way you can, even if it's just sharing a link on social media. And remember it's not just about 'networking'. Taking part in a community, especially one that shares similar interests, is as enjoyable as it is beneficial.

[AnnaLandin]

Lots of good advice in this thread - reading-order of speech bubbles , backing up your work, building a buffer of pages, being patient, etc. So I'm seconding all of those. I'd also like to add a more technical bit of advice.

1.) KEEP TRACK OF YOUR CAMERA. That is, always, ALWAYS remember from which angle you've drawn the scene. If you draw a scene in which two characters are facing each other and Character A is looking to the right at Character B, who is therefore looking to the left, make sure you draw them looking in those directions in following panels, unless they physically change places. If you draw a character facing left in one panel, and then facing right in the next panel, I as a reader am going to think they've turned around. If it turns out they haven't turned around, I'm going to be confused.

The same goes for whatever the character is doing. If they're facing, say, a building on the left that they're headed towards, don't have them heading to the right in the following panel; that's going to confuse me.

For further reading on this, here's a Wikipedia-article to tell you all about this 180-degree rule!

2.) Remember reading order! This goes beyond just speech-bubble placement (though that is super-important too!). As someone who draws in regular, western, left-to-right order, but has read a TON of right-to-left manga, I find this trips me up a lot. If your comic is drawn to be read left-to-right, do your best to keep the action within the panels flowing the same way. Try to have your characters moving to the right, as this encourages the reader's eye to move that way as well. If you have the speech bubbles running left to right, but the action within the panels flowing the opposite way, the eye gets confused

3.) Storyboarding is your friend and your crutch. If you've got an idea of what the next page will look like before you draw it, you not only increase your drawing speed, you are also able to tie pages together better. I storyboard entire chapters at a time, which means that before I sit down and draw the full-sized pages (I do thumbnail-sized storyboards), I can play around with speech bubble-placement, panel arrangements and - in the bigger picture - the overall pacing of the storytelling.

[zerobloodyrose]

Learn perspective. Be able to create good backgrounds is super hard but it add so much to a comic in my opinion.
Here is a good post about perspective and storytelling that Amy Reeder did two years ago on her Tumblr.

[justjezz]

Yep! I also take lots of pictures of myself for pose references. Mainly because I'm too shy to ask other people to pose for me. Plus, going to an area with a floor-length mirror helps (such as a gym or a dance studio) when taking full-body dramatic shots like falling, or being on the receiving end of a punch.

[CiciEnixa]

During your sketching phase, please please PLEASE draw both characters and background. I have seen comics with characters that look like they're floating in space because the perspective for the character is different from the perspective of the background.

[artofthecatt]

Don't make a character with a perfectly circular head. It might seem like a good idea at the time, but trust me. That stuff 'aint worth the hassle.

[getsuart]

Ah ah ah yeah ! Those places are the best to make some references !
Also, using broom for lance or sticks or bananas for guns are the cheapest... (never tried the banana, but I'm sure it's perfect.)

[UzukiCheverie]

1.) KEEP TRACK OF YOUR CAMERA. That is, always, ALWAYS remember from which angle you've drawn the scene. If you draw a scene in which two characters are facing each other and Character A is looking to the right at Character B, who is therefore looking to the left, make sure you draw them looking in those directions in following panels, unless they physically change places. If you draw a character facing left in one panel, and then facing right in the next panel, I as a reader am going to think they've turned around. If it turns out they haven't turned around, I'm going to be confused.

I'm glad you mentioned this! Crossing the axis can make things look totally backwards and confuse the reader as to what's going on x3 I know because it's comics people might think that using the term "camera" for it is weird and should only be used for film, but drawing a comic is a lot like just shooting multiple pictures that make up one whole scene from a movie - you gotta make sure you use it right, or the results could be disastrous :x

[fanyart]

There are some tips that I have learned or figured out:

• The famous term "believable characters" that is seldom explained is basically about characters having a reason for doing what they do. Don't give motives only to your favorite characters but also to less often appearing characters and most importantly, the villain. Villains that exist only to annoy the main characters and let them show off are shallow and the readers feel less for the main characters as result.
  In my stories I make sure that the villain has a valid and very understandable reason for doing things they do so that the readers wonder who is really in the wrong there.

• Thinking up a past for the characters and villains is good too. Even if it never shows up in the published story, it's a good way to organize the characters' relationships and build their story according to their life experience.

• Break blocks of texts into small bubbles. Not only the big blocks, but I found it's more attractive to readers if you use just one sentence per bubble. If it's a compound sentence, don't hesitate to break it into two bubbles but make sure the reader instantly knows where to read the rest of the sentence.

• In your script calm dialogue scenes may not seem so long bu when you actually draw them, you realize that you have ~8 pages that look almost the same. I did this in my old comic Dragon Heroes: Crow and want to avoid this at all costs now. This is probably one of my worst pages:
  

  
  
  It's one of those 8 dialogue pages and you can also see there violations of the rules from the previous point - GIANT blocks of text... (I don't mean to bash the comic now, though it's almost a decade old, I'm still proud of that, It was my first digital completed comic I did in high school, but it's good for showing mistakes )
  Now I have a similar quite long dialogue in my another story but didn't see it again until after I have sketched the pages:
  
  It's only 5 pages and there is sunset so at least the colors change during the dialogue but I still feel it's too long and too much info for the readers so I plan to put some parts of the dialogue in some other scenes.

• Lastly: plan the end for your comic. People often make a world and want to tell a continuous story but with no end in sight, they lose interest after some time. Also when their art improves, they tend to go back and redo the first pages as they think new readers would be put off by their old art and can't start reading from the "better pages" as the story wouldn't make sense. Then the artists often lose motivation because they see no end in their redraws.
  It's much better to make shorter complete stories from your world. This way new readers can jump on the train without problems and you can put old stories you are not that satisfied with into "the origins" or "funny things from the past". It's also better for the creators as they avoid falling into that redrawing loop.
  If one of your story gets really popular, you can always make a sequel

[fanyart]

• Just one more thing about endings

Plan your ending carefully and think about what the readers want to read. Learn from what you like to read. It has been quite popular lately to leave open or tragic endings just because "it's cool and makes people wonder and talk about it". - Is that really what it does? Isn't it more about readers being upset about starting reading something with expectations and then getting cold shower with not properly wrapped up story?

I really wanted to point this out because people often mistake open endings and tragic endings with the author's laziness to think up a good ending. (And audience talks about it not because it made them think but because they don't want to admit they either spend time on unfinished things or that there could have been something wrong with the story. Thinking they "just didn't get it" they come up with theories "what the hell it was all about" that the original author never came even close to.)

I don't mean you should give all your stories a "happily ever after" ending. Tragic and open endings are good too, but they must be done well and must have a meaning, not just "haha, this will make people ponder a lot about the value of life if I let her die" or "let's leave it up to readers' interpretation"etc.

I noticed young people often do this mistake, from time to time a friend talks to me about a great story they want to sell to a publisher and it has that "cool tragic ending" I discussed above.
I was wondering why this tale is always the same and realized I had that period in my life too - I wrote a long story I was really happy with and thought how cool the tragic ending was but then I watched an anime which was in many aspects quite similar to the story I had written, but just before the final episode I realized that as audience, I totally didn't want it to end bad, not from "human" view, but because it would ruin all the feelings from the previous episodes. It gave me a chance to analyze what an ending and it's aspects and structure means to the audience's experience.
(I did rewrite the end of my story but you will never see it as a lot of the ideas were used in the anime and I don't want to be accused of plagiarism.)

It seems that "cool tragic and open endings" are just a period in writer's evolution and I hope this helps some people get over that period quicker

Sorry for the walls of text, I hope it helps and I'm going back to studying >_>

[L4213]

NO BUTS!

if you want to start something START IT! the only thing stopping you and your goal is you! it doesn't matter how many mistakes you will make because you will LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES. so yes, failure is a good thing

[stefminnie00]

I think everyone pretty much listed the basics, but I'll just add mines: Reread, proofread, and edit your work before you put it up. Know what you like/don't like to draw, and find your fan base. It doesn't hurt to try new things, but find a genre that you feel comfortable with. Put effort in your work because it really shows and truth be told, I'm pretty sure no one wants to read a rushed story and see rushed art. I'm always struggling with this one myself, but be proud of what you put out there. Even if you feel like you didn't like what you created, chances are that someone out there will!

[purrlpankras]

When you can't go on.
Just remember someone out there is waiting for the next episode and will probably kill you if you don't upload it.

[r0ckrabbi7]

I can give a lot of tips, problem is I am still struggling with doing most of them... u_u
I guess one thing I learned through the years of desperately trying to start a comic is...
Try not to add way too many panels to a page. It will make adding text difficult, and it limits you at what you can do. + it can be hard on the reader's eyes if he has to squint just to find out what is going on.

In the past I used to bash as many panels on a page as I can... so many, that I could easily split them to 3 or 4 other pages.

[MylCreates]

do a quick warm up (doodle) before you draw out a page

-unless you're literally drawing all the time

That and doodle your characters in various situations or before a scene plays out before you do the paneling

[michaelson]

I've thrown out a couple pieces of advice here and there but one thing that should be mentioned is learning how to take feedback or better yet learning what voices to listen to. I think it can be easy to take every bit of feedback personally, it's only natural when you're putting yourself and your work out there, I mean, it's YOUR baby - no one wants to be told that their baby is anything but perfect.

But perfect is hardly ever achieved on your first try (or your second, third, fourth, fifth...), but learning what kind of feedback is actually going to help you improve is really important.

It's one thing when you actively ask for feedback on ways to improve and there are other times when people chime in without being prompted. I would recommend never shooting off a response to these comments based on gut reaction - always try to parse out what they're saying. Does their feedback make sense? Is their feedback HELPFUL? And most importantly, is this from someone you respect?

It doesn't really make sense to listen to every bit of feedback you get - this is especially true when you start to build up a larger audience where there are going to be so many different opinions and voices telling you to do one thing or another (often times conflicting advice). But it's important to single out the key voices that seem reasonable, helpful, well-meaning and ultimately respectable.

[jessicasurline]

After going to college to do digital art, I found that switching back to traditional art was strangely problematic. With digital, I noticed it was a little too easy to slap on the polishing elements, like a lens flare, too soon. I could make a turd of an image look passable just because of the default bells and whistles of a program, not because I really ever became good at constructing the base of the image. Also, the undo hot key is a blessing and a curse. Undoing an "oops" feels great but when I got out of the digital realm I found myself more reluctant to put pen to paper because I could not undo a mistake. I had to let that go and find a way to work with the mistakes in traditional art. In fact I am so happy I did because then I allowed myself the opportunity to have happy accidents. I learned really cool and different techniques for it.

[Cairas]

Use reference photos for backgrounds. I'm not saying trace them (nothing wrong with it, a lot of famous comic book illustrators do), but definitely don't be ashamed of it. I'ts hard to imagine what buildings should look like or how the compare next to a person.

Also, write out your ENTIRE story before starting. It doesn't have to be detailed, I summarized the entire thing. But this way, if you have artist block later, you can look back and have a clear idea of what you were going for. And your story doesn't feel rushed.

Fugitive

[DynamoToon]

If you wanna draw, you have to dedicate alot of time to it. You're not gonna draw a masterpiece in five minutes.

[CWCHASE]

Draw everyday, even if it's just a small doodle. You'll notice stick figures become masterpieces overtime due to the fact that you exercise that part of your brain that processes visionary information.