How do you guys draw your comics?

[monochrome0M394]

what I mean is that how you draw your comics? are they western or Korean-like? how many panels your planning to draw? and how much shading and details you're going to put in? will be unique to others? I wanna hear those thoughts

[Shanny8]

I do western style- pages. I thought about doing panels/scrolling, but my goal is to put my comic into print form once I finish a chapter- that would be too much extra process formatting the panels into a page. I do about 40 pages per chapter.

How much shading & details? As much as I deem necessary...some pages dont require much- while others require a LOT. A lot of shading & detail hinges on your art style and how much detail you choose to have.

[sefra114]

I typically draw with Western/manga style paneling! I think the Korean style is great for reading mobile, but I prefer not to draw that way as I think that format would be difficult to bring to print. For my current webcomic, I have almost completely finished all the pages, a total of 700 fully colored and shaded. All together, drawing all of those pages has taken me a little over one year of consistent work!

[rajillustration]

My style is pretty Western, as I am a Western person, (whenever I do anime it absolutely looks like a Westerner pretending they know what anime is, so I generally don't) but I am doing all in on scroll format since I'm intending this comic to really only be for digital. This is mostly because my audience is so small, it just doesn't merit any need and hassle to make it to other versions as page or print. Maybe one day. But by then I'd be doing different comics, so...it just won't ever be necessary.

So there's a lot of details I leave out because I know people's screens will be 2-3 inches wide. I use cell shading, but I don't use a lot of tiny details in backgrounds (the details like foilage are with brushes that do leaves for me), my brush has actually got a really thick line to it so it's visible when I shrink it. I also use a lot of gradients and halftones in the background to sort of unify the scroll--giving it a bit more of a page feeling although it's not page. I just want everything to blend comfortably one scene to the next and not look like it was lazily pasted together on a white background.

[monochrome0M394]

mine's a bit lore based. since the audience's pov is basically an another character who is watching over mono and her world. in fact i could just put this here i wrote a little awhile ago before i got into the tapas forums:

5 types of pages that make the comic interesting (and helpful for those who sometimes don't read too much text in the comic) the 1st is the normal pov page. it was just that. a normal pov usually found in normal comics. the 2nd is the character center page. usually a close-up to a person to make the focus on the character that it spoke of. it can add only 3 people to the page. the 3rd is the character convo page is where more characters are interacting with each other, it was based on some games I have seen like fire emblem or Castlevania. the 4th is the action pack page where there's game UI and health bars kinda like gawin saga. and finally, the 5th is the lore page. this was found in books or something handed to them and told lore from it.

i don't like the very long formats of the comics sometimes so i go with the shorter western ones. i usually go with two - 6 panels. though for some reason i wanted to make everything look like art. i struggled alot with the background details and currently in the crisis of it. mine's hard shadows and soft lights. you may seen what type of landscape/place they are in. and i havn't posted the comic yet so i wanted to be unique as possible.

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

For my current webcomic, I have almost completely finished all the pages, a total of 700 fully colored and shaded. All together, drawing all of those pages has taken me a little over one year of consistent work!

glances at the 34 pages she's managed to produce since October 2020, glances at the above number

I applaud you, and am insanely jealous of that number. That is waaaaaaaay outside of what's possible for me.

I do western-style, paneled pages because, as several folks here have expressed, I'd also like to be able to print this in the future. My work is all traditional media, though, so I use pencils, microns, markers, and a decent amount of anxiety to produce about a page a week. I scan it into Photoshop, clean up the colors that my scanner mangled, clean up the panel gutters, and add the text.

[Aleksei]

When I started I couldn't decide if left to right, or right to left, so I decided from up to down, and let the speech bubbles tells you where to go xD
I don't have a paneling planning. That's something that I lack. But I have learned a bit of tricks while doing my webcomic, so I think that I could do a western style paneling if I try REALLY HARD.
I soon decided to only shade the nose and the neck. Only to give the appearence of 3D, but not much more. When I do some backgrounds I have to detail a bit of more shadows, and others time, I paint with shadows what should be understood as a background. Mostly I stick to nose and neck, though,

[ylldre]

I don’t draw. I paint them. My story is heavy on lores and landscapes/backgrounds are important to the world buildings and since i have zero ability to evoke emotions using cel shading properly. I don’t know man.

[monochrome0M394]

MY MAN (or woman or non-binary)- GIVE ME YOUR TALENTS ON LANDSCAPES AND BACKGROUND PLEAS-

i would recomend looking up refrences on shading styles like i did with my hard shadows and soft light style-

[ylldre]

I am also still learning though, but the learning process is fun with background/landscapes. The thing with cel shading is i don’t really like lineart lol. In fact i’m currently learning to paint background without lineart cz when i see rigid line my mood drops instantly idk why lmao. Thanks for the tips.

[monochrome0M394]

oooh okay. good luck finding the perfect shading style that suits your style!

[Mallory]

Someone recently told me that my comic style looks like "a cross between anime and claymation" and I... kinda like that description. My art is 100% anime-inspired because for a long time that was the predominant entertainment media I consumed, so now even if I wanted to, I can't shake the animu out of me. I don't try particularly hard to avoid it though, I still think anime looks pretty cool even if I consume relatively little of it these days.

I draw page-by-page in a traditional smaller tankonbon size because that's the size of book I want to print; it is read from left to right though, since I am an English-speaker and am writing it in English. The size was just for ease of printing. It's going to be 12 chapters at roughly ~12-14 pages per chapter, so that puts me at 150-160-ish pages for the completed work. I found that the smaller pages kinda squeeze a lot of detail out anyways, so I find that the amount of space and detail left looks good even on a phone screen.

I did go to cel shading for the colors though because... I am lazy and rendering is hard. Really glad I did because whenever I render these days I'm always like THE HECK IS GOIN ON WITH THESE EDGES HERE so I'm glad I can just pretend that's not an issue when I'm working on the pages.

[Jenny-Toons]

In terms of panel arrangement, I do for a cross between page format and vertical format. Not really concerned about making my work into books, and I feel a lot of what I want to do does well with the vertical arrangement. I try to keep the number of panels manageable (so around 25-40 panels an update). For me, that can be around 4-6 pages worth of panels, maybe seven if some panels are big. I also do a lot of panel overlap to imply quick pacing. Don't really do a lot of large spacing unless I want to imply time passing or a big pause.

Style wise, I'm inspired by 90s anime and 2000s western cartoons. Things like Sailor Moon, Kim Possible, and The Proud Family. Also go for aesthetics that are flowing, maybe a bit haunting.

Not really afraid to experiment -- a lot of what I write is sub-genre horror, so that gives me a lot of room to go wild and play around with effects. I find new ways to show lighting, how to display symbolism, how to do interesting panel arrangement with broken borders. I just wanna have fun with it.

[sefra114]

Thank you!! And your 34 pages is nothing to sneeze at! That's still fantastic! Reading that you draw your pages traditionally too makes it extra impressive! That takes a lot of extra effort! Keep it up!

[ylldre]

Yeah like this one wip. I hated it and abandoned it. Thanks a lot. Good luck for you too.

[monochrome0M394]

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THAT LOOKS SICK- and since you abandoned it can i look at it as source of insperation into one of my locations in the comic of mine?

[ylldre]

Yes feel free to do so.

[Kaydreamer]

I started off with pages, trying for a YA graphic novel style. (Fewer panels, larger illustrations.) But I transitioned to working in a scrolling format after about two months. It's faster for me, I don't have to worry so much about panel placement, and it's helped my pacing immeasurably. I can re-format them for the page when it comes time to print.

I average about 20 to 25 panels per update. Or at least, I'm trying to. The one I'm working on now has 29, and I'm going to have to grind hard to finish it on time. I'm well aware that my art style is too time-intensive; mostly the shading style. But I love it, I adore the way it looks, and I'm unwilling to compromise on that quality. I'm trying to speed up my shading process without making it too much rougher. It doesn't need quite the polish it currently has.

My drawing style is very anime-esque, or anime-fusion, or whatever the word for it is. Avatar, She-Ra, Voltron, and The Dragon Prince are all major stylistic inspirations.

And I make my comic entirely on Procreate! Weird choice, but it works for me. I sketch in long drafts, chop them up into smaller chunks to paint them, and make sure the colour at the bottom of one chunk is the same as the colour at the top of the chunk it's scrolling into. Once I get my mittens on the upgraded iPad Pro, I'll be able to work in longer chunks, with more layers, which will be lovely.

[FafasMcMelt]

I think my visuals are very reminiscent of super hero comics, so I'll go with western. I don't think about how many panels I want per page, only how many panels I need per page (as to create the scene) and go from there.

As for details and shading, honestly I do my best most of the time, which is not efficient at all when doing comics, but I love using the visuals to tell the story, to create the world through visuals, so I have to do my damn best. I can't every time, either for lack of time, energy, or just plain incompetence, not all pages look my best, and I hate it when that happens.

I don't know what you exactly mean by unique, but I do think my comic has some rather uncommon visuals and aesthetics. Coupled with the fact that although it looks wacky, and the characters behave in funny ways, the story I intend to tell has some very serious undertones, I think it creates a rather interesting dynamic.

[R.n.P]

Is manga style different from western style? if so I use that but I set the dialogue to be read using the western pattern