How do you keep heavy dialogue scenes visually interesting?

[LakeLake]

What advice would you give someone working on a project with lots of dialogue. Particularly for the parts that take place in downtime when there isn't much going on outside of the characters' conversation to help keep the visual aspects of the scene interesting.

[artamazon]

I use this guide all the time for everything! I would reference Wally Wood or Will Eisner, or even just look at some favorite artists and books to see how they handle it. A lot of it is changing up the camera angles, making sure your panels all look different. Even if you have the same two people talking, you can move the camera closer, farther away, etc. Manga sometimes like to show things in the scene that might not even be a character; sometimes they will show a mug, a tree, a table while the characters talk off screen. I'd say just play with panels and see what feels good.

[Bree_Mana]

my advice is to break long pieces of dialog into separate chunks/panels/speech bubbles. I did't do this near the beginning of my comic and t definitely makes it look crowded

[Tulmut]

Tension is key. Araki, (if you don't somehow know writes JoJo) uses the visual language of film to communicate Comedic or Dramatic tension as the dialogue goes on.

A slow zooms, sudden changes in color, breaks in the 180 degree rule, all can keep the audience visually engages enough to consume your info dump or long debate.

Also, minimize the number of shots. Lots of larger panels, with less visual information in the background to help reduce the conflict of noise created by text blurbs.

[beta1042]

you can focus on body parts or objects in the room/bg

[R.n.P]

Give interesting character angles or poses, or at least i do that to make it interesting for me to draw

[Hatteri]

• a lot of different "camera angles", zoom in, zoom out, perspective changes etc. As long as you don't just show two talking heads or torsos over and over. But you shouldn't go to crazy on the angles either if the conversation is just some casual coffee table talk.

• give your characters body language. The face isn't always the main focus. Do they play with their hair? Maybe they use their hands a lot when they talk, maybe they bounce their leg or bite their finger when they're nervous? The possibilites are endless! Just know your character and how they act and feel about the conversation and the person/people they're talking to.

• It is okay to cut away from the characters as the dialogue continues simultaneously. You can show the room they are in. It gives the reader something new to look at and usually helps with setting the mood for the scene too. Many inlcude some hidden visual symbolism to these scenery cutaways too like maybe showing a fly struggling in a spider web while an intense argument is happening with one dominating and one submissive character?

• Great color palette/mood lighting and location meaning. A conversation in moonlight inside a gothic castle feels different than a conversation on a sunny warm forest path.

These are my favorite techiques.

[demthorshie]

This is actually what I do to be honest. Either show different parts of the environment or throw in a far away shot of everyone in the room during the conversation. I also like to dedicate entire panels to the dialogue and I also sometimes break up the dialogue in to smaller speech bubbles so that they don't take up too much room.

[AdamBraveOfficial]

That is really helpful. I struggle hard with this. I have some pages where I repeated the same angle of the characters countless times. I will note this for the future!

[artamazon]

I have this page printed out and hung on the wall! I love it!

[abcde]

Super useful, thanks a bunch friend!