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Jul 2019

I was doing thumbs of my future comic pages, and I just now looked over them at once... and realized that something is very wrong in them.
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They're boring and sterile. I usually have one or two ideas for a panel quirk on some of my pages, but not this time. Every frame look similar, heck, every page look similar, the panels follow very boring square layout with no dynamics in it. and there's not to many panels on each page, and they all very big ones. Other comics sprinkle in many smaller panels and have up to two or three times more panels in their comic pages, but I have no feel when this is needs to be done. Are there any articles or tutorials on how to break away from that and be more creative with the layout? What are the rules and tips for that beyond the bare basic of "size of panel directly sets the importance of the event in it" and "you should arrange them so it was easy to read"?

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    Jul '19
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    Jul '19
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My words will not be as effective as my sensei, Mark Crilley

I myself have been studying the art of making comics for seven years. Here are some tips

1) to make your pages more effective is to be a good storyteller. Don't let pages numbers stress you out. Use as many or as little as pages and panels as you need to make sure the sequences are consistent and the pace is how you want it.

2) composition. If you feel like your scene is stale, try telling your story from a different angle, point of view, close ups, etc..
When you watch a movie, how many different camera angles do you see in just one scene? Think about that when you draw your thumbnails. Composition is important for every aspect of visual art.

3) speech bubbles and sound effects.
Use this effectively. Make sure your speech bubbles are in the order, and are easy to follow. Sound Effects are a huge part of the graphic novel anatomy. It can be small or large and cover a lot of the panel.

4) Backgrounds
They have to stay consistent throughout the scene. It helps the readers feel the atmosphere and know where your characters are.

5) Movement
Characters and objects should never be drawn like stillwater. Even if they're standing in line at a grocery store...
Stan Lee's book about comics can explain this much better than me. I advise you to look it up.

Those are some of my tips. I hope I helped you out a bit.

Since those are just thumbnails I'll leave out the more technical side of drawing them, but the most pressing thing I've noticed is that the panels indeed look a bit dull when put together. It's really important to vary angles, make characters do "unecessary" poses (but exaggeration helps communicate!), or see it from other perspectives(a conversation focusing on the characters, then the camera moves on to the rest of the house, or a little critter on a window).

I also hear a lot of discussion about panels not always needing to be dynamic and crazy, but it's good to vary every now and then from rectangles. Have a character that goes over the panel if the scene focuses on them, or have the panels split diagonally when two characters are arguing, or just have a ton of dialogue in the same panel if the characters aren't doing anything interesting or they're exchanging very short sentences("How are you?" "Fine" "You don't look fine!" "I'm just sleepy", that kind of thing).

I guess my main advice is: if you feel like your panels are starting to become too stagnant or uninteresting, start breaking the "rules" and just trying out wacky, unorthodox stuff and see what works for your comic :> it wont all work, probably, but that experimentation is key. As you noted, most (or all?) of your panels are rectangles (although they do vary in size and arrangement, so that's good!) that fit neatly into the gutters, and the content is self contained. try starting to use unorthodox panel shapes, letting content break out of the panels, overlapping panels, etc. to get different effects. I pulled a few examples from my comic where I tried some wonky stuff and thought it was at least moderately effective:

Here, just the diagonals in the top row that I used for kind of a cut-in effect surrounding the main scene

On this page I opted to create a panel that was just an isometric view of the room, to clearly show off the positions of all of the characters being talked about

I'm a big fan of having full page panels that have smaller ones layered over them like this. In this case, I also have some water breaking out of one panel, and hitting something in another panel. Can sometimes be neat~

This one is one of my most recent pages, but I was feeling pretty good about the stalactite popping out and acting as an eye-drawing element on this page :> my original thumbnails just had it in a regular box but I think this turned out more dynamic. Also some layering in the bottom right corner.

Now granted I'm not at all claiming to be a paneling pro or anything xD I'm sure there's still a ton wrong with what i'm doing... but I have a lot of fun experimenting like this, and my readers seem to like it too :smiley: