Rate your comic chapters on how hard are them to be drawn (or written)

[allenT]

Got an idea for a thread!

Comic creators, Rate your own comic chapters, on how hard is to draw/write the chapter. (Not how beautiful it looks/written)

(1 being the hardest)

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MAOR

1. Chapter 4: From A Distance
Total 4 spreadpages including cover and also the "village glance" that takes a month to prep says everything.

2. Chapter 6: A Good Neighbor (upcoming)
Oh boy, I can see it could reach this level of difficulty:more Sanariya, the actings, plus some new backgrounds in 2nd half.

3. Chapter 1: Fisherboy
I was putting quite some efforts drawing trees and all the enviroment, despites some not so well-drawn pages.

4. Chapter 3: Papa
I really like what I drew in the the first half. All papa scenes I like.

5. Chapter EX 0: Fishermen Friends (from MAOR :Extras)
The few big panels and the that 'closeup of fish in the net' are my proud and joy.

6. Chapter 5: Mealtime
Sanariya is probably the harddest to draw here but she don't have a lot of panels like in chap 6. I actually let loose a bit on some panels backdrops, didn't bring my best into it.

7. Chapter 2: Market At Sundown
Nothing that is too hard to draw, probably just the amount of backgrounds but they're not that hard.

[powerplantanimations]

1. Hand Arc - I wrote 10 weeks worth of material and I had to flush it down the toilet because it wasn't good enough. On top of that, I had a tonsillectomy. I was writing in bed while I was drowsy and in pain. It was a little difficult explaining the rules of this universe in a simple manner. Some parts I wish I've written differently. I don't think I'm quite happy with how I portrayed St. Peter... like at all... the BL universe was actually a last minute retcon that took me a long time to make sure if it was consistent enough to pull off. ALSO we had to edit the scene where they find out that Naota's a pervert because I got carried away. We had to edit all the blood out because we didn't want to get too graphic. Burd calls the cut we released the "Castrated Cut" :v I do plan on referencing the crazy lines since I want the series to get WAY MORE dark.

2. Season Finale Arc - The final scene was a pain in the butt. I had to re-read my comic to make sure everything was consistent enough. It was a big exposition drop and I had to cut it down. On top of that, the fight scene was a little difficult to write. Glad I pulled it off though.

3. Soul for a Sol Arc - A little tricky writing Eve, a robot who becomes a stick figure. She's feeling stuff for the first time, so I had to take that into account. ON TOP OF THAT, we had issues with the fighting scene since it didn't make any sense. We were rearranging and all that.

4. Origin Arc - I'm surprised that this arc was super easy to begin with. Considering the story we were going for was completely different until AFTER the Dodgeball Arc. I was pretty much figuring out the direction of where Burd and I should take this comic. This started off as a joke btw! I didn't know WHAT I could possibly do to make this concept anymore interesting. So I was flying at the seat of my pants. Now it's this crazy epic now.

5. Dodgeball Arc - This is one of the two easiest arcs I've written, but the reason I'm putting this here was because this was the moment where I realized I can kill Quincy off in his story. I had to do some major restructuring there to make this scene make sense. Originally, he wasn't going to die permanently. He was going to die for a couple of seconds and then come back. But now, I'm killing him permanently in his story (not really a spoiler....).

6. Date Arc - Had a blast writing this.

Read That Stick Figure Isekai | Tapas Web Comics

[IndigoShirtProd]

Chapter 1
In terms of writing, I had written the plot for the first within the period of a week during the summer before I started. Writing wasn't "hard" because I had multiple drafts completed and subsequently thrown out under my belt so I already new what I wanted. Though, like most people, if I could go back, I'd probably write another draft and restart the comic but it's not worth it. Drawing was it's own degree of complicated because it wasn't the first time I'd drawn comic pages; at the point I'd started this comic I'd made multiple traditional and digital pages, but nothing at the scale of a full fleshed out chapter. So it was a challenge and took far longer than I expected to make pages, even though the style was quite simplified.

Chapter 1: Redraw
I did end up redrawing/rewriting the first chapter. Things mostly stayed the same, but elements were removed and the chapter was more story focused. I enjoyed redrawing this chapter since it came after chapter 2, where I introduced a new art style, because I was more comfortable drawing in the style. It's pretty apparent when it came to the look of the chapters side by side, but I decided to not redraw chapter 2 (even though I still really want to). I think my favorite parts of this chapter were redesigning the dojo and redrawing the goddesses. I didn't like drawing the park and it was only for one panel.

Chapter 2
Now sitting at my least favorite chapter of the five (six) so far, mainly due to the writing, is this chapter. Of the three characters featured, only one was written "in character" or accurately to how I would've preferred to characterize them. Unfortunately, I didn't have that good of a grasp on my characters. And then the action scene was poorly choreographed. Like, I don't think it's bad, but it could be significantly better. It's taking all I have to not go back and rework the second half of the chapter. But other than that, I love how I did the ice effects and the set piece of the Ice Temple is still hands down one of my favorite drawings of this comic.

Chapter 3
My favorite chapter so far. Had a good time writing it. I don't know why, but I love the volcano I drew for this chapter and the action scene was great! I really have nothing but positive things to say about chapter 3.

Chapter 4
The funniest chapter, I hope. At this point, most of my writing hang ups have dissipated, so it was a good time. I got a critique on the color and lighting choices in this chapter and I have to agree somewhat. I do think the color choices were a bit dull, but that's in comparison to an ice chapter and fire chapter which both had really stark lighting effects. I liked that way I drew glass in this chapter.

Chapter 5
By far, the best looking chapter. Lots of good set pieces, a wonderful double page spread, and (hopefully) a successful final battle. I still in the middle of finishing and drawing this chapter, but I do place it as my second favorite chapter only because it's about 20-30 pages longer than all the chapters...

Read The Black Belt Society | Tapas Web Comics

[AmazementComics]

Potential spoilers for Superwoman: Code Oblivion. Although I’m only spoiling the 5 out of the 10 episode names, so it’s not too bad.

1. Superheroics Gone Awry. Admittedly, writing the first episode was tricky simply because the who and why of the story had to make enough sense for people to still understand and not feel lost or lose interest past the first episode.

2. Descent into Madness. This one has a little bit more action scenes. And the dialogue is more focused on the characters instead of in the story.

3. The Whole World is Watching. Another exposition focused episodes. And as the title suggests, this episode involves multiple places around the world.

4. A Force to be Reckoned With. A heavily action backed episode with a lot of story progression.

5. New Friend, Old Enemy. Another exposition filled episode with a surprise twist. It’s going to filled with a lot of detailed backgrounds that I’m not looking forward to.

Amazement Comics | Tapas Creator

[allenT]

Bump bump bump

Anybody wants to rate their chapters?

[moontokkym]

I can't really rate "chapters" because I post page-per-week and rating over 40 pages would be waaaay too long so I'll do the highlights:

1) Page 35 - the broken glass nightmare.
Fracturing psyche? Good. Fracturing my will to finish the page because I decided to make it look like the page was shattering with all the refractive problems that does for every single panel on that page? Oh god.

2) Page 20 - So. Many. Buildings.
I decided to do a view of both the shiny tall skyscrapers and the outerlands town below. Being a town made of whatever people can get their hands on, no two buildings should look alike... That was so draining to me, trying to come up with building concepts on the fly, not even counting the skyscrapers...

Page 47 (upcoming) - So many panels with hair
Page 47 has ten panels, which is the absolute maximum of panels per page I'll allow myself to have. I've done 10 panel pages before like page 25 but this one was worse because of my character's hair. I absolutely love her hair because I get to play around with the texture and shape but because it's so textured I haven't found a way to convincingly and consistently simplify it in my own style yet, so I end up just messily doing a full render, which takes over 20mins per head. She's on the page 6 times, so I spent 2 hours on just her hair. I hope that I'll get to develop a method where I can do her hair in 5-10mins like some of the other shorter haired characters.

If you want to look at what I'm talking about you can check out the pages here:

Read Petrichor | Tapas Web Comics

[allenT]

bump this thread~

[stiatent]

My journey in Web Comics almost every episode had technical issues lol Going forward the plan to keep improving on scene lighting techniques , better implementation of effects and to truly capture that AAA action-horror videogame aesthetic

To keep it short, just posting the top 3

1- Ep. 2c-2: I'm a Stranded Boy Continued -
Combination of Fog, Destroyed city rubble, external car scenes and internal car scenes during the night.
The fog plus detailed scenes led to crashing several times , had to paint the fog in post, not the biggest fan of how it looked in some scenes. Indoor car scenes are the worst, because the I had to place scene lights in such a way they don't reflect in the glass but light the scene as required. If reflected in glass, the lights appear like a large white rectangles. In many cases, I had to do multiple renders with and without glass and combine in post,

2- Ep. 3a-3: I'm the Neighborhood Boy
Wasn't sure how this fight scene would come out but happy with the motion of the poses. The hard part was getting the effects to look descent-good, it's an effect heavy episode too. It was a challenge rendering hordes of monsters and a detailed scene together, had to render sections and characters separately and merge in post. Sometimes the lighting didn't match and had to fix in post.
The worst however, is that I overwrote the original work scene (used in ep 3a-1 and needed to be reused in 3a-2 and 3a-3). Scene props got reshuffled, tried to get them close to og scene. Usually I'd key each of the images to a keyframe, but just reposed the characters, lighting and camera one keyframe, for fear of misplacing stuff if I scrolled to another place in timeline. It was torture to animate lol

3- Ep. 1c: I'm a Family Boy Continued
The 1st action scene, was very new to doing web comics, fog was a challenge again, doing speech bubbles and paneling was something I was still trying to figure out. Was happy with how the worms came out but had a good bit of trial and error as 'the big creature' as the original idea camera angles didn't capture the mysterious yet gross look when placed in the 3d setting.

[darthmongoose]

Some of the hardest pages in Errant, or ones that took the most time include:

Chapter 0 Page 1: Because I hadn't really seriously drawn comics in years, and I knew it was the start of a long-running project. I did a lot of test-runs of this page, and had to kind of work out the style as I went. I think I re-inked and re-coloured it about three or four times!

Chapter 0 Page 6: This was the first time I ever used 3D models to construct a set for a scene to take place in. It always takes a lot of setup to do that, but the first time especially I had to try to just work out how I'd do it. I'm really proud of these pages though because using 3D made the angles much more cinematic than my older work.

Chapter 1 Page 1-2: Oh my god the sheer amount of background work and sourcing photo reference and making a brush that draws windows and stuff, and then colouring it all... and then the Chapter House Lounge is a whole 3D set I constructed so the scene could take place there. Plus it was introducing a new major character I hadn't drawn before... AAAAAGH

Chapter 4 Page 15-16: This page combines a photobashed and then heavily edited and drawn over skyline for Camelot, then a 3D modelled hallway that's also heavily edited to fit the vibe...and then the Round Table and chairs which I 3D modelled from scratch (except Urien's throne), researched heraldry and Japanese mon to design appropriate shields for Rekki and Sarin, set up the whole scene and took various shots, and worked out a way to make the lettering look carved into their chairs.. It took AGES. Probably one of the hardest updates.

Chapter 4 page 25-26: Having a scene take place in a car seems like a great idea until you actually have to do it. This scene was really hard work.

Chapter 6 page 1-2: I designed an entire OS frame and browser and an entire site that resembles Wikipedia and wrote the content for Jules' page, mocked it all up from scratch in photoshop. I should probably mention actually, that all social media, messaging apps and computer apps you see in Errant are things I created for the comic. This one was the hardest by a mile because the more you look at a browser on a desktop computer, the more crap you'll realise is on the screen. Also on top of this, this page I had to 3D model the lab because it's the setting of the scene for several pages.

Chapter 6 page 27-28: That hug is the single hardest pose I've had to draw in the comic. Just working out the logistics of how limbs intertwine and overlap in this tackle hug when one person is 5'3" and the other is 6', and then also since Rekki is left-handed and Sarin is right-handed, their sword hilts also caused a potential issue because they kind of ought to bump into each other, so it was like "okay how can I make this look like they naturally just squeezed around each other?" .... It's one of my favourite panels though.

[DualDragons]

Hmmm I'd have to dig and see which ones are hard. My art also improved drastically from beginning to current pages so comparing may be hard

[darthmongoose]

Hmmm I'd have to dig and see which ones are hard. My art also improved drastically from beginning to current pages so comparing may be hard

Yeah your comic improves so dramatically from start to current! ...But actually It'd be interesting to read because of that. There might be things that when you did them for the first time were really hard, but now you could just confidently do on any page without breaking a sweat because you've got in all that practice doing it in various pages. That's an inspiring example for any budding creator who's struggling with the steep learning curve of comics!

[DualDragons]

True yeah

I even see it in the Square One prologue I'm working on, with the span of pages ranging from 2021 to today

[GodbreakerComic]

My comic is pretty much a straight line of increasing difficulty in both art and story. That was intentional I was waiting for my drawing skills to reach a certain point before the real juicy story/character stuff starts. Is that good for pacing a story? Absolutely not lol.

So from hardest to easiest: 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

1-5 act more as a prequel, with 5 being the end of the first arc. 6 and 7 is where the story pops off.

[theyrebothakilogram]

one: 7/10, this one didn't have the most complicated scenes, but I wanted it to look really nice since it's the first chapter so it took a little extra effort

two-seven: 6/10 there really wasn't anything crazy here, there were a couple of tough backgrounds but most of it was just getting it done, I had some troubles with consistent faces and dramatic lighting, but it wasn't too bad

eight-eleven: 5/10 some of this was really easy (characters in cloaks) some of it was less easy (getting dynamic poses) so it all balanced out to a pretty midlevel difficulty, relative to the other chapters

twelve-fourteen: 7/10 I decided I needed to draw a stadium audience... It was a poor choice

fifteen: 10/10 (Hardest to draw so far) This was probably my hardest chapter to draw mostly because of the fight scenes. It was really hard to show direction and movements in the fight to show what was happening, and it didn't 100% work out the way I wanted it to, but I think it mostly get's the point across.

sixteen-seventeen: 8/10 had to draw crowds and a little fight (less acrobatic) but I think I didn't really make it clear what was happening in these chapters despite how hard I tried

eighteen-nineteen: 6/10 not to bad, mostly just characters talking to each other

[SoftWonderBun]

(1) Chapter 03: 55 pages. Still feels like it went on forever and it did, took my two years to complete... I beyond doubled my page count with a whopping 55 pages by the time it came to a close. Art-wise, thankfully we spend a lot of time in the same location and I was able to bang out pages pretty quick because of that.

(2) Chapter 01: 12 pages. Bit of a struggle. I was still getting my feet under me with comics and my process. As well as working around my day job and master level procrastination skills. Art-wise, I has a lot of different locations to work with and multiple crowd/group scenes that felt like they went on forever!

(3) Chapter 02: 24 pages. This one really solidified what I wanted to do with the comic. More so, what I could really do without killing my motivation by trying to do the most. The comic up to page 15-16 (so all chapter 1 to chapter 2 15-16) was tradigital with digital inks and copic coloring. DONT DO IT! I had to go back and re-digital everything back from that point once I made the switch. not fun. Art-wise, we doubled our page count but it was smoother sailing.

(4) Chapter 04: 28 pages. I reeled myself WAY IN on the page count after doing myself so dirty with chapter 3. More locations than chapter 03 and a steadier pace of the story progression now that the MCs were settled with each other. Art-wise, had a lot of fun with the outfits for this chapter.

(5) Chapter 05: 59 pages. Popped off with page count again but it is the last chapter of the story. None of it is out for public consumption yet but I am already on page 38 as of writing this. Should be done by November/December at the latest. Art-wise, we are just chugging along. Couple of pain in the butt gas station panels but they are behind me now and I know to NEVER draw the inside of a gas station again. lol!

[koregan]

Well,I don't have many published chapters yet, but i have already wrote the whole story before getting to Tapas. Please note that I'll only be speaking about the writing side, since I'm working with an artist to illustrate my series.

1) Issue 1 : A Shot Of Spleen
I'd had this story idea in my head for a few years, but deciding to put it down on paper was the best possible decision. Obviously, building a new universe with its own rules and characters is pretty exciting, but the introductory chapter is a real balancing act to hook the reader. In fact, I had to rewrite the first scene a dozen times before I was satisfied with the result and could get on with the rest of the story.

2) Issue 2 : The Impossible Living
This is a transitional chapter with a strong focus on the characters and little action. It was certainly easier than the first chapter, but I had to take particular care with the dialogue to create the dynamic I really wanted between the protagonists. Nothing too complicated, but a lot of work on the characters' motivations and their respective backgrounds.

3) Issue 3 : Never Die Again
A more action-packed chapter than the previous one, with a succession of characters. I didn't like the second scene, so I kept rewriting it until I decided to step back and let the ideas come more spontaneously. I didn't want the middle of the story to be too soporific, so I did my utmost to involve the reader in the fate of the various characters, while allowing myself a few humorous digressions.

4) Issue 4 : Providential Rebirth
I really enjoyed writing this one. The introductory scene is one of my favorite scenes in the comics, and everything falls nicely into place for the final episode. This chapter combines action with more introspective moments. From this part of the story onwards, my hands were writing on their own, and everything went really fast !

5) Issue 5 : Indelible Trace
The chapter I enjoyed writing the most. Everything was easy, smooth. I knew from the start where the story was going and it was extremely satisfying to finally see it all come to life.

Read Bare Bones | Tapas Web Comics

[allenT]

Bump my old thread