Redoing my first webcomic on here

jakkelwebb 2020-04-19 04:19:25 UTC #1

So I've recently joined as a creator here and decided to start fresh. While I have my own website with the full story of my first webcomic, The Wretched Ones, I've started to post redrawn pages to here to gain readers who dont have to suffer through my original godawful art. I'm also using this as an opportunity to fix plot holes and abandoned plot lines.

But this has been a work in progress for years now and even my older redone pages are looking shabby compared to the newer ones. I know that I'm still making a lot of mistakes and I'm looking to get help so I can cut down on the continued problems in the comic.

So the point of all of this is: What mistakes am I still making in these redone comics? What can I do to continue to improve almost 8 years after I started making comics? (And why is no one reading past page 5?)

darthmongoose 2020-04-19 08:22:59 UTC #2

Good on you for seeking feedback like this! Here are some things I'd advise looking at:

The lack of clean panel borders isn't really working. I can see what you're going for is a sort of soft fade out look, which works in some comics, but it's not meshing well with your style because you use hard brushes, strong colours and crisp cel shade. If you're really really keen to make this work, I'd advise spacing the panels more, and considering using a bit of texture at the edges to break up that "round default digital brush" look it has going on, but I'd personally advise instead just using some clean straight gutters with a nice black stroke on them to match the black line art of your comic.

The text size is very small. I'm squinting reading it on my laptop, and can't even imagine reading on a phone. The text needs to be bigger. There's lots of space in your panels to make that work. I'd also advise a more comic-like font rather than a typewriter looking one.

The drawing isn't bad, but the inking looks very rushed. It looks like the line smoothing is turned up very high and you're sort of quickly hacking your lines in short bursts rather than slowing down to do purposeful continuous lines. The gappy look makes characters and objects lack solidity and volume, especially when the inking either side of a gap doesn't quite line up, or the line on a bodypart is floppy and doesn't really describe the contours of the body in a solid way. I'd recommend taking your time a bit more with your inks. I know inking sometimes feels like an annoying and boring part of the process of making a comic, but good inking can really add a lot of dynamism and solidity to a comic.

The backgrounds... you know what I'm going to say, right? I'm sure you already know that your backgrounds are too sparse. Obviously making a comic will always be about balancing time and result. You put more effort in, you get more interest out... but if you put too much effort in, it's diminishing returns. Remember, it's okay to use aids to help you to save time, like 3D models either auto-lined or traced over, copy-pasting backgrounds you already drew, using photo references etc. and you still don't need a full background in every panel, but you need enough that it doesn't feel like in the majority of panels your characters are floating in a flat-coloured void.

Keep at it! Your work is pretty well drawn and has potential, so I hope these pointers help.

Mechi 2020-04-19 11:43:08 UTC #3

I agree with all the feedback that darthmongoose has given. I want to add that you are using a lot of panels on a single page, which makes it kind of overwhelming. I personally am a big fan of efficiency, which in this case means that you have to use less panels and be smarter about what you show in them. It saves time and raises the quality of your art. I made that mistake too in the past, each page had like 15 characters which meant that I had to rush through it to get it done, and the quality would suffer because of that.

Also you could really benefit from studying some color theory, using your colors purposefully will be easier on the eyes of the reader. (I have sensitive eyes so I tend to click away from comics that don't use their colors right).

As for the readers not continuing past page five, I'm sure that you have an interesting story to tell, but unfortunately with comics the visual appeal plays a big role in wheather people are interested or not. So I hope you will appreciate these tips, and keep going!

uhokhjol 2020-04-19 16:58:31 UTC #4

Hello!
I drew a little instruction about one thing that seemed as an issue to me - the angles!

I noticed, that you mostly use the same angle, and draw characters to their waist. You can try to use different angles to make frames seem more dynamic and interesting. I offered a few options, I use those in my own comic

And also, the positioning of the objects! If you place an object or character right in the middle of the frame, and don't use composition or perspective, it looks boring and lacks depth. Try to draw some distance between characters, when they are talking (I drew that on the pic above), and also! For the objects on the back and for background, it would be better to use less saturated colors, than for objects on the front. It also adds depth and volume to the picture.

I hope I didn't sound too harsh, I wish you luck and patience!

C_o 2020-04-19 17:00:33 UTC #5

As someone else said, your text is too small and your font choice is a little strange as well (why a typewriter font?). Every single character in your comic also has the same identical face and body shape.

There is a strange sort of smoothing to the colouring and line work that reminds me of drawing in Adobe Flash back in the day, it makes me think you're making this with vectors. It results in a blobby art style that is kind of off-putting to me personally, that could explain why people might not be getting very far in your comic.

Your comic is also primarily front-on medium shots (waist up) which makes everything quite flat and static. Varying up your camera angles could make things more dynamic.

sonten 2020-04-19 17:49:07 UTC #6

I have been where you are - and I'm currently redrawing my old webcomic after 7 years.

Beside the useful tips above, I can recommend you 2 awesome "how to" books. They helped me a lot, hopefully you'll find some good advice in them too.
First is "Making Comics" by Scott McCloud, and the second is "Draw Action: 250 Ways to Get Movement into Your Drawings" by Carlos Gomes Cabral

Good luck with your comic!

jakkelwebb 2020-04-20 04:54:16 UTC #7

This has been incredibly helpful in helping me see my weak spots.

I honestly started making comics without panel lines because I hated drawing them. They are the bane of my existence and I figured I could just not draw them and pass it off as being creative, but I guess the jig is up. I'll start doing that in the next comic volume.

The comic images started much larger but Tapas forces me to shrink them down to be tiny, so its really the site that makes them so hard to read. But if I'm going to be posting on here, I should adapt to the host site. I'll probably make two versions, one with normal sized text and the other with large text. I also start using a font made from my handwriting later on so I do get rid of the typewriter font.

I always saw the gaps as a natural part of my style but if it makes it look that weird then I guess I should work to get away from it. I do actually love inking, I guess I've adapted to doing it so fast to make the weekly deadline that I don't take the time to look at everything.

The effort I put into the background depends on how rushed/stressed I am that day. Sometimes I take time to think about what to put there and how to set a scene, and sometimes I pour a solid color and call it a day. I've been trying to work to create at least one good establishing shot and then improvising simple backgrounds in following panels because 'they know where they're standing, as long as they don't move I'm gold'.

A lot of the pages that are up were drawn and then redrawn years ago so I have gotten better, but I always like to hear honest feedback. I really want to make this one particular story really good and its hard when I made so many mistakes in the beginning and now its hard to get into. Hopefully one day I'll be good enough to draw more readers.

darthmongoose 2020-04-20 05:48:02 UTC #8

It might be that there's an easier way to make them that you're missing? Because panel borders aren't that bad once you have the tricks to making them sorted out.
I make mine in Clip Studio, which has built in panel border tools, but if I was in Photoshop, I'd do it one of two ways:

Flatten the panel contents, make a rectangle with the shape tool and add a "stroke" using layer modes, then put the panel contents on the layer above and alt-click the rectangle layer to clip the content of the panel inside the rectangle.
Keep all the panel contents separate as they are, make a folder of layers above the content that's all white rectangles made with the shape tool creating my panel layout, then add a black stroke to the folder of rectangles.

I recommend looking up online tutorials for whatever software you use to make your comic. Doing the panel borders first is often a good idea because you can do your sketch layers knowing where the edges of your panels are and how much space you have.