Stupidest thing you ever did/thought in terms of comic making

[marygold]

Not necessarily you drew a wonky nose. Something like this, I'll use mine as an example.

When I first started out I for real thought you had to draw the screen tones yourself, no kidding, I actually tried. I do full color because I like full color, but also because I was absolutely traumatized from the screen tone experience :')

[Puppisama]

I used to believe when making a manga you had to put the sound effects in japanese hahaha.

[El_Psy_Congroo]

I had no idea how to do screen tones either. My first comic took place in NYC and I wasn't sure if it constituted fair use but I would generate line art from photographs of buildings and streets using these phone apps. One had a comic function that did screen tones which basically ended up looking like grey and white chess board. I tried the same pattern elsewhere and it looked awful. This was before mangastudio had all those neat screen tone and lineart generating gizmos:

[60Six]

When I first started coloring my comic, I was treating each panel like it's own entire picture. I mean with like it's own line art, own flat colors, own 3 shading layers. All within the same page (Separated into groups). It made for MASSIVE, computer-chugging file sizes and a million layers to fish through.
It wasn't until half-way through the first chapter that it just dawned on me "Wait... Why don't I just put all the line art, all the flats, and all the shading together for all the panels?" I don't know why it took me so long to realize that... It's not like that's how I did my panels when it was in black and white.

[NickRowler]

The stupidest thing I ever did was ask someone to review my comic on my birthday. The person more or less said it was complete garbage, got pissy and said to make it more like Invader Zim (I hate Invader Zim), compared my writing to the infamous miscarriage story from Crl-Alt-Delete, and when I asked "did I do anything right" they refused to say anything nice saying "critics don't do that" but then they said "Well at least you didn't use anime cliches like most newbs."

It made my birthday REALLY depressing (add that I was already alone on my birthday).

[AnnaLandin]

Other than the terrible mistake that taught me that planning ahead is a good idea, you mean? Man, that comic was a mess. I wrote myself into a corner in chapter 2, the antagonist wandered off and was never seen again, and nothing ever got explained.

I scrapped the project halfway through chapter 4.

I think my worst mistakes on a page-to-page level have involved reading order and placement of dialogue. I've drawn pages that were practically unreadable because it was super-unclear in which order you were supposed to read the panels.

I comfort myself with the fact that I was at least never as bad as the Swedish translation of the manga-Bible (literally the Bible, the Books of Moses, in manga-format) which had all the panels arranged to be read right-to-left - but then put all the dialogue balloons in each panel left to right.

Which means that yes, you were supposed to read it in two different directions at once.

It was the most atrocious thing I've ever seen.

[Greg_Dickson]

I had no idea how to do screen tones either (I still don't), so I was very confused when I started my comic in a black and white format. At first, I wanted to make it all cross-hatched to make it simpler for myself, which was a dumb mistake, since there were backgrounds and surfaces that I needed to use blacks and greys with, so I sort of ended up with a hybrid. Thank god I switched to full colour 4 pages ago. I thought it was going to be harder to accomplish, but it's technically easier (both on myself and on the eyes). If I ever have time, I would love to go back and re-colour my first 5 pages (not including my already coloured cover).

[spadesart]

probably when i tried making a comic with no script planned and no outline (it was literally just page by page and i never wrote the dialogue so id have to rely on memory, which usually didnt work). i kinda made it up as i went because there was no planning period. it failed, tried revamping it after a year, still with no script. only got to page 13/14 with both tries. with my current comic i actually have a complete outline and script and im almost to page 30 (which really impresses me because ive never made it that far in anything.)

another thing was waiting for another story in my head to become absolutely perfect before i started writing it. i never started writing it (with my current comic i just dove straight in after a week of light planning and outlining and im doing really well!!!).

[heterodont]

Jumping into a longform with no prior experience in sequential art or story writing except maybe stuff I wrote for class ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

[blackopsracing321]

I totally did that too with my first project. I would just have an idea of the story, sit down and freestyle the crap out of the pages. It came out as an incomprehensible mess.

The dumbest thing I've done recently was not labelling the layers of the first page of my series. When I had to go back to edit the page (basically just cleaning up stray lines and colors) it took me an hour and a half to finish something that takes me 10 minutes now lol.

[J.Z.Castillo]

UGH! The first couple of pages of BioHazard are facking terrible! I can't look at them sometimes! It was back when I was pretty fresh at digital art so I thought having my structural lines show through was cool as fuck... it wasn't. Terrible. I am currently redrawing them all lmao.

Also! hand-written text? Seriously? I can't with myself.

[WakaXO]

When I first started my current comic I would completely finish a page before adding text/word bubbles, which was a huge waste of time as they covered parts of the image I spent time on.

[El_Psy_Congroo]

Same, and that emoji is my spirit animal.

[Shanny8]

I would say mine is not taking lettering space into account. I ended up having to put the lettering over parts of the art that made it look weird altogether. After that, I started trying to make a conscious effort to account for lettering when doing my art.

Also I would over detail my panels, and when reducing the size for print- the page would look cluttered & messy as hell. So I started trying to balance out my pages with enough detail in certain panels that, when I reduced it, the page would still look clean.

[joannekwan]

Having any sort of rasterized text and not saving the original text format so as to make easy corrections. –_–

[kristintipping7]

I didn't know what layers were when I first started trying to do digital art. Thankfully my (then future, now current) sister in law filled me in. There was also a brief period when I first started making comics where I was convinced that I didn't need to script or do layouts for any of my pages beforehand. I did my almost 60 page senior project comic just winging it from page to page, and it turned out about as well as you would think.

[Michelle]

My first real attempt at doing a long-form comic, I dove in and did it page-by-page. WHY. I'm really amazed that people liked it because the story was really unfocused.

I also did a lot of cliche anime-type stuff story-wise, not because I liked it, but because I thought other people liked that sort of thing. Now it's so cringey to look back at.

[MissMagicGirl]

When I made my first comic (I was like 15 at the time) I made all the pictures for one comic page on an A4 paper. I did not understand that I could make one picture at the time and then put them together on my computer.... So some pictures got so small I could make almost no detail and they look really weird. Also I made everything with really bad color pencils... ^^

Here is a page from my first comic LOL XD

[alaingrey]

^^ I used to draw my pages as spreads. This is ca. 2013- Time flies O _ O They were done reaaaally small- 15 cm across so that I could fit each spread in my sketchbook. It's not a stupid or terrible process perse, but I'm not sure why I did this? I'm glad that now I can have detail in a page.

What you can't see from this- I drew everything on yellow construction paper. Just because ?? It really helped me feel less pressure to make a page, but editing them was Ass.

...Also there's a Drugs and Wires cameo on this page. I don't think I'll ever draw a comic that doesn't have Dan sneaking around in a panel lmao

[marygold]

Noooo X'D sorry about that!