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

[scullpanda]

Leave my hand drawn updates that were colored and finished near a cat that eats paper

[WasHNooB]

Hahaha where to start….
I took photos of my traditional work (too stupid to think of scanning) and inked it on Paint (because it was soooo digital). To top that, I did it with a mouse. XD
But if you want to go super stupid mode, I didn’t know what layers were. When I finally “upgraded” to Paint tool Sai, I did line work, ink, color and dialogue on the same layer XD
My traumatic experience has left me to do much of my work traditionally, till today. XD
- WasH

[Puppisama]

Hahaha, funny thing, I dont have any scanner, so gotta take crappy pics of anything I do traditionally.

[marygold]

I think I just met my twin lol. I haveuno problem drawing over my pictures, scanned or not. Makes no difference to me. And oh my god, the one layer thing. Every time you made a mistake, especially with sizing and position. HELL. I'm a more seasoned digital artist now but I still do my original sketches on paper. They look better that way ✌️

[UzukiCheverie]

jesus christ yeah the number one rule i tell anyone when it comes to storytelling in comics is to . . . not do that lol very few comics have been able to pull off the exposition panels (much like how they're used in fairy tales for "once upon a time" stories) but I still heavily discourage it. We all gotta learn at some point though xD""

---

When I was writing Time Gate as a novel, back in its fanfiction days, long before it was a comic, I had no idea how my characters would get from A to B, just that A was the beginning and B was the ending, with a few little events scattered here and there that I wanted to write about. When I started Time Gate: Reaper's scripts for the comic, I found myself coming up with so many more ideas that I could use to fill in the many many blanks I started off with. But back when I was writing the fanfiction? Yeah I just wrote what came to mind, very little of it made any sense and was just pointless stream-of-consciousness writing - which works for diaries, not so much for plot-based stories

[Cielle]

ughh so many mistakes. I didn't do thumbnails at first or any artistic planning at all. I just had the script and a vague mental picture of what I wanted. I also used to have way to many layers. I would have a sketch layer, a lineart layer for their bodies, a color layer for their bodies, then on top of that I had a lineart layer for the clothing, the a color layer for the clothing...you get the idea. Part of that was because I was afraid to erase anything in case I changed things later. It's not the worst thing ever, but it really slowed down my process.

[yumehop]

Believe that I was actually hard working enough to have an update schedule

[Aspie_Gamer]

Made the mistake of "resizing" the very first page of Chapter 1 of Life of an Aspie so that the font could be a little more legible. Long story short, it didn't work out and now I need to find the time to finish a new version of that page that doesn't look all around ugly.

[Zanreo]

Also, sizing down comic pages for posting by resizing down by image resolution instead of exporting to png and resizing from there. The layers would sometimes not match completely up with each other, and sometimes I'd save the RESIZED version over the original, og even worse, just save the finished png while the original file was still unfinished... When I realized I could just export instead, the quality got so much better...

[shatterjure]

Using direct stock photos as backgrounds...
xD

[Shanny8]

@shatterjure I really hate when I see people do that.

[Ghostie]

I still don't know how to use screentones, despite my comic "using" them. Basically my pages are made using a 2 second change in Photoshop to change everything into Bitmap. XD It works lovely and I can control how many dots I need on the screen, but I'm limited in texture. It works for a scratchy horror feel, but I doubt it'd work outside of it...

I used to think that people who drew comics drew their bricks and art inside of them all at once, until I learned that some people draw whole "bricks" of pieces individually and splice them in, cropping to fit appropriately. So now I do it that way. XD Which is alright I guess, I'm learning to make that system work for me, but I'm still improving all the same as I go.

I'm really new to comic making. XD

[Shanny8]

@Plague by "bricks", do you mean panels? If so, YES- I'm one of those people who layout my page panels & scale my art to fit all at once. That is too much extra work drawing a sep panel to itself and then have to adjust every last one to fit on a page.

[Ghostie]

Yeah panels, that's what I meant. I couldn't think of the word. XD I'm the opposite, I don't like doodling freehand without the limitation of where a panel should be, so I draw within the frame to be sure all the layout and flow works together. XD It doesn't limit me by space much tho because my PSD and LIP files are MASSIVE, so the quality is usually all the same. I work weird. XD

[Shanny8]

@Plague I pretty much have an idea of what I generally want my page to look like. I start out on 3 steps- 1) rough layouts so I can generally get an an idea of how much space I need to use & where the word balloons need to go so I can adjust the art for them. Then there is 2) I tighten up my pencils & 3) inks. Most of my construction is in stage 1- if the art I envisioned for a panel doesnt work, I try to adjust the art for that panel, which pretty much works for me. I dont knock your process coz whatever works for you; as long as it helps you to get an end result that you're good with, but the sep panels thing wouldnt work for me coz I think in terms of designing the whole page for the best possible story flow I can get.

[maelstrom51210]

I originally drew Demon King traditionally, scanned it on my prehistoric scanner and colored and shaded it digitally. The ending result was horrible scraggly lines and uneven color fills. But you know, I was a novice back then (I still mostly am), so it's forgivable.

But the worst was the first version of the prologue. I colored it manually with the two gray markers that came in the pen box.

[Shanny8]

@maelstrom51210 Cant be any worse than my original page for my printed series- The Clique. This was back when digital coloring/lettering was just becoming a thing- I printed my lettering & sound FX on adhesive (sticker)paper and placed it on my original art.

It's stuck there for life. Now that I'm remastering the series, I have to digitally cut out the old dialogue & sound FX, and fill in in the gaps(blank spots) with art via Clip Studio.

[demthorshie]

Making the comic up as the story progresses, never know what direction the story might take in advance. This is one of the main reasons why I can't look at most of my old comics today xD!

[Greg_Dickson]

I feel like I'm improving over dumb mistakes with every page. I never figured out until this second, that I could make a scene look like nighttime, by making a layer on top of my colours, and putting a nighttime colour over the image at a reduced opacity. I'm sure there are better lighting tricks than this, but damn...it feels like something so basic.

[SpavVy]

Oh God...let's see...

About 2 years ago I used to not storyboard, like at all and I thought they weren't important. I was horribly wrong... I had to start over.

I also didn't make ref sheets for my characters and it was all done through muscle memory which was a bad idea especially for really detailed characters.