Things I’ve learned from going from illustration to comic art

Ah man, yeah this is a good topic. A lot of very skilled illustrators get very frustrated when comics trip them up. Here are some things I've learned.

• Readability is king, queen, every flavour of monarch. You can't leave things vague and up to interpretation unless understanding them truly, genuinely, 100% isn't important at all for understanding who is where and what they're doing. You need to be clear, and you need to be obvious. For fine art and the fancier end of illustration, it's okay to leave things up to viewer interpretation, but in comics, it's more like writing with pictures, and if you're not telling readers enough of the story, they'll usually get frustrated and bored.

• Comics will strip your art naked, so you'd better have good basics. You don't have time in a comic to spend ages adding lots of nice details, or rendering, so a lot of the techniques a person can use to create a "wow!" reaction become unviable, and you really do have to strip down to just simple art, usually line work or flat solids. This will make it really obvious if your line quality is poor, or if your proportions and anatomical drawing aren't confident, because there's no place to hide. A lot of people look at the simple art seen from popular creators and say "HUMPH! I can do that!" and then only discover how hard it is when they try it.

• You need to learn to write. Really amazing art can hold up poor writing and storytelling for a while... but only for so long. There's only so long the audience will keep going out of "wow this art is pretty!" before they start taking it for granted, because YUP, that sure is another nicely drawn picture of a face! Oop, another well-drawn environment! Okay... you can experience that by going on Artstation or a gallery. Good art alone gets attention, but diminishing returns on reader engagement; the art needs to support a great story and characters.

• The audience are not illustrators or illustration professors. As a fellow illustrator, if you've clearly put in work and drawn something really hard like a horse on a bike riding down a street full of people viewed from a low angle, I can appreciate how hard that was and be like "WOW! NICE!", and as a fellow illustrator, I can see an unusual or unfashionable style executed very well and say, "damn, that's some nice drawing!" but the audience... mostly do not care. They don't care how hard to draw the thing is, only that everything in the comic looks okay. They don't care if your style is truly remarkable and unique, they just want something that looks appealing/cool/cute/sexy and fits with the tone that's drawn to a decent standard. They also do not care that your comic got top marks in your illustration class and your professor praised the unique style and evocative rendering and visual metaphors. Your audience are probably reading your comic in their lunch break in the breakroom toilets at a Starbucks, and they really just want to be entertained for a bit to brighten their dreary day, so you can't blame them for not being adventurous.
  If you want to make fancy coffee table graphic novels with experimental art styles, Tapas isn't the place for it; people who want to make that should go and pitch print comics to Self Made Hero and Nobrow where that kind of thing is valued.

• Don't be Principle Skinner. You know the meme; "Am I out of touch? ...No, it's the children who are wrong!" If the audience are not reading your beautifully drawn comic, it's not the audience's fault for not getting your totally deep and beautiful comic, it's YOUR fault for not making your deep and beautiful comic catch their attention or communicate why they should care about how its deep themes affect a character they can relate to on a human level. OR it's your fault for trying to sell it to the wrong people. You might think that's harsh advice, but if you believe every problem with your comic is your own fault, it can be empowering! I cannot change the audience; I have no power over them, but I do have unlimited power to change myself and my work or where I try to sell it.

Generally, the main thing is not to assume you'll immediately be great at comics even if you're fantastic at illustration, and also never to turn your nose up at a "less skilled" illustrator who's killing it in comics; they're clearly doing something right. Always look for things to learn and you'll do just fine!

y'know, this is kind of funny to me..
i'm the opposite, im quite crap at illustration-type work, but i have a lot of fun drawing comic art! .. That's most of the reason why I don't do commissions. Anyways, keeping things clear and having good composition is definitely one of the best things you can do for your comic, Mob Psycho's art isn't the greatest but it has very clear composition and you can almost always tell what's going on, meanwhile something like Berserk, while it has a lot of technical skill and also most of the time is clear, is sometimes muddied because the composition gets ruined with all the darkness/similar looking figures.

This is super relatable! I used to do pretty 3/4 headshots all the time because I used to draw only portraits of my characters and faces were the only thing I was good at . Making a comic requires you to do different things: experiment with perspective, anatomy, different poses, backgrounds, etc.

I also used to have the same mindset as you: I always wanted my characters to look pretty in every single panel and shot they were in (I still have this urge but I try to fight against it as much as I can), but I quickly noticed that this would lead me nowhere. Having ugly shots and making mistakes is part of comic making and is key for improvement!

You used to mainly do illustration, huh? Pardon my mush, but I feel like that explains why your panels look so pleasant and engaging. ^^ Your roots definitely show.

I feel like my roots show too, but this causes me endless agony and embarrassment because unfortunately mine are in character design. DX In essence, my art brain tends not to care about anything except showing off the details of the characters' designs and making sure they're "accurate" (i.e., things like posing and expression are always an afterthought).
ALSO, it hates when you can't see the characters properly, like in closeups and actually interesting angles, which makes shot composition a nightmare.

Basically, I feel like I always have to actively prevent myself from drawing the most boring comic possible. I do have the skills to do it right, but my gut instinct is to never use them, so it's like a constant battle. >_< And now that I think about it, that may be a large part of why I find comic art as draining as I do...considering how long I've been drawing comics, you'd think my mindset would have adapted by now, but I guess I'm not there yet...

I knew that being decent at drawing wouldn't mean I'd be good at comics, but it didn't really hit till I started making comics and running into issues with text placement and spacing alongside art. Like jeezus, the amount of grief over figuring out how much space everything needs while still being legible is something I will probably be working on till the day I K.O. from this realm. Mainly bc I like full-blown illustrations and tend to treat my layouts like one giant page of art over individualized sections despite thumbnailing the pages in sections, so I often get into the pages and then remember towards the end that text needs to go here so like...make some spaceeeeeeee. To try and combat that I've been including the dialogue on the page at the line art phase, but it doesn't feel natural yet, so I just gotta keep at it.

LOL on the backgrounds bc I'm there with ya. I had to draw a dang cityscape and I was trying to be super technical with it and I just was starting to hate it, and then I was checking out some stuff by the Etherington bros and tried a more organic approach to it, and was able to get through it, though recreating that ish is more work if I want it to look consistent since I don't have a model of it, but like I'm figuring shiz out as I go. I just know I like making my comic and looking forward to it getting easier as I learn more along the way.

Ah yes, standards creep - if you have meticulously rendered characters, you better have meticulously rendered backgrounds too or they'll look totally out of place XD Downside to putting a lot of effort into one part of the picture is you have to match that effort in every other part of the picture as well :'D

Oddly enough, this only seems to apply to elements in the same picture, but not to different pictures in the same comic. For instance, your comic starts off with some very illustratory, beautifully-rendered shots but when you fall back to a more standard level of detail for comics, it doesn't feel jarring or inconsistent at all - in fact, the more detailed shots may have 'primed' my brain into thinking your normal shots are the same level of detail when I'm just reading through casually and not paying close attention

Yeah, this is often an issue in comics communities, where you get people lamenting that some incredibly detailed and beautifully rendered comic isn't as popular as say... I dunno, the simple, bold work of Bryan Lee O'Malley, not because the comic they're holding up is particularly good to read, but because they're attached to this ideal that more complex art that took more work deserves to be more popular because they believe the artist worked harder, or that things that look closer (at least in surface terms of rendering and stuff) to the art of renaissance era masters deserves more accolades.

But knowing when to simplify and when to add detail really is a high-level comics skill. More detail slows down the reader and increases their time spent on a panel, extending its perceived length in time (good for establishing shots), "others" the character or object to create a disconnect between what's being shown and the reader (good for villains, monsters and extraordinary artefacts or things that are uncanny, out of place or meant to inspire awe) and tends to make the subject more serious, BUT can also have the effect of melodrama or purple prose and slip all the way around into comedic if pushed too far (sometimes done deliberately, like in Spongebob). Simpler art reads faster, so speeds up the pace of a panel (good for action), makes characters and objects more relateable (good for comedy or when you really want the reader to relate to an emotion) and you can use empty space for all sorts of things like creating loneliness and vulnerability, or freedom, or scale. It's a tool that every comics creator should have in their kit. That and obviously, knowing that killing yourself spending hours adding detail to every single panel, even when it's adding nothing to the story or tone, is a bad idea is important for anyone who wants to make a viable living at this!

THIS!!! Absolutely!! Perfectionists can't survive in this field. *nod vigorously

Very interesting topic.

The really hard part is to find a simplified style which looks perfect in every angle/panel which can be drawn fast and fits to the story telling