What did you learn during the comic creation process?

[Lensing]

This is a bit of a vague question but I want to specify it.
Whenever you ask people if they can recommend a good way to improve at drawing comics,
most of them will answer:
"Draw comic and you will improve"
But is this really the case?
I know some artists who have improved a lot since there first comic but we also
don´t know how they came there.
And I know other examples of people who draw a lot, page after page and don´t
improve at all. So why is there a difference?

What about you? Have you improved? How did you improve and could you only improve
that skill through creating sequential art? Did anyone get better from comic to comic and
how did you become better?

[darthmongoose]

I think that if you're drawing to a beginner level, just drawing a comic is enough to improve because for beginners, just building up a habit of drawing consistently, getting drawings finished and learning to draw and get a consistent finish is enough. Learning to draw fast is a pretty vital skill in being able to iterate on your drawings and so improving.

But once you reach a certain level, just drawing isn't enough. You'll need to draw and actively look to challenge yourself by drawing things you find difficult, not finding ways to avoid drawing those things, and looking for guidance on how to draw those things better.

Let me show you some of my development over the past twenty years or so...

So here we have a terrible attempt from when I was a teenager to make something like RPGworld!

Problems: I was clearly quite slow at drawing and found drawing a lot of work, so there aren't many actual drawings in this comic, and the amount of detail in panels is very limited too. The character designs are over-complicated for the medium, showing a lack of fore-thought.
There's also a lack of technical expertise here; teenage Kate didn't know how to make speech bubbles or find comics fonts, how to do digital colouring well and so there's inconsistency to the style.

Let's jump ahead a couple of years to the old-old version of what would become Errant, the old version of Fan Dan Go, named FanDanGo (just roll with it, okay)...

Firstly, yes, that is Jules, or Juu as they were called back then, sporting incredible anime hair antennae. I know. Amazing.
So anyway... here we can see some development. More comics-friendly character designs, more fully-detailed panels with full background, and a more consistent art style. You can see an attempt being made to incorporate depth and perspective as well as breaking up depth using value, but a definite lack of knowledge of how to really place characters in perspective and value to make good compositions. The anatomical drawing has generally improved, so while it's nothing amazing, it's certainly better. The speech bubbles are using a proper comics font and using oval shapes... but they're ugly "default photoshop oval" shapes and don't have nearly enough padding. Also there's TOO MUCH FREAKIN' TEXT! Draw the damn story, Kate! Don't just have characters narrate it all!

So, what happened next? I got into the UK small press comics scene, and was able to learn from more experienced comics creators. So with their guidance, I learned a bunch of new skills and...
Placed as a Finalist in the Tokyopop UK and Ireland Rising Stars of Manga (Weirdly topical, since it's back) with this comic called "Fell".

You can see what a difference some guidance, practice, endouragement and being pointed at good resources makes here. The style is tighter and more consistent, the anatomy is more solid, the lines are less gummy and more deliberate. There's depth being used to dramatic effect and more clear expressions and dynamic angles. The speech bubbles are a lot more polished, though still with some padding issues.
But there are weak areas like the tone isn't really being used to define depth very well, often feeling more like "colouring in", and the style feels a bit overwrought; throwing in lots of detail and stylistic pizzazz to cover for weaker areas and just ending up a bit busy. There's a general "awkward" look to my art at this time, like I was doing cool stylistic things I'd seen in comics without really understanding why better artists use them.

So let's skip forwards two years to what I'd consider one of the best comics I've ever made. Placing as one of the winners of the Manga Jiman competition, it's "Above the Clouds" from around 2008:

Above the Clouds is a confident comic. I stripped back all detail and went with black and white with minimal tones. So even if the art is awkward, it has a confidence to it. The placement of the viewpoint is a lot more deliberate, tones are only used when needed and the few lines all do a job. The font is a comics font, and it's chosen to fit the art style. The bubbles were hand drawn, but at last with good padding and a nice shape. You can see how instead of trying a bit too hard to add detail to cover for weak areas, there's none of that fear here, because by this point, I was doing professional work and had learned to stop and say, "Yes. That's enough".

Next, a Marvel pencils Sampler from 2013. The script was from Runaways vol 2...

There's an increasing confidence in the use of angles here, but not necessarily the best use of space or depth, and a slight awkwardness around the style because I was trying a little too hard to not be "too manga" and it bleeds weirdly into the proportions.

So when you get up to 2019 and Errant, there's further improvement because I went and studied storyboarding and composition, and became a lot more deliberate about where I place characters in a scene and how I use my shots to tell the story by making decisions about what I show the reader...

The speech bubbles in Errant look waaaay better because I got advice from my partner, who is a designer, about spacing and stuff, and changed up how I make them to be a more pleasing shape. You can see saturation and value are used much more deliberately to create depth here, and there's more of a sense of space. The characters are more consistently drawn and with clearer expressions, reducing the amount of text needed to convey things. The time I spent trying not to be manga fed back into my manga work, really helping me think about why I use certain stylistic stuff from manga and how to use it effectively instead of it just being a shortcut.

So in summary... yes, I think comics can teach you things, but you have to be willing to change your approach and open to the idea that there might be better ways to do even things you're very used to doing. You should always be studying good books and other comics, and never assume you're already making the best comics you can possibly make, because if you're just repeating the same approach over and over every page, then they won't really help you improve.

[Lensing]

Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to write this and upload the pictures.
This is the information I have been looking for.
It is great that you continued doing sequential art and thank you for all the detailed
background information.

I did a lot of sequential art when I was a kid and young teenager, I still have some
of it and it all was very rushed and sloppy and traditional with pencil or ballpoint pen
because it was the 80s. I relearned to draw at the age of 40 and the problem was that
I never felt "good enough" to finish pages because it felt embarassing to draw comics
which look like a kid had drawn them when in fact I´m over 40 years old. I just wanted
them to look better. I started to do sequential now and managed to finish pages after
7 years of daily practice and theory and I´m really happy that I did.
I was asking the question because I´m thinking about what´s the best way to improve
when I finished the 8 page comic I´m working on right now, I´m on page 8 right now.
I will probably give it to an experienced comic artist and let them give me advice and
then try to improve on what I don´t like about the comic.
I did learn a lot so far and my overall work process got faster. The importance
of character sheets, to have a color palette, best order to color and stuff like that

[TroyVSTheWorld]

My guess is the amount of self-reflection. If you don't cringe at your old stuff you don't learn from it or understand how to make it better. It's easy to get caught up in your own comic you neglect to read the comics that got you interested in the medium in the first place--You can learn a lot of subtle things from your favorite creator by the way they drawn certain characters, panel shapes, or even their typography. It's always fun to read words in a comic that are creatively displayed.

A lot of times I'll read my older stuff and think "You know what would have made this better?" which clearly shows oneself they've improved. Plus, I started a webcomic with the original intent of getting better at drawing, so literally everything else I pick up along the way (digital art app understandings, writing skills and more...I think?) is bonus XP gains. Yeah, when you make art, go for XP gains, those are the best.

[Lensing]

Very good answer. Self reflection is a big point.
I have one example of a german comic artist, she draws 3 pages a day since years, I follow her uploads
since years and the first pages have exactly the same quality like the last pages. Not good, not bad.
She doesn´t even have the time to self reflect or watch a tutorial

[RedLenai]

• To be faster
• To be consistent
• To search for ALL KIND OF SHORTCUTS
• Better Coloring
• Better Lettering

Bust most importantly, to don't expect each panel to be a stunning illustration, that sometimes you don't even need to make "the biggest effort" or "reaching perfection" or "the highest of your abilities". Nah, by reading other webcomics, especially, popular or extremely well known ones you get to see that sometimes panels don't have shadows, sometimes the 3d model is not totally blended, panels are repeated from time to time, you can leave all those ASSETS from the CSP Store untouched despite it looks like a collage.

Another author, sure can come and say your work looks choppy because you're using 3D from your favorite game (cof cof Sims 2 cof cof), but like, who even cares, man? Most of your readers just want to consume the soul outta your newest chapter and done, even the authors that hire you (my case specifically) just want their scripts turn into comic, they even read comics so as long as the art is presentable and somewhat coherent that's it.

[Lensing]

Very good points,
especially on the shortcuts and the perfection.

I have one trick for the perfection part. I draw digital but when I hate a page because it looks so amteurish,
I print it out when it´s colored and compare it to a page from Lucky Luke, Asterix or Tintin. That´s 3 comics
I grew up with. It doesn´t look amateurish and I can spot things that can be worked on in the future or can
be worked on directly, like too saturated colors. The pages look good when they are not on the giant
screen. A lot of the tiny that I was worried about simply disappear and the anatomy and proportions
don´t look so wonky anymore

[KennethLopezJr921]

Ive been drawing comics (well to put it more accurately, just a single series) for 3 years now, beginning in 2019, and while that might not seem as long, I've definitely learned a lot in those years. It was quite a learning experience but it was far from being a fun one.

One thing you'll notice when you begin drawing comics is that it involves a lot of drawing. Way more than what you'd usually draw on a daily basis. And depending on the page count, you'll be doing way more drawing then you ever did prior. That may or may not be an intimidating prospect, especially if you're like me who's first comic chapter is almost 200 pages long because he thought writing chapters as the length of 24 tv show episodes (or in this case a 45 minute pilot) was a good idea wouldn't take 3 years + to draw. But if you get past that factor, you'll be in for quite a labor intensive and often frustrating experience. I cant tell you how many times I had to re-storyboard a page or two because the original thumbnail wouldn't work drawn out or how many times I screwed up whilst inking and had to restart the page back when I was drawing my comic traditionally. The one thing that got me through all of that, is probably the most important element in drawing a comic is willpower and motivation. If you really love your story, your characters, etc enough to not let the pain of drawing the comic detour you than you'll get through those difficult times. You'll also be able to learn from those screw ups and be able to become better at drawing comics. Its not easy and it wont come naturally, its something that you have to do. I can remember feeling disappointed in the amount of pages I drew during 2020, only 12, due to my lack of will and motivation that entire year. And I can remember promising myself on new years day for 2021 that I'd push myself to be more consistent with comic pages and not let the painful process slow me down..

Another thing that helps is to listen to feedback because it'll make drawing your comic much easier. Looking back, I don't think I would be where I am without listening to advice. One notable one was my friends' insistence that I switch to digital. This was well after I had finally gotten the hardware to do digital art at home (before I could only do it in school). Yet by this time I was still drawing comics traditionally. It was stubbornness and self delusion than anything else. I had convinced myself that if I were to make the switch then my comic would loose some of its edge and that if I continued to use a quill nib, which was uncomfortable using and made inking take longer, that I'd miraculously get better. Despite the fact that traditionally inking in general felt limiting to me (and not in a good way) and that my digital works were far more stronger than what I could do with simple inks. I did eventually relent after finishing my first digital pages, I realized just how better this switch was. Like compare my last traditional page to my first digital page:

Another piece of advice was to draw comic pages in batches, rather than drawing page by page. It was something I had done before back when I was drawing tradtionally but stopped mainly because I felt that doing it would make inking more intimidating. I felt that it would be less stressful to do the inking for a single page when the sketches were done, rather than for multiple. And I stuck with it even after the switch to digital out of habit I guess. But it turns out, this process is flawed because some pages wont be completed in the same exact time. Some took less than a day while others took almost a week. And if I wanted to draw comic pages without getting burnt out, something had to change. I vented about this in the tapas discord and one of the users recommended that I draw comic pages all at once instead of one at a time. I've only recently adopted this process and its helped with speeding up the production and consistency. Now I don't have to worry about being stuck on one page as I could flip flop between comic pages. That and the art style doesn't change between pages as the gap between them is much shorter than before. My most recent Chapter part took exactly a month to complete and not a day more.

There's more but I think I've covered the more important bits

[adkahdj]

Regarding reusing, I have found that I reuse, say a character, a lot more for convenience rather than to make my story incredibly dense. Something I would have never thought before writing a story myself.

[Lensing]

Thanks for replying, very good advice.
Yeah, I realised the part with the drawing more, especially finshed figures.
I did a lot of quick poses, gesture and body parts but rarely any finished figures and now I´m doing
at least 6-20 every day depedning on the page.
I will try the drawing pages in patches thing, the reason why I didn´t do it this time was
1) I wrote from page to page and that worked better for me than having the plot, but I will
try to have the plot complete for another comic because that has many advantages
2) I´m not at the point yet where I trust the process, the sketches look horrible to me, I want
to delete them, the inked pages don´t look good and when it´s colored I still think it looks
awful and embarassing but when the page is done with speech bubbles I start liking the page.
It´s hard to accept the sketches when you don´t like them. But I think my brain will get used
to knowing that it will look good in the end

[Lensing]

Thanks for the reply.
I used one background 2 times so far and I already felt bad about it and inked over it again,
then I changed it a little bit but I guess reusing is something I will do a lot more when
I got more time pressure

[TheLemmaLlama]

"Draw comic and you will improve"
But is this really the case?

I think people's main reasoning behind this is that comics force you to draw all sorts of things that you wouldn't otherwise draw, because you need it for your story. For instance, random background elements that we take for granted in day-to-day life.

If you're just drawing for the sake of drawing, you tend to stay in your comfort zone and keep drawing the things you like/are good at over and over again because it makes you feel good and productive, and even if you tell yourself 'hmm, I should probably step out of my comfort zone so I can grow as an artist', you have no real motive to actually diversify ("shoulds" are not a very good motivator! :'D)

And I know other examples of people who draw a lot, page after page and don´t
improve at all. So why is there a difference?

I've also seen such examples; I think this happens when people are focusing primarily on getting their comic done, so they don't have a lot of time to slow down and reflect on how to improve their art. Honestly, I don't think this is always a bad thing; there will always be some aspect you can improve on and you don't want to get trapped in a neverending cycle of pursuing perfection - at some point you just gotta knuckle down and get the thing done. Stagnation isn't this terrifying beast you have to avoid at all costs (that sounds like an exhausting way to live!)

If you go in trying to make a comic with the intention of learning art from it and improving your skills, I think you'll pretty much always improve. Just keep in mind that the priorities of improvement and consistent output can clash, and if your first priority is artistic improvement, sometimes you have to be willing to slow down, reflect, miss the next deadline instead of rushing out an update, or even abandon the project altogether and try something different :]

---

For me, I think the main skills art-wise comics have helped me improve are:
- clarity (making sure people know what's going on in the image)
- fluidity (making character actions/poses look natural)
- atmosphere (making the world feel immersive)

I'm naturally a lazy person so I don't think I've ever liked making super complex character designs and I probably would've gravitated towards simpler artstyles anyway And I'm not really sure if it's comics that helped me improve the atmosphere of my environments - it might just be correlation rather than causation (I've only properly learnt how to draw backgrounds later in my artistic development (and am able to understand technical perspective stuff etc), and I also happen to be pretty much drawing only comic panels around the same time)

But clarity and fluidity is definitely something I would've had a hard time learning without sequential art; when you have a story to tell, you need to know how to tell it clearly and when your characters are actually doing stuff, you have to draw them ... actually doing stuff, which means you get better at poses

A sample panel from each of my sequential art projects (plus a pre-comic illustration)

pre-comic piece (2013)

Carefree v1 (2014)

Small World (late 2014??)

Carefree v2 (2015)

The Curtains Were Blue (2017)

Group Theory (2020)

Back to Bed (2020)

early bitwam (2021)

God's World (2022)

[Lensing]

Thanks a lot for the answer.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense, especially the fact that you are forced to draw things that
wouldn´t draw. I have a list of things that I have to train after I finished this comics.
Example: braids and collars, I thought I could draw them and one my female characters has
braids and a collar and I´m still not good at them. But I´m looking forward to the improvement
in the next comic.

I realised the clarity and fluidity too. The style on page 8 is already more fluid now compared to page 1

I also know now what´s important for my style and what not. Hands for example, they don´t matter much
and I care about hands way less than I thought, most of the hands look like the character would
wear gloves and it works in my style

I always digged your style, God´s world looks stylish

[system]

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