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Comic Creators Thread: Ways to Stay Motivated, Creative, and Productive?
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He was telling me a story about how he once had a guy in an armbar, and kept trying to tell the guy to tap out, before he broke the arm. The round ended, they fought another, and my brother lost in a decision. In the video I linked above, you can see a similar thing, where he starts open-handed slapping his opponent, until the fight is stopped, because he realized he fractured the guy's eye socket.
It got me thinking about a story based around this idea of a big, tough dude, who's too nice for his own good.
So I took that character, and sort of merged it with my love of crime and martial arts movies, and got an idea for a story I think's worth telling.
I'm a bit shit at drawing action though, so we'll see how it goes.
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Question to you guys. When you draw your pages, what sized paper do you use? Do you work on A4 like the comic itself or do you go larger? I'm currently playing around with an A3 block and it's kind of cool.
That said I found out from @jyrenB thanks to him looking at the release lists. So if you plan on submitting stuff, they don't seem to alert you directly on the release date. Which is a bit of a bummer, because it doesn't give you oodles of time to possibly drum up any noise for the comic. However, I'm still excited.
I'm assuming the first OSAS issue will be in a week or two, but who knows. Submitted the two more issues recently, so we'll have it nearly caught up to the webcomic as soon as they let us.
XBL: JyrenB ; Steam: Jyren ; Twitter
I'm really excited (terrified) of how the guided view will turn out. Like I think it'll be super neat on some of Eve's acrobatics, but Im worried how good a lot of the panels will look blown up.
And yeah, I really can't wait to see how Guided View handles things. I don't think you have anything to worry about. Eve will look great with it.
XBL: JyrenB ; Steam: Jyren ; Twitter
Though I think I kind of obsess over time management with these kind of things.
All-in-all it takes me about 4 weeks or so to pump out an Eve issue. I've gotten pretty quick about it, especially in that I don't actually script it out. I know what beats I have to hit to move the story along mind you, but I kind just improvise from there. Which I actually think works to my benefit, since it does mean to tap into the tradition of Ozark folk tales, which are basically hypebolic one-upmanship that's made up as it goes along. I also don't ink it, which cuts down a load of time.
That said, I've still got Backwood Folk, and a movie thing. The latter eats up time like you wouldn't believe. However Backwood's first big arc has something like 50 pages left? (I actually have a lot of the final scene drawn, just not the stuff leading up to it, because look at this doofus) And the movie project is like 75% done on the drawing front, and has to be done by July. And at that point I'd like to get Eve to one issue a month until I have enough for a print edition.
Let me tell you, I'm a blast at parties.
Though to read it in the guided view I had to buy it myself, and I'm a little less jazzed about that. Though of no fault of theirs. They actually paced it quite nicely. It was just my fear of it being quite zoomed in.The pencils came out a little rougher than I wanted, but the next issue should look fine with it. Basically just problems of looking at stuff you did over half a year ago creeping in as per usual.
Anyway's here it is! Eve of the Ozarks #1
(also I just grabbed a copy will read on the train
However, if there's a means to check the sales I haven't been able to find it. Which is a very weird feature to exclude, and I could see it rubbing feathers the wrong way. Especially if they only payout once you've earned $100 dollars.
That said, the possibility still exists that I haven't found it, or they email you stats. Since it's been online only a day, I don't want to jump to any conclusions just yet. I'm going to give it a week, and then email an inquiry on it. Give it a chance for a weekly report and so forth.
Also thanks! I hope you enjoy it!
The only thing I'd say is that some of the lines could have been cleaned up a bit more (think I could see the draft lines around one of eve's heads) but that probably also has to do with the zoom etc.
Actually Guardian of the Bluffs kind has a weird origin. Junior year or so of college I switched from my major Art to Creative Writing (condensed version- Started offering less technical classes, more how to make it into galleries which was in no way my interest) and I was in the early days of Backwood Folk, and one a couple of my classes I wrote short stories that were more or less the history of Po'Dunk. And I had a Magic Realism class, and I ended up writing Paw Duncan's sort of origin story. How he came to the area and so forth. Also was the origin of the one-antlered elk and so forth. I liked the story a lot, even if it was easily the darkest thing I'd ever come up with.
At the same time I had a Children's Writing Class. And I had to come-up with an idea for a children's book. And so comes Eve of the Ozarks. Which the mock-up of that children's book essentially was the prototype for the first issue. Except that it was meant to skew towards very early readers, and it had a whole other main character, the Mockingbird, who basically gave Hieronymus a sort of voice. (I actually re-used the Mockingbird bit for one of the webcomic additions) But as it went on, the Paw Duncan story kind of mixed in. And so Guardian of the Bluffs is basically this sort of continuation of a really dark short story I wrote in college.
As for the lines, yeah I totally agree. Issue 2 is a lot cleaner, and Issue 3 (thus far) even more so. When it comes to collecting all of them, I'm definitely gunna do a bit of clean-up on the first issue.
(Also those narration boxes- hoo-boy)
Page format I chose, because it was essentially the dimensions of an iPad, yeah!
Now to sit back in terror, prepare the website so new readers can jump in exactly where the issues leave off instead of having to do some archive looking, and try not to think about just how much everything about OSAS is better than those first twenty pages.
XBL: JyrenB ; Steam: Jyren ; Twitter
I think it's just because the linework in your comic is always so clean, that having that ink-splatter effect in the last panel, really makes it pop.
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And glad you liked that panel! The hope was it would build to a nice sudden explosion, and it really worked. The only thing I can take credit for in it is describing it to my wife as "make it as chaotic as possible." I think she was looking for a place to use the ink splatter anyway. Definitely worth it, even if the splattering got some ink onto the couch in the process.
XBL: JyrenB ; Steam: Jyren ; Twitter
Feels good that it's out there. There's a section of IGN's comic page doing reviews of the Submit comics and they gave us a B- for pretty fair reasons. In my mind, this is our low bar and I'm perfectly fine with starting there!
XBL: JyrenB ; Steam: Jyren ; Twitter
Do you guys have much experience with it? I'm surprised that the major publishers get away with using it, the figures always look quite stilted and lifeless. I'm thinking maybe drawing their faces on instead of using the default settings would do the trick...
I use some simple 3D stuff, from time to time. Mainly when I need to pull off some kind of weird, tricky angle. I showed an example here, and talked a little about it here.
I dunno, I think that 3D models and such are a tool like any other. There's good ways and bad ways to use them. I try to be as inconspicuous with them as I can.
Generally though, I find entirely CGI/3D comics to look really off-putting and weird. And drawing over 3D models does require some degree of skill. Besides just technical drawing skill, there's stuff like panel composition, pacing, blah blah blah.
But hey, give it a shot. Nothing lost in trying.
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Whenever I use 3D models it's mostly for figuring out how an environment will roughly look from this and that angle. David Petersen (Mouse Guard) sometimes posts his papercraft figures he makes to use as ref. They give a nice consistency to his environments.
And @Amigu
Don't worry that it won't look exactly like what you have in your head, just draw that shit and that's that. If you ever want to tell all those stories in your own lines you have to start somewhere. We all have our own ambitious brain-childs we would hate seeing realized the wrong way, however nothing will ever stand in your way of redoing it once you have the skills. Don't wait for your art skills to grow and then neglect your writing skills because of that, just do both and learn both at the same time.
I talked about this a bit on my Tumblr, but for a long time I was really resistant to the idea of using 3D models and stuff. But, I can either spend a whole day agonizingly laying out a perspective grid for a shot of a city, tweaking it to be just how I want it, or I can draw a bunch of rectangles in SketchUp, rotate and adjust to get the angle I want, and finish the whole thing in an hour or two. Same thing goes for figure drawing. If I can do it off the top of my head, and make it look good, I will. But, if I can use photo reference or a 3D model, and get something that looks better, quicker, I will.
Additionally, I use stuff that I model myself, with the exception of the models that came with MangaStudio.
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But yeah comics totally done with poser do look really weird to me they kind of remind me of that 3D animated series from the 90s ReBoot. I'm still surprised that the big two do them and get away with it.
Granted, every artist worth their salt is, from time to time, going to do stuff the hardest way possible, and spend hours doing something once that may take less than forty minutes after they've done it once. For comics, if you're telling a story you're in the middle of, it probably makes more sense to use that cheap, easy technology solution at least once or twice and save you the heartache of an avoidable roadblock in your storytelling.
Of course, I'm behind in my own project given real-world roadblocks, but my point is, you will probably encounter obstacles works on your stuff, and at least some of them are going to take more time than you expect. It's okay to be pragmatic about getting a thing done without wearing yourself out if there's a tool to give you fair leverage already out there.
Coming soon to an internet near you!
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I'm drawing this at a smaller size, on what's basically letter-sized Bristol board, since I totally eroded my buffer of comics, and need to put these out at a slightly quicker pace.
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Edit: Here's a process .gif too.
I generally think it's better to come into a story, when things are already exciting. You can always backtrack, later. Like, in this comic I did, the first page sets up the problem, which has already been in effect for a while, and then introduces the hero, has him solve the problem, and then goes back to explain what caused the problem to begin with.
I mean, it could have opened with twenty pages of people suffering through a drought, deciding they need to hire someone to fix it, meeting with a few different mercenary types, etc. before finally starting the story. Or it could have shown the hero, being chased out of one town, wandering around for a while and getting into trouble, and eventually turning up to deal with the problem at hand.
The former would put more of an emphasis on the townspeople, the latter on the hero. Neither's wrong, just serving different ends.
Like, let's say you're going to write a western. You can open it with the hero riding across a dusty plain, or with his neck in a noose, standing in front of a lot of angry people. Neither's wrong really, it just depends on the story you're telling. I mean, I think the latter's more interesting, and more likely to make me keep reading, but not necessarily. Sometimes it's fun to read something kind of slow and ponderous, that takes its time to meander.
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I've tried to start my own comic, but I'm too lazy and don't draw well enough to be confident in starting it up. I think it's important to have the story outlined before you start. Most stories end up flailing around haplessly if they're being made on the go, either spinning its wheels uselessly while trying to find out what to do or just losing control.