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kenmo
He's very good. I like the expressions he gives his characters.
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Here's a cover from one of my comics. The character on the cover is Man O' Metal, who was active during the 1940s. I like how the lighting highlights his muscles and gives a nice look of thickness to his body.
They layout is pretty good too. He's got a balled fist and a look of determination on his face and his back is literally up against the wall. The picture has a very nice heroic look to it.
EDIT: Here are the other covers to the series...
A sample page. Needless to say, Colonel Yamato won’t be reappearing in a future story....
And a nice poster of Gold Venus flying her P38 Lightning...
They say the P38 Lightning was the precursor to the modern jet. Whether or not that's true, the P38 got the job done in World War II.
The top two pilots in terms of confirmed kills, Richard Bong and Thomas McGuire (whom McGuire Air Force Base is named for), both flew P38s. Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who was in charge of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was killed by a squadron of P38s.
Maybe I should add some shot-down Zeros falling and smoking in the background? Maybe have the guns on the P38 firing? What do you think?
Tutorial: Word Balloons
Word Balloons Take Up Space, Usually Lots of Space
There's not a lot of hard and fast rules in the art of making comics, but there is a least one: Word balloons take up space. If you're going to use them, you need to plan for the space they will consume. Usually this means including things in your image that are expected to have word balloons placed on top of them.
This space can be what in a non-comic render would be called "dead space", areas of the render where there's just nothing of interest. Or it can be parts of the render that are not central to the purpose of the panel. The image below has both "dead space" and non-critial parts. Only the two central figures are key to the purpose of the panel. The rest can be covered with word balloons, if needed.
Notice that well over 50% of the panel can be covered in word balloons. This is quite common.
Stylized Word Balloons
In the second panel shown above, Knur is given stylized blue word balloons. Stylized word balloons let the reader know that the character has a special sounding voice. In the case of Knur, he is an AI powered hologram, and so his voice sounds artificial.
Once established, stylized word balloons can be used to let the reader know who's speaking even when that character is not in view.
Very interesting @magicjava I really like the fact that the balloons are semi transparent.
I use a 75% opacity setting on them. It lets a little bit of the background through, but you can still read the text even over a noisey background (like trees).
EDIT: I try to improve with each series. Gold Venus was my first series, and I was happy just to get it done. Heroes of the Wild Frontier is my newest series. It's improvements include:
Here's another postwork recipe for Photoshop.
The cost is some finer detail, but you get a nice, soft cartoony look.
Go to Filter - > Blur -> Smart Blur
Set Radius to 2.0, the Threshold to 25.0, the Quality on High and the Mode on Normal.
Then go to Filter -> Artistic -> Cutout.
Set Number of Levels to 8, Edge Simplicty to 0, and Edge Fidelity to 3.
Lastly go to Edit - > Fade.
Set the Opacity to 50 and the Mode to Screen.
And that's all she wrote!
Attached are my before and after images.
I love these recipes. Thank you, vrba79.
For those of us using Photoshop CC, the artistic filters have been moved to the filter gallery (Filter/Filter Gallery...).
No problem. They're fun to figure how to make too.Tutorial: Thought Balloons, Exposition Boxes, and Monologue
How To Use Them Well
Thought balloons, Exposition Boxes, and Monologue usually all serve the same purpose: they're a compact way to tell the reader what's going on.
The example page below shows the villian monologuing his orgin story while the hero has a thought balloon that sums up his situation and what he must do. The page appears in a 6-page backup story where space is limited. An example of an exposition box can be seen in my Tutorial: Word Balloons post, where a yellow exposition box is used.
As a general rule of thumb, Thought balloons, Exposition Boxes, and Monologue should be used sparingly. They're good for moving a story along when space is limited or the character being delt with is a minor character you don't want to spend too much time with.
How To Use Them Poorly
Most comic readers prefer to be shown a story taking place with text accompanying the illustrations. They'd rather not have a story told excusively with text while the characters stand around.
The reason the above use of a thought balloon is bad is because it tells us who Konrad is, rather than showing us through a story.
A better choice would be to have Konrad declare his love, and then later show him meeting other girls. This opens up a chance for story telling and for the reader to wonder if Konrad is a rat while he's with the other girls.
With the thought balloon, all mystery is removed. If we see Konrad with other girls, we know what he wants to happen even before he tries.
Loved the Tom Foster video. Was humorous and informative. Really makes me want to get into some ink work. Interesting how the 3D is used. I think that I tend to want to use 3D in a similar way. Not as an end, but as a facilitator.
Thank you! Great tips so far from everyone!
The semi-transparent speech bubbles sound like a plan, and they look really good.
I've created Action scripts for the two recipes you've presented. You can download them from my google drive. I've only tested them in Photoshop CC 2018, which has the artistic filters in the filter gallery, not the filter menu. But I think the older versions of Photoshop had the artistic filters in the filters gallery AND the filter menu, so these actions MAY work in older versions of the software.
To use the actions, just open an image, open Window/Actions and use the hamburger menu to load the action script you downloaded from my Google drive. Open the Comic Book Recipies set and run the Action you want.
Here's what the actions look like:
SKETCHED
SOFT CARTOON
I'm glad you liked it, BeeMKay :) And hopefully we'll get to see more of your comic soon. It looks very good.
Great to see them in use. ^_^
Lettering is truely a challenge, the first one is my very first try at it, and me being annoyed about the fact that the conversation stands between my two characters, but putting them left and right from them would make it hard to follow the conversation as well. I don't like those overlong pointers to one or another person either.
I then decided to use the gutter as well as place for text bubbles and try to move my camera to a place where the bubbles don't need to be between them, but for some scenes it can't really be avoided
about the 50% of the panel used for text I am of a different opinion though. I know it's done and even by established comics but I really don't like it. If there is a lot of text to get the information to the reader I prefer to have two or more panels where not much is happening but mybe the focus on this or that person
Thank you!
Actually, I wanted to throw something into the discussion, which is... continuity. Or rather, that you have to watch very closely that you don't run into props-continuity problems. Here's the latest page of Demon Divsion, and it has a glaring continuity problem in the last image, namely, the door... It's dark brown from the staircase side (where the characters are now) and white with a very distinctive handle from the corridor side (where they came from). Only... I forgot about that little fact when I set up the image, so... yeah. Re-rendered.
Any ideas how to solve this, outside of re-rendering? Have you run into such problems before? How do you deal with them? Do you have strategies to avoid something like this?
Oh, yeah, and speech bubbles... As you might notice, the speech bubble sometimes have a lot of space. It seems unneccessary if you just look at the English language version. But I am also doing this for a German language version, and that needs more words. as a rule of thumb, you are supposed to get a small letter o of your font between the lettering and the border of your bubble. Or so I've been told.
So I have to adapt the bubbles to the "largest language version", unless I want to fit the German text into the English bubbles, and scale down the font, or equip each language with their own set up bubbles. Example; this is the same page as abovem but in German. As you can see, I use the same font size and some text still barely fits.
Bee, the only good tip I can give you is "safe scenes, safe scenes , safe scenes"
every location I have has its own scene and if there is moving down a corridor it either all fits in one scene or I make a copy of the original and continue to build. Or if I have the same location but lots of things change in the meantime (but I might need to come back to the original scene) mace copy and add a time stamp for which situation you need which version. A useful way to reduce render load is to make groups of architecture or furniture /people and I can hide those groups I don't see according to the direction my camera points.
About your situation in the last panel I would probably try some post working. there is only the open door outside in the last panel which needs to be altered I guess from what you said. Form the previous panel the golden badge is only seen on one wing, and its not the one which is opened, so pick the colour fom the second to last panel and make a new layer for that door wing.
Thanks, Linwelly!
I have all sets (locations) in their own scene file so I can pull it up if neccessary. Some sets have different "states" like daytime, nighttime, etc. That does save a lot of time.
As for the scene, the door has the correct colour, but in the initial render, you could still see the white door of the corridor in addition to the dark one from the staircase set... it really didn't look good, but I failed to pay attention to that. I fortunately was able to repair it, but what if not? If it had gone "life"? Talk about embarressment...
But it begs the question... would it make more sense to render in more layers (people, background A, Background B, whatever..) ?
While I'm at it, here's the latest page from Dwellers (http://divisiond-dwellers.thecomicseries.com/):
A couple of things and I hesitate to put this all here because it sounds like jerkish things to say, but they kinda need to be said.
1) A HUGE mistake 3D comic creators make (I made it too, so...) is thinking that making a 3D comic makes them immune or exempt from all the rules of good comic writing and production. Comics have established standards and only 'some rules' should be bent and even fewer ever broken. I find most, if all, think they have to reinvent the wheel and dream up their own solutions for common problems.
2) Another mistake is to stop studying comics - only because their art-generating method is different. "Well, I render and don't draw so I don't need to follow anyone else's example." Meanwhile, there's a zillion established approaches and methods to comic storytelling. And a 'hand-drawn-look' is only the tip of the iceberg.
3) The basics are the same no matter HOW you make your comics.
4) 3D comic artists attempt to make a "comic book" -- > instead of telling a story using pictures. It's the paradox, where they do (or emulate) things the same way traditional comics did. Not understanding many comic conventions were done to deal with production-related limitations. [usually printing, coloring and deadline limitations, etc].
5) We don't need a one man's tutorial thread when there are plenty of fully viable resources and answers. We need to be linking to those sites, here and avoid the journey of discovery.
This one for balloons. Follow these and you'll be fine.
http://chrisoatley.com/comic-balloons-comic-layout/
http://www.blambot.com/articles_grammar.shtml
http://chrisoatley.com/comic-lettering-comic-layout/
Fonts
http://www.blambot.com/fonts_dialogue.shtml
And how to use them....well...
http://clintflickerlettering.blogspot.com/2010/10/lettering-in-adobe-illustrator-three.html
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There's so many others. Ones for layout, story flow...pacing....action....
This is ground that's been covered very well in other places....
Don't hate me.
@griffinavid I think that is a good point, and that because of it, people have been linking tutorials that cover certain topics. Nice list you put together and now it is all findable in one place.
I've personally found that tutorials (videos or books) are great resources, and yet the execution of the tips/directions given isn't as easy. Or identifying where you went wrong might be difficult. You look at something you've made, and yet something feels off about it. In those instances particularly, it's very helpful to post your work and get ideas - even if most of those ideas are in fact from the very tutorials you could have consulted, or perhaps have consulted.
I was in a writing group sometime ago. Every member had bookshelves full of writing tips/guides etc. Most of them said, when they read one of the writing books, their take-away was different with each read. I found both interesting and true. So, often, each member would discuss a 'how to" book (how to write emotions, word painting) that they'd read or were reading, and then share the one or two nuggets of information that really spoke to them. I found that sharing the knowledge in little bites (or summaries) was also helpful - even though, clearly, everyone in the group could go directly to the source of the information.
Also, hearing the same information from multiple sources is always a good thing. It's sort of like studying by reading, then by writing what you know, or explaining what you learned to another person - each act helps to cement the information. Also, the way that one person explains something to you might work better than the way another person explains it, so multiple sources of the same information might be a good thing.
So, while I agree with you that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, and in fact it is probably best not to, I also feel a tips thread serves all these purposes, and more. People give tips, learn from others, and even problem solve for others. That said, I'm off to read one of the links you shared. Thank you!
Nothing wrong with that. And you're right, rather than reserving 50% of the space for word balloons, you can double the number of panels. And 50% is a guide, not a rule.
But the point I was trying to make is that managing space for word balloons is something you must do in comics, whereas you never do it it traditional rendering. It just can't be ignored. It's usually best to figure out how you'll manage that space before you render, rather than just doing a render and hoping the word balloons fit in somehow.
This is a trick I do all the time and I'd highly recommend it. It's how I was able to get 13 people, a forest, and a giant mansion lit by dozens of candles into an Iray render in the panel shown in my Tutorial: Word Balloons post. And using this trick will naturally lead us to...
Yes, putting things in layers is a great idea. In the example you gave with the door with two colors, you'd only have to re-render the door layer. Just remember that camera angles must remain exact, so you may want to save cameras for each panel inside the scene. Having things in layers also makes it very easy to do things like applying photoshop filters just to the background.
Another tip is to have pre-built sets for key areas. You can then run through some test renders to try to catch any mistakes in the scene before you start doing the heavy rendering.
I don't think anyone's saying this is a one man thread. Lots of links to tutorials and discussions have already been given and are usually well recieved by us. I even asked you if wanted to post a tutorial on your rules for making covers.
That said, YouTube videos and blog posts are not the end-all, be-all. For example, none of the links you provided on word ballons mentioned planning for them before you do the render, which is probably the single most important tip you can give. None talked about stylized word balloons, which are a very common technique. None pointed out the differences between how word ballons and thought balloons are used from a story telling point of view.
They're also slanted towards hand-drawn material. For example, one talks about how to mix serif and san serif fonts, which is not something you'd normally do in a comic done on a computer. And none mention the semi-transparent word ballons that Linwelly and I independently discovered.
@Griffin_Avid Thank you for the links! It seems like I will have to redo the speech bubbles, and really make two versions, one for each language. Also, I now see that the speech pointers are not properly pointing at the mouth region. Maybe that's a good thing to do the next time I am waiting for a render to complete!
What I do wonder about is the crossed I thing, though. How do I get that one? Even in the Comicrazy-Font, all there is is a regular I, not the crossed one mandatory for "I".
That tutorial is talking about hand-drawn lettering. On a computer, you'll have a serif font, or a sans serif font, not a mix of both in one font. If you want your "I" to sometimes be serif and sometimes not, you'd need to use two different fonts, which I wouldn't recommend.
Ah! I didn't know that. Something learned gain. Thank you, @magicjava
I do learn a lot more from interaction with others than just sitting there and studying on my own... That's why I enjoy this thread a lot.
Those links about lettering and fonts use are certainly helpful and considering the placing of bubbles early enough is a relevant thing. That is why I make a transkript for every page with the follow up of the panels and a description of what happens and the text that is spoken (or the captions). It takes too much time for my liking, but in the end it pays to do so, as well as plan the pages ahead to leave on a resolution or a cliffhanger.
Something to consider in all this is the change that happens with the shift from printed format to webcomics. While taking in all the information from the pre-webcomic time is important it shouldn't be kept as unchangable. The different ways of lettering is one thing but as well the format. If you want to publish online you need to take into account that many people will want to be able to read on a mobile device. The standart page format usually ends up being too small on the mobile to read. That is why I decided for the scrolldown format, with one or two panels in one screen which does make space for the gutter as well.
Reading a lot of webcomics and make note of what is done nicely and what you don't like certainly will give a good feeling for how to handle difficulties.
I agree. The switch to digital opens up a lot of new possibilities. The semi-transparent word balloons are an example, and so are the motion comics that vrba79 mentioned. But we also have things like sound, video, and databases available to us. Exploring how these technologies can fit into making a comic is something I really want to explore in the near future.
Do you have certain web comics that have influenced you? If so, would you mind posting links to a few? I’d like to check them out.
For example, none of the links you provided on word ballons mentioned planning for them before you do the render,
The first link I shared has this:
At first, you just suspect there might not be enough room. But only five minutes later you’ve tried everything and can no longer deny it: You did not leave enough room for both script and art.
That's why I said 3) The basics are the same no matter HOW you make your comics.
Same for studying comics. Yep, if you want to mainly make a webcomic, you study them and see what works and what doesn't.
Just don't make anything about your comic "In a webcomic format" not the scale or page sizes, etc. Always convert it later.
That's very good advice, Griffin Avid, and I forgot to thank you for the links you provided earlier.
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Because I'm building an entire comic universe, and I'm only one guy, I have to get the most bang for my buck from the things I do. To that end, my comics have backup stories, which are 6 page stories that focus on a characer other than the one in the main story.
The backup story for Gold Venus is Black Fury. Black Fury is Detective John Perry, who fights crime in the 1940s as an after hours vigilante when his partner is murdered and his death goes unsolved. Assisting Black Fury is his young ward and daughter of his murdered partner, Tabitha Marley as Kid Fury.
Here are the four covers that appear on the back of the Gold Venus issues, along with a sample page and a poster of Black Fury and Kid Fury on patrol in their Super Charged Auburn Speedster.
That noir cover is awesome. You're onto something.
Word balloons are nice too. It's usually a thing to balance the space between the words and the balloon.
And the last image is a clever nod to that famous cafe painting where all the celebrities are together.
I peeped that.
Very nice.
Thanks, Griffin Avid. Black Fury will definitely be getting his own series one day (as soon as I have the time).
Just to follow up on my previous post, I almost forgot I already have some test covers done for Black Fury's own series. They're still WIPS, but here they are:
So doing the covers first inspires you? I usually do covers last.
No, not really last, just somewhere near the end.
I usually have an idea though of what I want the climax and cover to be.
That what drives me forward, the desire to show that moment or express that point.