#and obvs some panel ideas come when im actually working with the paper and can feel the space out n whatnot | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

unproduciblesmackdown · 6 years

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yeah for real when you’ve got a Scene in your head that would make more sense as a comic, you do get the whole advantages of using that format....like the dialogue of course & being able to show the changes between one panel & another to show movement & actions & things & time passage in general. and getting creative w panels is another tool you have to affect pacing and even tone, & unlike stuff like tv/movies, you get to change the shape & size of panels, which is useful imo for not only mood/pacing but also u can zoom in on exactly what u want viewers to look at. like having a lil panel just of some Detail like a hand or piece of paper or whatever. comix can jump around different shots without adding tension the way it might w film...idk i personally find it pretty fun to work with & it comes somewhat naturally to me to picture something as a comic in my head, though i’ll picture things like A Film just as much lol umm anyways yeah i think its great just to mess around w ideas in comic format & it can be rly good for making a scene with feeling, even in a short one... and i like to show emotion in movement and expressions and all, so that works out. like you can show a bunch of different facial expressions & show the slight changes & all....& show how ppl react to someone else in the space & move around each other.....its neat b/c imo emoting is generally a lot more in the subtleties of things. like you could show someone’s feelings exclusively through direct shots of their face but, realistically, ppls feelings are in things beyond their expression at any one point in time—its like, if the expression is subdued or exaggerated vs the essential content of the expression alone, their posture and how they move, what they look at, what they say, subtle shifts in their face or body as they react to something new—all these little sorts of behaviors ykno? not to downplay facial expression coz thats p much always key, and like i said its my fave...but when it comes to trying to portray stuff w emotional impact, i like to think of a lot of other details that imo can lend a lot of visual and emotional information alike....plus just the more stuff you’re drawing the more you’re giving a scene to work with... bgs and everything can set the mood & also just give context to a scene & even i’m getting better about like, making even simple bgs sometimes. anyways not like im an expert in anything at all related to anything but i have been Drawing W Feelings In Mind for a while i guess lol and yeah about characters who are usually carrying some form of tension (symbolic like displayed persona vs their actual internal, &/or more actually feeling tense like irritable and all lol) still having tension be relatable even when they’re happier or more relaxed, & thinking about that in a drawing—for me anyways i just think of that as part of trying to show their personality in every drawing. like i was saying w the example of when i nobly set out to give ppl another pic of kip fucking, even if he’s totally chill w the situation, it’s relevant to me when drawing it to think of the fact that he’s usually Not getting to be chill with Any situation, and have that affect how i portray the state of finally getting to purely enjoy himself in a major way. like i suppose thinking abt this just now, i always make a point of drawing him actually physically tensed in at least some small way, i think as part of imagining how the like usual constant presence of internal conflict plays into the reaction to its absence. like how it’s not an on/off switch where a person who has to live w that all the time has some version of themself that gets to Be Normal and suddenly not have to think abt how that feels. like even tho he’s presumably getting a break & a good distraction from that stuff, i think of how he wouldn’t suddenly have a new set of behaviors to access & isnt like, suddenly a completely different person, & how there could actually be a pressure in enjoying urself b/c of the knowledge of just how special that is & how much u should savor the moment. like, even in relief there’s a tension. sidenote especially if you think you might not get such a great experience again—feeling fantastic can have a painful edge in that case & can even be really heartbreaking if you don’t know when you’ll next get to feel that way again. anyways Back To Fucking lol like i said i think in that relief i’m drawing in a little bit of desperation in the knowledge that his moments of relief from feeling all hyperaware and self conscious and conflicted and what have you etc are rare, that i show by giving him a little edge of intensity in some way or another. me drawing kip as sexually desperate lmao owned... but truly that’s just a little piece of always trying to show a chars personality no matter the emotion or action or situation or whatever!! like back in the day i said something about how two people will show the same emotion differently in their facial expressions even if most ppl have the same “basic format” to it...the difference in how ppl emote & react to things shows their personality (so does other stuff obv but relevant to emotion specifically...) & so say if i draw the same expression for one character as i did another at one point, it would have a different meaning for each of them in the context of their differences in personality...one person’s smile has a different meaning from another person smiling the same way, and all. obv thats most relevant in characters who r dramatically contrasted in their outward behavior. like i talk about all this like its a science or i plot a whole chart before ever making a drawing but mostly i come up w some image or scene in my head that seems good to me & then sometimes barely even plan how to put it down. or other times i do think abt it a lot, but even then i’ll usually do last minute tweaks. it’s really mostly instinct imo, i don’t know if it’s true that i’m a bit overly tuned in to other ppls emotions & good at reading even really subtle shifts, that might be part of it, but even if it wasnt true, emotions are usually a p instinctive thing. but ppl can communicate the same feeling in totally different ways, including ways that AREN’T instinctive to you, so imo its also good to like, also treat it like something to consciously think about. and like also just yeah in media you already like that already seems emotionally impactful, its cool to pay attention to that & keep it in mind & try to imitate & stuff. and like i said about it not being a science, i talk abt putting emotion & a characters personality into everything, but its not like i think of anything i do as being overly complex & i expect anyone to look at any random drawing of mine & be able to fully reverse-engineer a characters entire personality from one pic lmao....i don’t pretend anything i make is some work of genius that contains Everything. but it at least contains something. & maybe if u had a few pix to compare, it wouldnt be hard to deduce personality from it. like, even when someone’s acting different from their usual personality, it’s still the same person, & how they usually are changes how their behavior reads. like for lars to be relaxed and casual around other ppl suggests a higher level of comfort & trust than average, specifically because of the fact that u know his usual behavior is to be more stressed & in one way or another defensive around others. also i like to try to draw personality in e v e r y t h i n g b/c all of this is propaganda of “my fave & if you don’t like it get out” lol......like each pic is its own lil love letter what with how if i didnt have a certain level of fondness for a character, then i couldnt be effed to draw them in the first place. so i want to be like, look at the way this character is, which is why i love & cherish them.....and like you said, with a basic ability to draw a recognizable form & an interest in making fanart with that ability, you’ve got everything you need to make the content you wish somebody else had already made for you to look at. and with choosing a lot of suffering characters to be fond of you have plenty of motivation to want to draw them having a nice time. or at least feel loved and appreciated or something. all that stuff hmm i can’t remember if i had anything else i meant to get at but yeah lol....Feelings

#took me a minute to finally get around to this just coz its been times of having words in my mind but not as good at putting them down #plus the usual terrible focus + distractions + naps

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unproduciblesmackdown · 6 years

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hey man your comic stuff?? fucking amazing do you have any tips for a novice child artist such as myself

hmm!!! thats a good question if i have any advice at all…i dont really draw things in comic form that often because of how slow i am…its a whole project for me lol

also natch im just an amateur at all of this vs people who like…pay attention to how to do things really well and/or draw comics on a regular schedule &/or get paid for it and all. so seeing this i was immediately trying to think of like, advice ive seen from random professionals on twitter & stuff & i’ve tried to moreso shake it down to the stuff I’M actually doing when i draw a comic. which is a bit tricky because of my small sample size & the fact that i dont have any kind of consistent process or technique unifying all the comic-type stuff i draw

like sometimes its just a few floating sequential drawings and other times is definitely more like, really thinking of it in terms of how i’m going to structure it in Comic Form & use the format to adjust my presentation of whatever idea i have

like i know ppl whose Job (officially or just by their own standards) to do a bunch of comics pages will do a script of scenes to decide what goes on what page and sort dialogue / action into panels & describe how things will look etc…and then do like maybe really rough layout pre-sketches, then the first rough sketch for a page, an optional more cleaned up sketch layer on top of that, and then the final lineart

i sorrrt of do a version of that, in that i am generally sitting on a Comic Idea for a while before i even start getting into the business of thinking through how it’ll actually work. i have to make sure that im “committed” enough to the idea to wanna make more than one drawing for it, and that i think i have at least a vague notion of how i could put it into a comic. sometimes i DO end up just putting the notion into a single drawing or condensing it into like, 2-3 lil floating drawings or w/e. coz a lot of the times the idea starts out really vague, often with one “moment” that serves as the whole inspiration & that i then try to build a scene/sequence around….a lot of the details beyond that can be really vague in my mind, like the setting or dialogue or who’s involved or what happens or the pacing or extra events or etc…basically Everything is real amorphous for a while

so yea step 1 is me having this one idea and trying to decide if building a scene around it would be a better way to present it vs just having one drawing, & if i think i can actually effectively carry it out….which is in reality even less fancy than it sounds…i just sit on an idea for a while & never get around to actually focusing on it / putting down any of the thoughts abt it that im formulating. but the upshot of me putting it off for forever is that i do end up with a kind of mental script / layout for a comic before i start it…..but even the extensiveness / format of these unwritten scripts varies a lot for me

like, a few times when i have made something that’s maybe longer than just one page &/or something ive been mulling over for an extra long amt of time (which tends to be stuff that is starting out w/ heavier than usual ideas) i’ll like, actually write down what happens page by page, even plan out specific panels, maybe even put down a few rough sketches of certain parts. i’ll have the Main Moment which is the idea that started the whole thing in the first place, but what tends to happen is i’ll come up w other moments that i think could lead up to / frame / follow the main moment, and i pretty much just decide how they all fit into one cohesive piece. so what my “rough drafts” look like for these more extensively planned ones—still really not that exhaustive, i only put things to paper when im basically done enough w my ideas to be just about ready to start actually making them—can vary in their actual formats (e.g. simple chronological bullet points of events, a few drawings, a rough sketch of how the whole thing might look), the core of it is basically just me finding a way to nail down how i’m going to arrange the Moments i have and how i’m going to lead one into the other…….like for things with enough pages / panels, i’ll tend to focus on which Moment will end each page &/or each line of panels, then have an idea of which other Moments i’ll need to put on which of those pages, and kinda figure out how to pace things

again that all sounds like maybe i have a real process…..I Do Not

im kinda lucky in that i think i have a decent sense for composition without having to struggle over it too much. so a lot of times i can leave a lot of that up to be felt out as im actually doing the rough lineart for the first time. i also often don’t nail down panel arrangement that carefully & also make it up as i go along a bit, which is probably not something anyone should emulate. someone was saying something about how some certain page layout of like, 3-something-something panel rows looks best, i dont know. i’m guessing, as with all things, nobody can say “always do this / never do that,” but i think staggering odd/even numbers of panels in each row is always a good guess. just makes it easier for them to read more distinctly at least, surely

sometimes i DO think about certain panels when i wanna frame a certain “shot” in a very specific way. but im just kind of doing whatever. i know vague rules like that wide shots / negative space slows down the pace, vs tightly cropped / small panels / packed w a lot of visual info tends to read as a faster pace, more chaotic. i dont quite go too wild about that sort of thing tho, because for me as a reader, a lot of times really tight shots that are like cutting between 5000 different angles rly fast all in a row, sometimes it is absolutely unreadable to me, as in i do not understand the visual info at all. it feels like the equivalent of how action movie editing keeps hanging on to the “incoherency = intensity” vs just me tuning out until the scene is over & missing details b/c i just am not getting anything out of it

thats not much of a factor for me coz i dont really ever do things with extended sequences of movement / action or whatever. i’ll keep things in one place. i’ll like to do smaller, “quicker” panels moreso to like, show simultaneousish details / to extend one moment…..occasionally i do Big Panels for a moment of higher intensity / impact too. btw putting a High Intensity moment in a super tiny panel is always really funny for the contrast of it all. i dont think ive ever done it, but it is

ummm…….also planning where your speech bubbles will go is good. i dont do that enough, but i should. most of the reason i dont have a more proper, organized process to anything i draw is that i just dont have the focus / patience to slow down for More Planning vs just going ahead and drawing it. jokes on me, since some quick vague planning can make it a lot easier on yourself vs just diving in and struggling w something for ages

uhhh also since im not that fantastic or mindful of panel layout? sometimes i’ll make a point of just having uniform rectangle panels of the same size/shape, so i only have to really worry about the layout within the frame. this is mostly good obv for things with not that much shift in pacing throughout it or action or whatever…you lose the advantage of how panel sizes can affect the tone of a shot or something & probably cant get that detailed in ur drawings but that is often Fine By Me

when i do use the uniform rectangle structure though, i kinda have to focus more on each individual panel, vs like, knowing ok, these three moments are going on this page, i have a vague idea of what’ll connect them, just make up the individual panels as you go along. this does mean that i have to kinda think more about what justifies each panel….how its different from the ones before & after it or how i might want it to be similar to “hold” a shot for a beat or w/e or draw focus to a small movement, what’s actually going into each panel, if i can/should condense two panels into one, etc. its still a lot of playing it by ear, i dont have solid rules of how i think i should do it each time

even when i do have a like whole plan for something im drawing i’ll often make more changes as im actually making it. sometimes its deciding something would be more effective, sometimes it’s just “hey this would work too & be easier,” and thats definitely fine. nobody knows the change you made, and Easier isn’t necessarily Worse anyways. convenience is good where you can get it

ive also definitely had specific comic artists formatting/framing styles in mind when i specifically wanted to use that while drawing my own stuff. like the way i’ll draw maybe a kind of horror vibe (more diagonal lines / “fractured” panels than i’d normally use, quick tiny shots of different smaller details, that kinda stuff) is gonna be different from when its a calm & quiet tone. where i dont really get too creative with the panels really & keep them pretty steady

and then that one time i did a largely nonsequential sort of panel collage b/c the marge simpson anime gave me great inspiration for how to combine & present a bunch of vague notions i had floating around all into one page. it was a good accomplishment & thats unsurprising because the inspiration i was using was That Good. thank god we can all benefit from each others good ideas and knowledge & work & all that. it does help to jump on a feeling of “wow what a cool comic i wish i could make something like that.” just go ahead and make something like that…

ummm this is all on the technical side-ish still but i dont really know what to say abt the kind of stuff that makes me wanna draw a comic in the first place vs just putting the idea into a regular single drawing…usually it Is kind of a more nuanced moment that i think would be better presented within some amount of context and buildup and all that. i basically exclusively draw emotions….and sometimes theyre better shown with some amount of action/dialogue, or at least a few different shots or something. i dont know if this area is helpful information or anything anyone would benefit from knowing about, or even if i have anything to say about it…is it all self evident maybe? idk! i do think i communicate emotions best through comics…not that each one is “here is my mood!” or talking about me at all, but i was for example trying to communicate about an abstract emotion, i think i can draw about it better than talk or write about it or anything. i DO sometimes draw more directly from my own specific feelings/experiences for things, but mostly when i think it can be relevant…i cant really do anything all that directly autobiographical, even casual diary comics or whatever. thats what my text posts are for… but i have been interested in how to convert these huge emotional issues that i’ve been v familiar with into a few pages or panels and how to present its impact in the simplest, straightforward ways i can manage…sometimes i think its worked for sure…..i feel like i gave a more Relatable sense to a certain experience by putting it in comic form than any of the times ive discussed it as a personal thing at length via text. like i said i communicate best via comics probably, despite not drawing them all that much coz im too damn slow lmao

speaking of, i’ve kind of been like “what a waste” abt the fact that i dont have like, a proper approach or regular strategy to thinking up comics before i draw them, but i think theres something actually okay to be taken from that lol……just that i know if i got too caught up in trying to plan it all out perfectly before getting into actually drawing it, i’d be making it into a bigger project and slowing myself down even more & i’d risk dropping it partway through or just never getting started at all. so if i have a less than perfect end result, at least i have an end result, and ive finally got that one idea out of my head in some way. and i feel like some of my comics do work out decently enough….a good handful of times ive been surprised w how well some ppl receive them

so i think it is good to just go ahead and dive in. i did that once w an idea i’d been sitting on for like half a year, and i think it turned out good enough. i just knew i could easily spend months and months more turning over all the details, which might make it Better, but would also mean that yknow, i’d never actually get around to making it b/c of feeling like it had to be ideal. so i simplified it a bit, used a uniform panel layout, did little drawings, and just got it drawn out in an afternoon or two. and now at least it exists lol. and ive sort of come back to the same idea in a way…if i feel like it turns out i wanna elaborate on something more, i can just make another pic/comic built on the same theme, who’s gonna care or stop me

i also try to focus on what lines are/aren’t necessary to avoid things being confusing or just pointlessly cluttery….this isnt a big issue b/c i dont often bother w bgs. dont emulate that either lol…….but im not doing any Serious art so its no big deal to me if im not “good” or not progressing as spectacularly as i might. i dont need my drawing abilities to be that amazing here. but bgs still serve a purpose beyond being a “skill” or whatever so im trying to include them more, aka occasionally, at all. still hardly ever. but sometimes you at least need like one halfassed establishing shot yknow. anyways

mmm this has all been kinda vague and i’m trying to think if there’s anything more specific i could/should talk about!! i dont know. i dont have a good perspective on what its like to look at my art while not being me lol & what ppl might think or what stands out to them or whatever. rip

sorry this is so long, i dont really have ppl wanting to know abt my Processes or drawing thoughts or whatever so i’m kinda jumping at the chance to talk about this sort of stuff after having been actually prompted to. but i dont know if i’ve said anything at all!! i dont know if any of it has been helpful

“tldr; i dont really know what im doing, but go ahead and jump into actually making them as opposed to feeling like youre ready / you know the best way to make a page, because nobodys ever ready or can say This Is The Best Possible Version so just go ahead and use whatever process feels like it makes your life easier, while still actually making the damn comic” is my whole thing, i guess

i dunno, if there was some specific thing you wanted to know abt that i didnt talk about / talk about well here, feel free to ask me to specify because i totally will, which is both an invitation and a warning obviously

sorry this is so long everybody…….writing an essay & by the end of it not being sure if ive given any info at all is part of my whole Thing

#long post //#jfc this is even longer than i thought #i dont know if theres anytning helpful about this at all #maybe its that ‘’if you think i’m good its good news for you b/c you probably know what youre doing just as much if not more than i know #what i’m doing’’

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