I'm more of a doodler than a serious cartoonist, so naturally I'm new to making comics look somewhat professional. I'd like whoever's willing to help me out with a little comic I'm working on right now.

Here's a zoomed out look at the first draft (I drew these separately on several different pages, so they're messily cut/pasted around - the actual picture is 2000 by 2500 pixels, but that's just too big to post)


Here's a peek at how it looks up close (it's straight up pen doodle - nothing fancy here)


My question is - what would you say is the next step? I'm using paint.net, but I haven't totally figured it out yet. I want to colour it, put boxes around each cell, and computerize the text/add speech bubbles. I'm sorry if it seems too amateurish for you all (the stuff here is amazing), but I would really appreciate any advice or help you can offer. Thanks!

Andrew

Well, it's not just that.
If you want to make it look somewhat professional, here's what you do...

Start sketching lightly with a pencil, but make the definition lines darker *What you want the readers to see of the character* like arms, legs, their head, clothes, etc.

Then since you are most likely going to do most of it by Paint.Net, you could either try using the line tool to ink it all, then just using the Paint Bucket tool to fill everything in.

Hope that helps!

*Oh, for the Speech bubbles, you SHOULD be able to use the line tools for that too, but it's your call*

-Ryu-

A lot of it can be solved by drawing your own panels out and scanning them in if you've no good vector software to work with. If you do, then use that to get some panels laid out to give some direction and control to your segment of interaction between the characters.

I agree with Ryuthehedgewolf in that the characters needs to be defined a little more (note, that does not mean detailed or more "fancy", in truth, your line work is good, exciting, and just needs development over time).

Hope that bit of info helps in some way. :)

Thanks a lot, guys! I guess for my next comic, I'll try doing it with a pencil and darken the lines I want. I'm sure inking will take a long time, but it'll make it look better, right? I guess I'll get on that.

ps - Druchii - What do you mean by "defined"? I'm new to the word in this context. If you can help me out with that, I'll be really grateful.

jay raj
Thanks a lot, guys! I guess for my next comic, I'll try doing it with a pencil and darken the lines I want. I'm sure inking will take a long time, but it'll make it look better, right? I guess I'll get on that.

ps - Druchii - What do you mean by "defined"? I'm new to the word in this context. If you can help me out with that, I'll be really grateful.

I remember Doug Chiang (art director on Star Wars Episode one) say once that a design is sucessful if the profile or shape of it was easily recognizable within the first few seconds of seeing it. Not unlike seeing just the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. There is no question that it's an anthropomorphic mouse just from the shape of design. The same can be applied to cartooning on this level.

I'm sure I will have a much more coherent answer in the morning, it's really late. :D

Hey again guys. I'm not sure if I should start a new thread for this, but I'll ask it here first. Here's the picture (smaller than the actual, of course)



What I'm wondering here is - what's the best positioning of the cells? I'm really struggling to get it right. I know it should be left to right and top to bottom, but I don't like having huge spaces between cells. How can I fix this? If you can post an example 'map' of how you'd position these cells, I'd be really grateful. Thanks a lot!

The panel sizes seem to flow smoothly until the third row. You should make the height uniform to the last two panels on that row and then it should look better. You may also want the last two panels of the same row on top of each other as reading those two panels from top to bottom is generally implied.

Thanks! I tried to follow your guidelines, and I'm finally finished!

The plug/crit page for the first page of my new comic is here - http://www.drunkduck.com/community/view_topic.php?tid=42300&cid=233&pid=# . There's a link to the comic page in that thread (in case you want to see it). Feel free to tell me what you think of it.

Thanks again for all your help, guys. I'm enjoying my stay at Drunk Duck so far, and hopefully I can improve myself a lot while I'm here.

ps - I'm currently working on a title page. It'll probably be kind of boring, but I'm trying out some of the sketching/inking techniques you guys mentioned. It should turn out alright.