Posts Tagged: first steps

Panel Descriptions In The Digital Age – Part 3

We’ve been talking at length about panel descriptions. Hopefully you’ve got a friend friend willing to collaborate, or found a forum somewhere that encourages people to post panel descriptions so that other people can try to draw them. Practice makes perfect! Aside from that, here are a few more tips that will save you time and money in the long run. I’ve already stressed the importance of establishing expectations with your art team well before sending them a script. In this section I’ll be discussing word balloons in panels, letterer notes, and the benefits to the revision process made possible by email. (more…)

Writing Tropes: Copy-Paste Plot

Tropes are storytelling devices. Used well, they enrich a story; used badly, they result in the dreaded cliché. This series of articles takes a closer look at some major tropes relevant to comics and the pitfalls they may present. (more…)

Panel Descriptions in the Digital Age (part 2)

You’ve worked out your tone, the character design sketches, and are ready to write those panels, right? Great! The format of your pages is entirely up to you, your artist, and your editor. Heck, you could text message or tweet a description of each panel if you wanted to! But the main point is to get on the same page, and this is done by finding a common language before you begin. (more…)

So You Wanna Publish A Webcomic? – Part 1

The internet has transformed independent comics and given creators an easy way to get their stories out to the public. There are a lot of different ways to publish your work online, but two of the most popular are WordPress and WordPress running ComicPress. (more…)

Panel Layout: The Golden Ratio


Announcing our FREE Golden Ratio Workshop designed to expand on the concepts introduced in the article below!


Excitement would understate how I felt when I read Frank Santoro’s articles on the first appearance of the Golden Ratio in Hergé’s TIntin comic pages. Santoro used grid overlays to explain comic composition with geometric shapes in a way that could be easily understood by a graphic designer, like myself. (more…)

Nondestructive Photoshop Shadows and Effects

Efficiency. As comic creators, we’re all striving for it. With full-time jobs, family, and everything else life throws at us competing for our precious art time, being more efficient means getting more done. My goal with these Photoshop articles is to help you streamline your process to get more work done in the same amount of time – or even less. I began with an article on using Photoshop Actions in your workflow. Today, I want to talk about using some of the more powerful features of a world class application like Photoshop. Specifically, creating shadows and effects nondestructively. But what is nondestructive editing? Let’s have Adobe explain it:

Nondestructive editing allows you to make changes to an image without overwriting the original image data, which remains available in case you want to revert to it. Because nondestructive editing doesn’t remove data from an image, the image quality doesn’t degrade when you make edits.

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Starting A Comic With Conflict

Find the conflict.

Not every comic book story starts with conflict. Some creators look for places to start that are non-intuitive like the ending of a story. Check out your favorite comic. Open it to the first pages – what do you see? You will start to notice that almost all stories begin with conflict. Now sit down and take your own characters (or invent new ones) and imagine them in the same situation. What happens when you put these new characters in a similar conflict? What elements need to change to make sense?

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