We have bold new experiment ready for you to enjoy this week – the very first ComicFuel Workshop podcast! Bizhan Khodabendeh’s “Panel Layout: The Golden Ratio” from 2014 is our most popular article ever posted on our website. So, for season 1 of Gutter Talk we’ve decided to revisit the article in the form of a FREE WORKSHOP.
That’s right! We said FREE WORKSHOP!!!
I’m not going to lie. Scripting is my jam. I’m a writing kinda guy, so excuse me if I get a little resource happy here. But there’s so much stuff to learn about scripts that just giving you guys only a couple of resources might break my heart. So we’ll start at square one.
So you want to make a comic? That’s great! In fact, that’s exactly what a class full of students down at Chula Vista High Tech High wanted to do. And after designing an extensive curriculum, Making Comics Worldwide CEO Patrick Yurick, and incredibly handsome Editor-In-Chief Kevin Cullen, decided to bring all of you burgeoning comic creators into the mixture by giving you the opportunity to follow along with the Graphic Novel Project (GNP) students step by step through this blog! (more…)
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…)
Basic edits
We ended the last post with WordPress and ComicPress installed and our child theme created. We’re now ready to start customizing our site so that it looks like we want it to. This post is still what I’d classify as a beginner level and we’re going to be customizing the layout, type and colors. Let’s get started.
Most comic book scripts are a series of panel descriptions intended for the artistic team. The script is your way to communicate to your artists—it’s a technical document, not intended for your audience nor designed to make people laugh or cry.
Shadows have always been a weak spot of mine. I’ll be sitting there thinking, “Man…that’s definitely not enough shadow on his face,” and the next thing I know, my figure’s head has turned into a giant black blob of ink. It’s more than a little disheartening when you have to redraw entire frames because of something so seemingly simple, yet so damn tricky! To ensure that this stopped happening, I hopped on my pathetic excuse for a computer and surfed through the net, looking for some awesome shading tutorials.
The idea with this series of posts about building and designing your own webcomic site is to really take things from a beginner stage through to something much more advanced and customized. For now, we’re at the beginner level and this post starts us at the basics. If you haven’t read part 1 about using WordPress and ComicPress and haven’t got everything installed yet, go back and we’ll wait… (more…)
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.
Exposition
“Exposition is a literary tool that is used to give information to the audience through dialogue, description, flashback or narrative.” Source: tvtropes.org
Once you have your lines of text set out, it’s time to launch into the final stage of lettering a page: composing your text on the page, and this is where I think hand-lettering shows a great advantage over font or mechanical lettering: flexibility.
