How to make a webcomic

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Katie, and I'm an illustrator and comic artist. Today, I will go over all the steps I take when making a comic episode. We will look specifically how I make the art from start to finish, but I will touch on what you should do for the early development of a comic. Also, I will be focusing on making comics for the vertical scrolling format. But everything I say will also apply to the traditional print comics as well. You can follow along in any art medium or program you like, whether that be Photoshop, Clip, Studio Paint, or traditional mediums. Let's get started. 2. Idea Phase: Before I start to draw, we need to have an idea of what's going to happen in the episode. Depending on what kind of comic you are making, the idea of phase will differ. Are you making an episodic comic or one that has an overarching plot for episodic comics, These are usually short comics that can stand on their own. The example I will be showing, called Sugar and Swords, is an episodic comic poking fun at video game logic. When writing out ideas for this comic, I focus on what will the joke be about for each episode? It can be a short phrase, like what a background character does in their free time or NPC character reacting to a glitch in the game. Things like that. Since these are short stories, I don't need to add a lot of details here. If you have a plot driven comic with a large story in mind, then the ideation process is different. If you are just starting it, then it would help by first outlining the whole story. Now I know many people start your story without knowing the ending, But having a rough outline helps you find out where you want the story to go. After creating this outline, you should flesh it out and slowly start adding more and more to it. Get into details of how your main character gets from point A to point B or any major events that's going to happen. Once your story is all laid out, you can start cutting it up into sections or chapters and have a good idea of what's going to happen in each episode, how long your story is. This is going to take a lot of time, but it is very important to start writing out all that will happen here so you aren't redrawing panels later in the process. Time to start showing how I write an episode for my comic. Sugar and Swords. For this episode, I want to poke fun at video game tutorials. Since this comic is focused on video game humor, I will start by writing some keywords or notes mainly, so I'm not looking always at the blank page. At this point, I write whatever comes to mind. It's much easier to edit down whatever idea I've written down than to try to make the first idea the best. Now that I have an idea, I'm going to start writing a script. If you are making a comic for yourself, then the script doesn't have to be formal at all. You can format it however you please. I know that I want this comic to be 4-8 panels long. I will keep that in mind when writing it out. I try to include where the characters are, what they are saying, as well as like what pose each person is in. Are they holding an object? How large do I want the panel to be? What expressions does the character have? I often ask myself these questions whenever I struggle to write. Also, I like to include whether the panel is a wide shot, a close up, or an extreme close up. These terms are used in filmmaking, but are very helpful when making a comic script as well. If you would like to know more about these terms, I would study the basics of filmmaking. There are many times when filmmaking and comics overlap. Just knowing the basics can help you in your comic process. Here is the script for the episode. Like I said, it doesn't have to be formatted in any certain way. If you are making comics by yourself, remember these are just notes for us to use when drawing the panels. 3. Thumbnails: We are ready to start drawing. Since I am making this comic for apps like web tunes or Taps, I'm going to make my canvas 800 pixels wide and 8,000 pixels long. And make the DPI 300. The length of this canvas will change depending on how long or short we want this episode to be. Looking at my script, I start loosely sketching out each panel. I always add in space for the word bubbles because they are an important part of comic making. For webcomics, we can always hang the speech outside the panels, but for the majority of the time, the speech bubbles will overlap with the artwork. As you can see, these thumbnails are very quick and messy At this stage, I'm just taking what we have written down in the script and scribbling something out. We want to be able to visually see how the comic will look and make any changes if needed. It is much easier to make changes in the art right now, then it's going to be later in the process. Make sure you are satisfied with the paneling before moving on. 4. Sketching: Time to take our loose drawings and sketch them out more. To start, I'm making a grid to show how much of the page will be shown at a time. I'd like to make them around 1,100 pixels high and 800 pixels wide. But feel free to measure your phone to see how much space is shown at a time. From here, I will take the rectangle and use it to make guidelines. I will also add inside guidelines to show where the safe area will be for the text, which is about 40 to 60 pixels into the canvas. And don't forget to lock your guides by going into view and then lock guides. If you ended up making more detailed thumbnails, then you might be able to skip this part and go straight to line art. But for me, I keep my thumbnails very messy, so it would be hard to do that. I take my time sketching everything out at this part, making sure the design and the pose of each character to my liking. At this point, I also like to create colored boxes for each panel. No need to start detailing the background just yet. A simple base color will work well so we can see how the panels will look together. Here is the final sketch. But before we move on to the line art, there is another important part we need to do, and that is the speech bubbles. 5. Speech Balloons: At this point of the comic making process, I'd like to add in the speech bubbles. And speech, here's how I make my speech bubbles. First we're going to go to the Shape Tool, right click and click Eclipse Tool. Then we're going to draw an oval. Make sure the field color is white. The stroke will be black in the stroke. Width is just going to be one point. Now we are going to go over to the Pen Tool, right click and click Convert Point Tool. I'm going to click the top point by selecting it, holding down Shift, and then dragging it out. Doing this, we'll turn our live shape into a regular path. So we're going to click Yes, then we're going to select the bottom point, Hold down ships again, and then drag this out. Now we have our speech bubble shape. Let's make the tail. We're going to go back to the shape tool. Right click, select triangle tool, We're going to draw a triangle. It's going to rotate this again, make sure the fill is white, the stroke will be black. Then the point will be one. To merge these two shapes together, I'm going to click both the triangle and the eclipse in our layers. I'm going to right click and then click Merge Shapes. Now these are both acting as the same shape when we drag it around if we wanted to edit our tail. I'm going to go over to the Path Selection tool. Click and click the Direct Selection tool. Then when I click the points, of course it's not clicking because I need to select the layer first. Now when I select the points, we can move it wherever we please. But again, change the shape into a regular path. Now we can move it however we want. If you wanted to add curves to the tail, we're going to go to the Convert Point tool. Again, click on these points up here and then just drag them out. If you accidentally click the bottom points but you don't want it curving like this, then just click at once. Now we can just go back to the direct slick tool again, change it however we want. That's it. Here are some quick tips for better speech balloons. Try to create a circular shape with the words. This helps keep the area around the speech. Even know that the shape of the speech balloon itself is not usually a perfect circle. It's more of an oval that's a bit squished on the top and bottom. If you struggle with how much white space you should give your words, try giving enough room to fit an O in the type that you are using. This is not a standard, so feel free to draw what feels right. A good way to make the tip of a speech bubble look right is to have it curve from the center and point it to the mouth of a character. It also helps to make the speech bubble close to the character, but not overlapping with its face, just in case there are lots of people talking. You don't want to confuse the reader as to who is saying what. Finally, look at references. If there is a comic you love, study how they treat speech. Keep an eye out for how they might show someone is yelling or whispering. If I find I didn't give myself enough room for the words, then right now, it is still easy to re, sketch and fix it. Usually I like to add in the speech while I am making the sketches, but sometimes I might add them in right after the thumbnails. Either way, as long as you're doing this before the inking process, you're good. If you want to convey a certain emotion, try changing the shape of the speech bubble. In this panel, I wanted the fairy to look sad. To add to that, I made the bubble more wobbly to show that she is speaking with less confidence. Looking back at what I made, I could easily have gone further and made the bubble even more shaky if you are curious. The font that I used for this comic is called Ready for anything. I created the speech bubbles from the shape layers in Photoshop. Although I use these tools in my program, you can also hand letter or draw the bubbles in yourself too. It doesn't matter which program or traditional medium you use, just find a way to add in the lettering and bubbles. That's easiest for you. Here is how the comic episode looks. So far, the ideas and character placement are all established. All that's left is to finally finish the art. 6. Inking: Here it is time to ink all the characters and backgrounds. I will hide the speech to make it easier to draw. But remember that whatever is behind the words will be hidden. No need to add any extra details that you don't want to. If you ended up hand drawing the letters or speech bubbles, then there's no need to hide it. I find it very helpful to label my layers and separate the background lines from the character lines. This makes it much easier to change any part of the art if necessary. If you are drawing your comics digitally, always remember to flip your canvas. This helps you see mistakes in your art that might be hard to find when drawing for long periods of time. If you are a traditional artist, then you can either turn your art upside down or hold the paper up to a light and flip it over throughout. Making any part of this comic, remember to take breaks when needed. I spend about an hour each work day on this comic, so I don't feel burnt out by the time I complete one episode. When you give yourself more breaks, you will come back with a clear mind, which might help you focus easier on the task at hand. Here are all the finish lines. All that's left to do is color and everything, and then we'll be done. 7. Coloring: At this point in the process, I will listen to a podcast or video while I work, because this can be tedious. If you already know what colors your characters are, then all you really need to do is start coloring in the lines. But if these are new characters, then it would help to take some extra time to pick out a good color scheme coloring. I like to use the lasso tool in Photoshop to select large areas of color. But when I'm doing detailed work, I just use a simple hard round brush. At this point you can call your comic done now. But I like to go over each drawing and add simple shading and color the lines. To shade the art, I use a clipping mask and multiply layer to add in the shadows. Once I'm done with that, I will lock the line art layer and paint over the lines with a different color. Before finishing it, I reread the comic to make sure that there are no spelling errors or problems with the art. If you have a friend, I would recommend having them read it over as well, just because there will be times that you missed something. Once it's checked over, we can finally call this done. I will export the files as a PNG and post it to online platforms like web tunes or tapis. Depending on where you post it, you might need to cut up the long comic strip. If you were to also post this to sites like Instagram, then I would export each panel as its own image. 8. Outro: That we are finally done. I hope you learn something new about making comics in this video. If you end up making comics of your own, I would love to see them. If you like the comic I created again, it's called Sugar and Swords, which can be read on web tunes, tapas, or bought as a physical book. With that, I hope you all have a great day. Bye bye.