How To MAKE Comics - From concept, to pages, to publishing

1. Introduction: Do you remember when you were a kid and you still love drawing comic books? Putting down all of your ideas on paper. But then something happened. As you got older, maybe you started to doubt yourself. I'm Ed for Chuck, and you might know me from some of my popular online drawing courses or some of my indie comics work. I've put together a course here that'll help you capture what you had when you were a kid. Welcome to how to make comics. Over 10 hours of content helping you to bring your projects to fruition. In this course, we talk about what exactly comics are and how we can come up with concepts and ideas to really flesh ours out. We get into worldbuilding so that our characters are not just hanging in space. And then we get into more of the nitty-gritty looking at script types and shot types and composition and panel flow. Really everything that will help you put this coming together at once. We've got that comic put together. Once we've worked on this project together, then I help you bring it to production. I show you along with some of my partners how to bring it to print, how to market it, and how to get it out there for the masses. Speaking of partners, I've got about half a dozen of them from all over the industry chiming in to help you make sure that your book is successful. This is a massive course of over 10 hours of content. But if you can stick with me, you'll finally be able to get what's buzzing around in your head, down on paper and out for people to read it. So why don't you join me and let's get started. 2. A disclaimer: Hey guys, I wanted to take a quick moment before we got too deep into this course to throw a political disclaimer. In the introduction. I said all about what this course is. Good a teacher. But now I'm going to tell you what it's not going to teach you. This course is not going to teach you how to draw. I've spent years constructing different courses on how to draw this in that, right? I'm kind of presuming when you're coming into this course that you learn how to draw, that you already know how to draw some basics. If you don't, you can check out my other courses. But again, it does not what this course is for. I'm going to show you some basics when it comes to constructing and composing a comic. But I'm not going to show you how to draw a face or anything like that. The drawings in this course are going to be quite simple, especially for thumbnailing and storyboarding. And just like drawing, I'm not going to teach out, right? I'm going to presume that you know how to write a sentence, a paragraph, and some of those basics, right? I know this is weird to say this, but I kinda got to put this disclaimer out there. What this course is for is how to pull all of those skills that you've learned before, all of those ideas into a package, bundle it, and put it out there for the masses. Hopefully, some big masses you'll be selling to, right? This is not going to teach you the fundamentals of drawing. It's not can teach you the fundamentals of writing. I want to be very clear on that. So I hope there's no mistake because I don't want to review later saying, No. That's not what this course is about. But there is a lot of amazing content in this course. So let's get to it. 3. What are comics: Hey guys and welcome back to another unit in how to make comics. For this one, we're going to explore the topic, what are comics? Now? Listen. I know you're probably thinking, I know what a comic is. I grew up with them or whatever. But what you grew up with might not really encompass all of what comics are. You know, you have your history, you have your perspective on it. And I've noticed that sometimes depending on your experiences, it can be a little bit limited. And, and when we're creating comics, I don't want to have us hedged in with that limitation, right? So we're gonna take this unit and explore a little bit about some of the history of comics and the different forms that they can take. Okay, so where do we start? Well, we can go way back to the first comic. Maybe. What do we got here? Well, we've got a cave painting, right? And its texture to a little bit funny, but basically it's either the copy of the cave painting or the original itself. And we can see what's going on here. We can see a man or a person is painted hunting some type of dearer. This was done thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago. And this illustration is still telling us the story. I don't know about you, but I find that like amazing. That's pretty cool. That thousands of years later, this artist is still telling us a story. And really that's fundamentally what comics are all about. The ability to tell a story through illustration. So I want you to keep that basic thing in mind, that basic premise in mind as we move forward here. Okay. So my personal experience when it comes to comic books, it was in the newspapers, the dailies, and especially the Sunday edition, right? You would have often at the back of the newspaper, these little comic strips. Sometimes there would be 34 or five or ten or an entire page of comics along with a crossword or something like that, right? You can see here that they're kinda limited, usually a couple of panels. And that's kinda how they all started, right? They started with this basic storytelling of just a little snippet of a story, right? This, sometimes, especially comedy was kinda conveyed really well this way, right? So they had this little mini panel series. Sometimes, usually it was episodic, meaning that it was self-contained, but sometimes there was continuation day by day and week by week and stuff. And these were syndicated all over the US and across North America and then eventually to Europe as well, right? Somebody got the bright idea though, that they would take a collection of these and package them in a book or a comic book. So whether it was Superman or Calvin and Hobbes or Garfield or peanuts, you started to notice that, yes, they were producing these for the dailies and weeklies, but they were also collecting them into a larger collection of a comic book or graphic novel for us. And it was awesome. Yeah, it was really cool to see the growth of comics this way, right? But it's good to know, like I said, where they all started. Okay. So we can look at it as some comics. We're starting with just a simple one panel thing, right? We've got Larson here and the far side. And he was end is you sink past ends here. A master of conveying a great, great story and often a very funny story in a single panel, right? He would hit it hard with sometimes social commentary or sometimes just something really goofy. But he always was able to pull it off in one panel is really interesting. So sometimes people argue and say, well is one panel comic. What we're looking at right here, right? Next one would be Charles M. Schulz and peanuts. And you'll find that a lot of his early work with this three or four simple panel format. He really did a great job with this. Later in the later years once they started getting collected and stuff, I get, you know, there was longer continuation of stories and stuff for him. But these original ones done for the newspapers were just perfect. Perfect carrying and succinct, right? Like and you can look at the artwork so far right. Now our work had to be pretty simple. Originally, no color in those prints. And simple enough that they could be printed. Newspaper press, alright, so you wouldn't get a lot of graphics. These weren't the covers of the newspapers or anything like that. Like I said, there were no colors. So you had to be really smart in your choices in illustration of how to convey the point. But as I said, what would happen was that people got swift and wanted to make more money off of it. So yes, they were working, making money off their initial publication and syndication. But then they would collect them all and polish them in books. And that spawned a massive generation of comic books that were designed to be formatted, for comic books to be formatted for that larger print, right? And OEM, what a difference it made. You can tell here that difference in storytelling. It's amazing, right? You know, you can convey so much more. You can have all these different panel shapes and formats and stuff. Again, you can have panel breaks and overlap. And obviously we eventually got into color as well. So this is part of the evolution of comics. And I think it's good to know about this type of evolution as we move forward in understanding them. Because what happens here is, again, we get limited by our own personal experiences. You know, right away, people, you've mentioned comic books and people say, Hey, it's superheroes, Captain America, Spiderman, superman, right? And that's it. And that's what people think is the end-all and be-all of comics. But it's not true because yes, we do have superheroes. But comic books are also whore or Western, sci-fi. And even like teen comedies and stuff. Again, there's all different types of genres and comic books. And heck, you can even get into stuff like religion. Or are you ready for this erotic comic books? And the way that we express them, or just a medium, just like movies or something. And within movies, there are all different types of genre. And so just remember that, that yes, we're illustrating a story and that we're doing it on generally paper and digital now and stuff I get, but it's just a medium of expression. And so you can have all these different types of genres within that medium and even more, you know, I've gotten like, what do I have here, eight or so. But there's much, much more. Almost anything you can imagine can be put down in the comic book, right? Here's the thing though. Like I said, it depends on how you grew up with them. So in North America, and we've got this very basic format of Spider-Man superheroes. Yes, we branch into different genres and stuff like that, but we still have this way of thinking, right? And that's okay, that translated into Europe as well and stuff like that. It filtered over the seas. But in different continents, there was a lot of different ways of expressing this, right? Whether you go to Japan or in the Philippines, a lot of really creative artists were approaching comic books and storytelling with illustration very differently. And it's amazing if you ever get a chance. Check out books like Elmer by Jerry here, or books from Europe, from France and stuff. There's just so many approaches to this type of storytelling. Some of them are amazing, some of them are inspiring, and some of them there just to make money for a toy line. He says, yes, even corporations get in to the comic book game. And I gotta say, you know, like this almost might sound negative, but it's totally not because I was a massive fan of GI Joe and transformers comics when I was growing up. So don't take it as a negative. It's actually a positive. Okay, We're gonna come back to where it all started again. This basic storytelling slide. Thousands of years ago, this artist told the story of a hunter. And we're still seeing it today. And if you can do something similar with your comic book, then that's pretty damn amazing, right? The point of this is when we're talking about the subject, what are comics? And we break it down really simply. It's just telling a story through illustrations. We really opened up a lot of potential. And that's what I want you to do with this. I don't want you to get stuck in your specific history of what comics is. You can be inspired by it. You can learn from it. But don't ever be stuck by it. Make sure you branch out. Make sure you read some of those comics from overseas. Make sure you look at how different artists are approaching it in different genres, right? Don't ever be hedged in because there's much, much more out there. And remember, just keep drawing eyes, keep creating. And it's going to be amazing when you get it done. Have fun with the guys. 4. Concepts and Ideas: Okay guys, In this unit, we're going to talk about something that's a little tough. Tough necessarily, but tough to wrap our hands around it, right? We're talking about concept creation, how we go about coming up with our concepts, especially for the stories in the books that we're creating here. Alright. Now listen, this is highly individualized. Each creator is going to have their process. Hello, I'm guessing there's gonna be some overlap, but I'm also guessing that it's going to be a lot of variation there. And that's cool. That's okay. That's what it should be, right? We should be able to see how something creative like this is approached in so many different ways. So what I wanted to do was, well, I wanted to show you a few different ways that I approach this content creation, right? You know, trying to come up with my concepts, right? So one way that I do is I take a look at issues that are in front of me, are around me, you know, I remember the old adage that write what you know, right? So not saying I have to know in depth all of these subjects, but I like to have some familiarity with them. I sometimes look through news, I scroll through articles and current events and stuff. I got hurt. And sometimes something sticks with me. Now, I don't always make it into a comic. You know, it just could be sitting in my head, way in the back somewhere. But then the more it kinda itches ME and the more I want to do something with it, right? Okay, so here's an article from the CBC. This is a Canadian news organization, right? And they're talking about the disappearance and murder of a lot of First Nations women. Just in case you're not familiar with that term in Canada, It means indigenous or native, right? So what's happened and you can see kinda scroll the amount of people that are missing is just, it's crazy. All right? And this has been going on for years, for decades and stuff. And it's something that I thought would be a really interesting story. Now, you gotta be careful. Like obviously I don't want to kind of take advantage of some people's misery or anything like that. But more so I feel like it's a story that just hasn't been told very well or very often. Especially in like for example, the comic book medium, right? We see the news and some people kinda skip over it and stuff like that. But I wanted to see if I could give voice to it. So how do I approach it? How am I going to approach this article? I've actually are this issue rather, right? How am I going to take such a massive issue with so many sensitivities to it and murdered and missing people and make it into a real book that pays respect to that. Alright. Luckily, I've taken another co, author on board for this book that I'm working on. And that has more insight into the actual issue than me. But from a crater standpoint, I would kinda look at it not simply, but like in a different approach in all cases. So basically what I'm saying here is like I could take a news article or a social issue or whatever and say, Okay, well, here it is. Missing native people or protest in the street or poison in the water or whatever it is her. And you can go from a to B to C and plotted out. And yeah, it's a decent story, right? But what I like to do is I kinda like to mess around a little bit or at least take, take a moment to say, how do I want to approach this? And one of those ways to do it is with point of view. So what I'll do is I'll take a look at the point of view and I'll say, okay, well, what's 1 of view? While an obvious one would be the victim? I could look at the story of these kidnappings and murdering murders. From the victim's point of view. Being taken, being held, the horror, the fear, all of those types of things. That would be, you know, pretty compelling story, right? That's how a lot of horror stories and thrillers are kinda base trim from the victim's point of view. It's always them running, it's their face, it's them. And sometimes even the killer is barely visible, right? So I think the victim's point of view is a valid approach here. And another one, speaking of dark, would be the killer's point of view. Yeah. That's an ugly book. But, you know, maybe it gives you some insight into how the story can be told a different way, right? Like you're looking at it through the eyes of a predator. And that tells a very different story. These are both very dark, hard to read stories, but yeah, how would you do it from the killer's point of view? I'm not saying this is what you need to do. What I'm saying when you take a look at your creation process, you know, there's a lot of different ways to break it down. And point of view is one of them. Another point of view here might be from the police. That grizzled detective that I don't know is a few months away from retirement, gets headed. This case like so many cases before, it looks like it's going to be just shelved and stuff. And then something happens, a break in the case or he recognizes someone. Maybe he knows the victim. You know. I guess what I'm saying here is that you can take a storying, go a to B to C until it straight, right? You don't tell it straight from almost documentary point of view. You know, you try to stay kind of factual and stuff, right? But why not just back away from it and say, well, there's some, how else could I tell this story? What are some other perspectives on it? And are any of those other perspectives more interesting and convey the story closer to the way that I want it told, right? Okay, So point of view, I want you to kinda think of it that way, right? But that's an option. I'm going to say. Another approach I have to, to content creation here is and if you thought that one was kinda like, you know, that hard to grasp and it's very individualized and stuff I got, well, obviously what are we looking at here? Dreams. This is tough because dreams or have been psycho analyzed and discussed and debated and thrown out the window and stuff and that kind of stuff, right. Like so I'm not asking you to go to some dream analyst or something like that. That's not what I'm talking about here. But a lot of us have dreams, right? And especially if you're the creative type, sometimes those dreams can get kinda creative. What I do is often I keep a little, a little notepad next to my bed. And sometimes if I wake up in the middle of the night, I might jot something down right and fall back asleep. Or sometimes I stay up and that same process or that same thought roles to my head a billion times, right? And then in the morning I wake up and I take a look at what I wrote and I'm like, I have no idea what I'm trying to interpret hieroglyphics or something, right? But once in a while it does work. And so I want to explain actually this dream that I had just a little while ago. And I thought it was kinda interesting, you know, like this is actually a, I'm going to get into storytelling structure here just a little bit. Okay, So this wasn't a dream boat concept creation so much as approaches, right? So let's see, I had this dream and you know, there was part one, part two, part three, part four. And it was actually weird. It was almost like semi episodic. I was jumping from one to the next to the next. This one had a kid or something. This actually now I think about it was kind of a kid, teenager and adult and another adult, but this one was kinda old, right? And so I had this dream and it was kinda, I don't know, it just like I said, a jump from one to the next to the next. And it almost seemed like I was almost watching a TV show. Was kinda interesting. Kinda somewhere around towards the end of this one, I kind of woke up but, you know, just half in and out of sleep. Right. And then I was like I'm going back to bed, going back to sleep. Then I had another series of dreams. And it was almost similar as this was really weird because sometimes I can't even remember my dreams or anything like that. But once again, I went from one to two to three to four or whatever. And I gotta say this first row and the second row, we're not the same series. Like it was not like I was repeating this one dream or anything. They were different stories or at least it seemed to me to be different stories. And I was like, Okay, well, this night is weird. I don't know what I am trying to figure it out a little bit. And then I think I woke up like this was still in the middle of the night and I was like, What is going on? Like this is just just a little bit of a weird year wasn't also weird, but it was interesting just the way my minded. Maybe I was inching on Netflix or somebody get the whim of mine had set out this pattern, right. And I was still half asleep, but then I kind of wrote this all down, this little square thing, right? And I went back a bit in the morning I woke up and I was like, ha I was looking at this and then I got it. It made sense. This was part one. This was part two. This was part three. This was Part 4. This was part of five. This was Part 6, 7, this was part of eight. They actually, the stories went like from here to here to here to here to here to here to here, here. And I had dreamed them in a different order. So I thought, well, that's pretty funky. All right, like I kinda like how this played out, right? Like this is really interesting storytelling here. All right. What if I was to make a book about this? Knock out this rather but like using this pattern, right? So I thought, okay, let's see. Maybe I could go with my own four pages, 4, 4 and 4. And set 16 might be a bit much and then do the same thing here. I could even make it shorter if I want to, to, to, to depending on the depth of the story, right? And so this is eight, right? And I was like, wow, you know, this could actually be a book, right? Like what is this? 24 pages now at this point, right? And then what I could do is kinda, I always think of if I wanted to do this storytelling, right, what I could do is do a sort of color hue over this section, a color hue over this, a color hue over this. And you know, have them separated. But if you're reading it this way and then this way, you know, from pages 12456789, 10, 11, you might not catch it totally. And if you repeat, there might be something subconscious telling you that this is familiar but not everybody would catch it, right? And then I could wrap up, I could wrap up depending on how many pages I want to have to wrap this book and stuff I got. But I was thinking of wrapping up something like a final story or even just a splash page or something like that with maybe some shattered mirror. And the individual subject in question looking at themselves. But they can view themselves as the little kid, as the teen, as the older, grizzled adult, home as a younger adult here. And then, so that if the reader hasn't grasped the pattern yet, they'll figure it out here. So basically what I'm saying is like, Listen. When it comes to concept creation, there is a lot of approaches. You could take previous legends, Greek or ancient myths and gods and grow off of that. You could look at how a story is being told in a movie and think, you know what, I like, how they did it, but, you know what, uh, what if, right, and twist it up a little bit. You can look at your own life and your own story, or those people around you, or somebody you admire. And then grab onto it and say, okay, well I'm going to tell the story, but, you know, it's going to be part of me to write. And you could throw it in like that. You could take current events, things you're seeing on the news in front of you or something like that and say, okay, well, what about this speaks to me? And then how would I lay it out? Or you can get funky with it. Try to pull from a dream. And even like listen, I had a dream about a, a woman with no eyes, right? And frequently how would how it's like, you know, I was kind of freaking out after having that dream. Then I drew some concept sketches for it. And I was like, Whoa, actually, okay, well, now what could be a story here? How can I, how can I make this something, right? So it could be as simple as just a flashing image, a scary image or, or a feeling or a pattern like I've kinda laid out and stuff, right? The point is that even though this is an individual thing and individual process, I wanted to take the time to show you that, you know, there's ways to kind of break it down and approach it. And what it might work for you. So good luck with it and let me know how it goes. 5. Character Design with Clayton Barton: Hey guys, I'm back and I've got another unit for you here. This time, I'm working on character creation. And this way I brought a buddy, Clayton Barton's going to help your. He's an awesome character designer, both in comics and games. And I'm looking forward to doing this session together. You're ready, Clayton? Hell, yeah, man, let's do it. Alright. Alright. Okay. So the first one, oh, that's not what I want. First one is going to be one of my characters. We're going to bounce back and forth between our characters here. This is one of my creations. Her name is hopeful. The dread, which so what do I have? I've got a rough dealt skeleton here, very, very basic. And I've got already things fleshed out in my mind. I already got things that I know what I wanna do, right? For example, what I did was kinda Google a little bit. And I said, well, I know that it's based in East Africa, Kenya region, right? And so I plotted that out geographically and I started to look up fashion from that area. Okay. So hopefully the dread, which she's kind of like a cursed soul or something, right? So as I start to design, I'm like, Okay, well what do I want? I liked the bands. I kinda like these bands coming around around the neck, right? I really enjoyed that so much so that I think I'll extend it and have it wrapping around her arms here. Okay. What I might do is put some some patterning. I'm, I'm noticing that there's some different types of patterns going on. So I might do something along those lines and how these have a special band or something like that. Right. And have her then wearing some type of traditional dress. I I don't know if I want a cinch it. Maybe since it up high and then have it flow out from there. Right. Maybe something along those lines, right? And so this is at this stage what I'm doing is I'm just really roughing and I might I might back it away, but you know what, I'm kind of liking it so far, Not just that, but I think I might have some, some bracelet bands. And I don't always like symmetry. I like going back and forth. So this one might be a whole forearm of bands and this one might just be around the wrist and maybe I'll make this like have a bigger band there. Anything else that I'm looking at the designs here? A neck thing I'm kinda I don't know. I feel like I've already got a lot of focus around the neck right now. I don't know. This is a maybe I'm not loving that so far. Come down into the address. There usually hit somewhere around ankle. We'll see if I like that right now. And I'm just going to put it simple. I'm just going to have some type of sandal going on. Her feet, up into the ankle and down. So that's her rough outfit. When it comes to the face, I'm I've already got something else in mind that I'm not going to put in here. I'm just going to have the hair line coming in. She's actually missing her eyes. So I'm just going to roughing things in right now. Nice, nice, nice and light, right? What I want to have here is she has got a very large African. Okay, There's some weight David here at the top a little bit. And so it comes around and it comes around to the base of the neck here. Okay. So she's I don't know if I'd do I want eyebrows? I'm not sure. No, I kind of don't like them so far. Looking at it now, what do I think? Trying to think of the flow? I think she's, she's looking okay. It's the general concept of what I want for her. I want her looking like someone from the Kenyan region. I know that a lot of them have had dressed, but I really, this the hair was a big part of what I was thinking of for tofu. The other thing is, and this is not something that I'm gonna do. This is some we'll talk about in a later unit about character turnaround sheets and stuff is when it comes to coloring, She's actually she's albino. So that'll be of note. The hair will be much lighter. There's going to be freckles on the face and stuff. Lighter skin. And then I'm trying to think of what color. It seems like we're going with a very vibrant colors here, vibrant blues and stuff. Vibrant greens going off of the albino skin. I'm thinking something along the lines of agreed. And like I said, Oh, I'll discuss that a little bit in my character turnaround unit. But looking at what it is right now, I'm liking it. I like the shoulder rap. I like the irregular armbands. I like the dress. I feel like there might be almost want. Some type of rope wrap or something because he's not rich or anything. I want to show some poverty here and have her waist wrapped on that part or something. What do you think? Clean? No batch. Pretty good to me. It yeah, that's a very well done. What I do is I pick my references and then just kind of sketch it out. And you know what, now that I look at it, I don't know if that neck is doing her any favors like this band around her neck at all? I don't know. Let's see if I come in here and I just kinda wrap do the wraps more. And our neck comes up like that. Yeah. I don't I don't know. I'm I'm kinda what do you think on an aircraft? You like it or not? Yeah. I liked the idea of the neck or app. I think that should work well, yeah, as a costume element. Yeah. Okay. And maybe some symbols in the neck wrap that's kinda matches these symbols or something, right? Totally. Yeah, that'll work well. So that's a quick approach to how I might go after whole food that red, which what do you think, Leighton? You got one for me. Okay. I do. I do. I'm going to come up with something very rough like you as well. And that's only for a character concept. In the beginning, you've already got me here. All I did was rough a skeleton and you've already got like a nice figure sketched in, man. I love it for me, man. I've got to see the anatomy and what's going on in order to fit the costume around the character accurately. So what I'm going to do is a sci-fi Samaria. So what that would be a pretty cool character concept to go with. I've got a bunch of references over here. Oh, pre-existing designs by other artists. I'm not going to copy any one of them, but I m going to kinda take ideas from them and with something new and unique blend of existing concepts that I've collected. So I'm going to use the pen tool as well. Now, the one thing that really stands out to me is this big hat. I'm not sure what the technical name for it is. Let's go ahead and zoom in. Actually. It's got this triangular shape and I'm always thinking about the largest shapes as I'm laying in the initial idea for a concept, because I think that's what matters at the end of the day. That's what's going to allow you to create a design that's readable and memorable. And the cool thing about doing this on a separate layer is that you can kinda reposition these costume elements as needed. And then I think that having some kind of shoulder, arm or shoulder pad would work out nicely. Symmetrical or asymmetrical? You know what I think for his shoulder pads at least, I'm going to make them symmetrical because I feel like a samurai. They tend to walk around in a bit more of a uniform. And if you look at a knight's armor, for example, you'll notice that they've got the same AMA where there be on their shoulder, roll their arms or their legs on either side of the body most of the time. Now you can still add a little bit of asymmetry TO character that always makes it interesting here and day, even if their design is overall symmetrical. So we've got his shoulder pads. And I think that just to give it some sci-fi elements, I'm going to add in these, these cogs that are protruding, least circular shapes that are protruding out from the AMA. And that's a bit more of a patent element. And you can see that those smaller patent elements fit into the largest shape there. Again, it says large shapes that matters the most. And I'm going to look through more of these references here. So I'm looking at this guy down the bottom. And I like the look of his AMA on the front there. So I'm going to go ahead and mimic that. And I'm going to build it up in plates. Thinking about the maneuverability of the character. As I lay down these metal layers. Because you've got to keep that in mind. Maneuverability, functionality of a design is something that's going to really matter, especially when you start to move your character around and put them in different poses. Exactly. And you know, it's interesting because looking at you're doing that, you're almost doing it at the various points of pivot, the ribs, the hips, all those notes. You're going to have that intersection moving so you're going to need the armor plates to do that, Right? Exactly. I think that that's a good guide, you know, the human body and how it's broken up on an anatomical level can really help guide the way in which you place on or across it. And you'll notice that if you look at, for example, a knight's alma, that the top section that lays over the chest really does cover most of the ribcage. And the shoulders. Armor on them covers the shoulders. Each section of the body is covered in its own piece of armor so that it can still move around. Sure. So I'm just adding in some patent elements here. Relax the body. They always add visual interest to the design. Absolutely. And then I'm going to cut a copy your idea actually like, I love the idea of a neck scarf, but since he is a samurai, I'm going to have it covered his face a little bit. Sure. So I think something like that would work well. And then we're going to have you swords coming out the back here. The other thing I'm thinking about with character design, and this is another reason the biggest shapes come into play is the silhouette of the character. And by the silhouette, I mean the overall shape and outline of the character. If you were to take older details out from the interior contour, and we're left just with the shadow of that character. How would it look? Would you be able to recognize it without that interior detail? Great point. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we think of some iconic characters like the whole curve, something, you know, you don't have to see the details that you just see the musculature and structuring like cod us the whole crew that's Wolverine or whatever. Exactly, Exactly. Some placing some AMA here on these forums as well. I'm trying to make this dude look really bulky. Yeah, I think he's looking good and I love those details, man. It's almost reminded me of like bamboo shoots or something during mean like there's Heck, yeah. Yeah. It's giving a very North Asian flavor to it. Yeah. My understanding of the actual samurai is not the best. So I'm making up a lot of the design choices here based upon a very limited repertoire of references inside my mind of the samurai. But I think that that'll kind of in a way make it more relatable. The audience, in a sense. Sure. Because most people don't have a super deep understanding about it. And the references I've got going on inside my mind as I work here are probably similar to the references they've already got. Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. I'd say 90 percent of the viewing public has a superficial understanding of these topics and stuff. And so as long as you hit some key points, you'll be interested, there'll be engaged. And it really takes a few iconic elements for a design to start becoming relatable. In other words, I've only, So for the hat that I've included, this is a common staple within this sort of semmelweis character. Add some texture details to it. Yeah, the hat, the swords, and the recall striking of the panels. I think there's almost, this is kinda what you need when you're designing a character, right? You just need some, some very key elements that are recognizable to 97 percent of the viewers. Exactly. And it's important to keep it rough as well. I think, especially in the initial, preliminary idea phase over design, is you're going to make mistakes. You're going to want to make changes. Yeah. I know that that's certainly the case for me a lot of the time. And this is really the hardest part. If he can get this down. It's quite easy to just polish it up later on and actually turn it into a very slick, looking pleasant presentation at the end. Okay, we'll give him some puffy pants at the top there. Some knee pads. Right? Gang keeping that maneuverability in mind. And I'm getting pretty messy here, but just getting some information down onto the page is half the battle. The last thing you want to be doing is just sitting there paralyzed looking at the blank canvas. Just get that pen moving on the page and someone's going to come out. And that's the most important thing. Okay, cool. So we'll zoom back out here just to see how he's come together. He's looking pretty awesome, I think. I think so. And it might even be code just to hide his face and shadow. So that's, that's my first design ed. Cool, I love it. Yeah, I'll jump on to my second. Okay, great. Let's see. Coming over to my second guy. And once again, Clayton has come to me because his is much more detailed than mine. All I did was rough in a skeleton. My character here is kept in Korea. He's kind of a national hero. Something like Captain America or capturing cannot occur. Guardian or that kinda stuff, right? So the iconography is the number one thing that I'm going to try to capture in in designing him. Okay. I luckily for me, I do have a lot of knowledge of crea. I lived there for 15 years, so I've got a fair bit. I kind of grab some K-Pop designs to see if that would help me in what I'm doing here. But he's a dude, right? And so I don't know, maybe I should've a 100 deeper for K-pop examples, but I really wasn't finding what I wanted to. Full fashion is quick and dynamic and ever changing. So I don't think that I would have captured it for what I'm going for here. The first thing I wanted to do with Captain create here is grab the center of the cookie here and throw it in the middle of the chest. So I'm just going to have this element, that kind of Yin Yang type of thing, right? The next one that I'm having troubles with or the, the, the elements off to this side. They each have a meaning. And I was trying to think of where I can put them, you know, like do I just block them in here on the chest? I think it's okay. What I'd rather do is give it a little bit of, you know, we're not just dealing with a straight on shot here like this character is going to be moving proven, Phyton, whatever and stuff. So I'm going to see him from different angles. So these elements can be wrapped around the 3D figure. Alright? So what I wanna do is wrap them around the shoulder. So if his shoulder was here, coming down into the forum or something, I would grab this one, wrap the band on this side. Very ugly and just sketch it in. And the same thing I would do on this, this other side. See coming down to the forum, whatever. And so I would grab this one and actually I'm gonna kinda fatten up here and watch this, see if that makes my job easier. It's block like this, right? So each of these shoulders are going to have this kind of element wrapped around the side and then, you know, the chest starts to come in. I don't think I want on this wide though, this seems to be a little bigger than how I envisioned him. I might try to slim him up a little bit later. Neck traps. Good enough, Easy, Ease then Captain America type of hero, right? Let me see if I can clean this up in a little bit in the middle just to make it look a little bit cleaner for those watching. There we go. Okay. So that's there. Down into the biceps, right? Okay. Let's see. Any other pole. I've got two more elements here. So where would I put them if these are wrapped on the shoulders? I'm thinking wrapping them on the boots. So we've got is ankles coming in here, is boot here. And maybe I'll do this same wrap. So that would mean that this one's this pattern. And this one's a solid dot, dot solid. So something along these lines right there. Cool, Cool, Nice and simple. So I've got the boots. Sometimes it's the simple designs that I'm the most successful, right? You know, something that's so recognizable. So I'm just gonna kinda sketch out a couple of things here. Because I want to figure out how I'm going to do the rest of the costume here. And like you said, i'm, I'm not really looking for any any details here. I'm just kinda trying to say, well, this is really rough. How do I want it looking, right? Okay, so I think if I got boots down there, I'm going to have gloves up here and then legs. Right. Pretty ugly sketch, but it's doing what I wanted to do. Okay, So if I back out a little bit, I've got the five elements that I want it on here. From the green flag. I've got them. But I feel like it's really, you know, it's all this is is the central yin-yang on white. And if I keep his outfit white, is it going to be white boots? White outfit? White? White, white, white, white, white. I really don't like that. I think that I can do something else with it for sure. So what I think I'm gonna do is just draw street coming through here and then maybe it centers down here. Actually that kinda works. Centers down through here. So this I can blackmail. There we go. Now we've got some separation between we've got white black, white, black, black. And now this is starting to come together into more of a costume, right? Like it's starting to make a lot of contrast makes a big difference, right? So I might do black loves black boots. But if I'm gonna do that, then what I would switch is I would have these bands, white, white, white, white, white, white down there, right? Because they got to contrast against the black. So I think it's kinda cool. I've got the black bands up here. I've got white bands down here, down on the caps. Looking at his face. There's some simple things that you can kind of choose when designing a mask. You could have. I've always hated this type that goes straight across the top. Yeah, I mean, and they just you've got the elements in the middle here and stuff. I don't know if for some reason I hit it was early 70s Marvel and they would do that a lot into it really bug me. And so that is not what I'm gonna do here. Another one would be like this kind of half mask type of thing, like this semi cow or looking right? I like that. I think it's not bad. But I am going for that iconic look where it comes down. And we have it like this. Actually, maybe not even that. I think I'm going to There you go. That's what I wanted. That reverse one from that. Something along those lines for where you can just changing these angles. Can, you know, it gives an angry bit open. You can, just, these small changes will change the nature of your character. So as you're designing it, I think you've got to be really aware of how these small subtle things will change the character. Did I incorporate any of this K-pop? Here's this tight leather banded span decks or something else that right. So I've got that's my one incorporating of K-Pop or something right into this as everything's going to be tight on him and stuff, right? And that is kept in Korea. Nice, easy, ugly. But that's my rough sketch. Then I would bring it through, bring it into a turnaround which is another unit. And really flesh it out. Not just the costume from all the different angles and turning it around. But the face, that's when the turnaround sheets is when I do the face and really look at it and even throw in some expressions and everything, right? Totally. You're off to your Lacan. Very cool. Let's do it. All right. So I'm doing a female character for this example. I'm going to do another sci-fi similar, but a little bit of a different interpretation. Like I said, still using these references over here. But what I love, especially about this reference at the bottom, is that she has got the head on with it kinda comes all the way down the side of her face and neck. So I'd like to incorporate some of that. And that's what I'll start off with here. So I'm going to create a head piece around the forehead and around the sides of the face. From there. I'm going to have this metal. Would you call it chain mail? Sure. It runs runs down the side of her face, down onto the shoulders. And I can add some detail elements on there. We can see that already there's some elements that I've added that are recognizable, that are going to get the message across almost instantly. And already was a character like the silhouette, just that had pieces starting to pop in Italy. 100% And then what I'll do is I really like this, this long code that's running down the shoulders of this guy over here. So I think maybe on one side of her body, I'm going to have that. But cloaking over the top of it, I'll incorporate some kind of AMA, which I'm seeing are the ear on this reference, some taking all of my references. And I'm using them to inspire different ideas. And your mind is very good at associating new ideas. Too. Well. Good at associating old ideas to new ones. It's kinda like you're giving your brain something to work with creative fuel. And so I'll have this code run all the way down her body to about here. And I'll have some dangling bits hanging off the bottom, kinda billowing around. Again, really trying to create a recognizable silhouette here. So that when people get to know this character whenever they see her afterwards, they're going to know exactly who she is. Right? Okay. Yeah, She's looking deadly, man. Thanks. I'm glad you like. Then over here, I'm just going to give her I'll give her some AMA around the top. And you want to, sometimes you're going to want to sexy design of course. But you also want to incorporate some practicalities so that it makes sense. If it's all sexy, but it doesn't work well as a functional design. That's when you start running into problems and people start calling you out on it. Absolutely will look like it works, right? There's going to be imbalanced there, but it depends on your vision for your comic. Do what you gotta do, right? Exactly 100%. You know, you've gotta be happy with the design as well. Yeah. And it's always that balance. You know, what's your intention? Are you trying to make money from your designs? I tried to make it soluble or is this something that's coming more from the hard way, a genuinely just passionate about this character that you've created. So I'm going to create some material in-between the top pieces of AMA and the AMA that's wrapping around her belly, which again is segmented to allow for that additional level of maneuverability. And then her legs are just going to be bad. Oh, interesting. And then when we get to the knees, I'm going to place down some AMA because it makes sense for there to be armor around the knees. You know, you get knocked down to the ground. You're probably going to be landing on your knees and hands. Sometimes there's going to be especially warrior type characters. They'll even fight with their names. Being someone in the gut or something like that, right? Yeah. And so you wanna make sure that depending on who your character is and what they're going to be capable of dope within the design. They've got the equipment that gives them the ability to do that, to perform those actions. And then around her fate will add in some armor across her toes is going to give her sandals. But I thought you know what, she's Ahmed to the hilt. So that wouldn't make much sense, right? And I think that's the other thing. In order to create a design that's believable, you also wanna make sure that it's consistent with itself, because any inconsistencies that are spotted by your audience will immediately highlight the fact that what they're looking at is a flawed design. Yeah, I think we have that in when you're designing characters and when your world-building, right? You want consistencies, whether when we're watching a movie and we're like, Hold on. He could do that, but he couldn't do it ten minutes ago or, you know, it doesn't make sense. I think being consistent in your vision, your approach in application, it's key. And a 100 percent we could give her leg bend, has sharp implements that she could hold toward those. She is up against her opponents. And we could even add smaller details like little tassels on the end of the costs that she's wearing around her shoulders and those things make all the difference, believe it or not. Yeah. And then finally, over here on this arm, we've got an opportunity to show that the kind of armor that it might have since the other one is being hidden by that cloth. So I'm going to give it some spikes, almost like Batman, except these are bigger. Meno. Hello. Cool. Now as for her face, I always feel as though that, that the face of a character is a part of the design. Because characters have lots of different kinds of faces. Sometimes they have facial hair, sometimes they have scars. And so these are, these are visual elements that a place into the design that make it unique. Angry. And so I'm going to expose her face. So you can see her eyes, you can see her mouth. But then, as I was just mentioning before, I'm going to add some more unique elements to it and maybe give her some face paint. I'll give us some red cheeks. I'm trying to figure out what you call them, but there's a typical like Japanese type face mask that goes from the Kabuki theater is I think yes. Yes, that's what I'm thinking of here. So i'm I'm trying to get that to come across. Sometimes have the cost the lips or something, right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And you could almost like, you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to erase those cheap that I've added in there for a second. And I'm going to copy that line that I've added in on the mouse and place them over the eyes. And that makes it look much scarier, I think. Cool. Okay, cool. So I'm going to zoom out there. That's it. That's done. That's boss looking. Clayton. It's been awesome having you as a guest lecturer and you know, we've worked together tons in the past. And so I'm really happy to have you here. I think some of the key points that we talked about today were silhouettes. Research doesn't have to be totally in depth, but you have to have both of us for pulling references and stuff right? Enough that the general public can kinda recognized, right? Absolutely. And then putting in those small little details, not all, even if it's a rough sketch, you just want to have a couple little things that are just recognizable just for that character, right? So that people can connect with it almost immediately. You want that immediate connection. Don't worry so much about creating a character that's too cliche or whatever, because there's cliche elements that allow the audience to see it and get it almost immediately. Perfect, absolute pleasure. And an honor to do this class with you. Thanks so much for the environment. I appreciate it. All right, Guys, everybody at home taking this lesson. I hope it worked for you. Let's see what you come up with. 6. Character Turnarounds with Mike van Orden: Hey guys, we're back with another unit and how to make comics. This time, we're talking about character turnarounds. And I've got a special guest with me. I keep pointing in the right direction. I wasn't quite sure Mike is going to help us out here. He's the master turnaround in my opinion. Mike, how you doing? I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm awesome. Men were in totally different time zones. So I'm really happy that I can connect with you and get you in on this course. Cool. Me too, happy to be here. So I hear you were telling me that you're going to draw one of my characters? Yes, Captain Korea. Perfect. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is let's see if we can get you a big screen here and started. Awesome. Okay. Yeah, actually a little bit of a headstart where we got a little bit of a lag here. Yep. So basically we're doing a turnaround here. And generally what I do a turnaround, I lay out a kind of a basic anatomy of the front view. Yep. Once I do that, if those permits. So I'm doing this digitally obviously. So what I'll do at this point is I'll, I'll take that first sketch of a front facing view. I'll use those as my, my measurements for all the other sketches for the turnaround. So what I'll do is I'll draw a straight line from the top of his head and the bottom of a speed run measure the size of his head. And I'll try and do generally about seven to eight heads in late than in height. And then from there it's just basic, just anatomy, sketching. And then, then at that point, like in your case, I just studied your character. So I just took some of the elements of his costume and tried to implement them into my sketch. Will Mike, why do you start with The fun view? Because that's usually how I start, right? So what do you usually start with the front? I think it's just might be psychological because most of the people that we meet and we're introduced to, we see them from the front view. So I studied that. I get to the elements of the costume. And then I just try to spin them like, like I'm doing here to the, in this case to the left. So it'd be a profile shop. And then this is a little bit tougher for a lot of people. It's not familiar. A lot of people do just draw front views. So this is a little bit tricky. But you know, it's just with anything, just practice. And then from there I'll just quickly sketch in the back view. Now these are very loose gesture drawings, so there's nothing too tight. I'm not getting into details or anything like that. I'm just trying to lay out everything for my measurements. I can see how, you know, you're basically going with the chin alignment by little the chest, right? Words across all the things are kinda try and keep it in line with each other, right? Yeah. And I'm just eyeballing it. So I just drew those lines in for reference just to keep, you know, good measure. And then at this point what I'll do is I'll, I'll lower the opacity. And then I'll start fine-tuning the actual sketch. And then I'll, I'll start grabbing some character elements and putting them in their loosely. And then the final stage, I'll just tiny it up. It'd be like equivalent to erasing on paper and then sharpening your pencil and redrawing everything a little bit tighter. Or actually what I do if I'm on paper, I kinda lightly sketch in a blue pencil or red pencil. Just something that's a little bit different. Yeah. Exactly. And then come in with each B or something like that, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so that's why I chose this kind of an off-color. It's almost like a a purple bluish color. And then generally I'll come in with a darker tone. And that's, that's, that's kinda of like good old trick of cartoonists. Animators and stuff like that. What I think it was two was about the scalability. Like now, if I throw something into the scanner, it picks up every color, picks up everything. But I think originally when people were running to print, press and stuff, there was somebody who blew that it wouldn't be picked up. So you're using blue as their sketches because they knew if it was inked exactly and it wouldn't be picked up on it, right? Exactly. Non photo blue is what they call those pencils. Isd is a spectrum today. Yeah. Yeah. So you're starting to work on some of the elements of Captain create here at sketching away, you've got that the yin-yang symbol already plotted into his chest, right? Right. Yeah. I tried to grab the things that would first stand out to me. And it was a yin-yang, excuse me. And then I would go for the little stripes on the shoulders. And then I think you had a view on under boots. And then there's that black line that just kinda goes down the center of the costume. So I tried to capture everything. And then of course, you, you're the character creator. So I know that you can spot this character a mile, a mile away. And that's what I was trying to do is just grasp the most important elements. Looking at it. You started off with link, just an average build and that's how it's working. You know, he's got a normal build to him. He's, he's not a massive guy. He's not the Hulk, he's not Wolverine, he's not short and stocky. I think. Just a typical midsize for superheroes. They're still massive, right? But you didn't little while to proportions or anything. Yeah. And I have a tendency to do that. I think a lot of people might, a lot of times I over-exaggerate, but in this one I tried to think they're a little tighter. And I think living in Asia helps me a lot because they have a lot of Asian friends. So it's like it's, it's interesting. So, but yeah, I tried to get your brightness so you're not hanging out with a lot of massive people? Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes we've got a gym, but I tried to keep the character closer to their origin. So right, right. Yeah. I've done turnarounds for Captain Korea and turn around and head shots and everything like that. And yeah, He's Korean, so he's not a bodybuilder, although even with superheroes, we always kinda throw those extra muscles, especially in the title, right? Like if you put him in street clothes or something he just might read. But there's something about those superhero things and you know what? His power comes from his suit. So if I want to say that a suit gives them a little bit of extra muscle, you know, that Batman cleavage or whatever it is. Exactly. Now if I actually, he's a lot of fun to draw is pretty interesting and it's simple yet complex. I lie like the elements of his costume. And it's right when I spoke, they did a good job in creating this character itself. He was fun. Thanks man. It was, it was something that when I was living in Korea, I was like, well, I love the iconic patriotic type of nationalist heroes from America, Captain, guardian, red, red, you know, like there all that. They really kind of, I don't think grabbed the national symbols. So when I was designing Captain Crunch, I was like, well when I was living in crowds and come on, I got to have a cream superhero and the SCC like Korea kinda of the old-style spelling to just have a nice flow to it, right? Oh, I was wondering about so that they spelled with a C is actually the French spelling for Korea. And the old maps had a seed for it. And so I just roll with it and I thought aesthetically it looks pretty good, right? I never thought I would learn something from this video. Thank you. Now the one thing I'm noticing and stuff, and this would be something that you start to take care of as you get more into details and everything is the stripes on his shoulders are actually not solid bars all the way through. Okay. They are they're part of the map or the nothing map, the flag that's to take Huike, that there's a solid line or a dot, dot, dot a solid line. It depends on where it's at, so they actually have some variation. So this is a good point. You know, if you're doing a character turnaround as much as possible, we want to ask the creator if it's, if it's not your, your creation. We want the character creator and say, what references do you have? You know, like for me I often say, do they look like somebody famous? Is, is there a famous actor or actress or suddenly GAD or something like that? So I can start to base some of the facial proportions off that or even the proportions or something. And in this case, it's based off the green flag. Okay, gotcha. Alright, yeah, that's a passer aptitude to be something that as a creator, I would bounce it back to you and say, Hey, I love it. But watch out for this one detail that you gotta, you gotta work on that a little bit. And absolutely, because it's there for a purpose. So yeah. I agree. A 100 percent. Now I know you're living in Thailand. Yeah. You ever think of doing a tie superhero or something? You know, I've actually been asked by many hi folks to create a superhero. Yeah, you have to be careful out here in Thailand is one, the last one. It's under a monarchy. You know, it's like they have a king here. So you have to be careful what you do there. But I think I can have some fun with it. I think so too. Yeah. That's one thing that I got into was, you know, whenever we're creating characters, are we being respectful to the source and how do we do that? Those types of things, right? And as creators intended goes along way. So if we're trying to be respectful and, you know, I think will be forgiven if we muck up. But our intent is good and we recognize that and just keep on rolling with it. The word respectful apps. Yeah, right. Right. As much as possible. I'm actually working on as I was creating this course, I've got a two or three books that I'm working on that or someone my own original characters, right? You know, I'm a Canadian dude, dude, right? Um, but I'm writing these stories for women. I'm writing these stories for minorities and all this kind of stuff. And I tried to do also is if I don't necessarily know the subject very well, I tried to consult people that will say, I'll take them on as co-creators or cold writers or something, right? When it comes to create kept in Korea. I, I lived there for 15 years. I've got a pretty decent knowledge. So. I feel pretty confident, but always smart to take on co-creators. Absolutely. Yeah, I think more minds the better. And a lot of cases. As long as you get yeah. No, I think you have a lot of stories to tell. I'm sure we'll have to talk about that later. Definitely, Definitely. Yeah. You didn't see it play out both in the character creation and in the book itself, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You have you have to write two issues. Yeah. I'm working on a third actually. Fiverr been written and I've taken on some writers and stuff that they were looking to create as well. So I'm kinda behind on producing the books. I'm a little slow on it. Men about. I wish I could draw this fast though. I like it. I'm going to get a role in here and stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is fun. Yeah. Yeah. And I think for people who are watching, you know, I get a lot of questions like, how do you draw a little bit faster? It really, it's because I have the main idea in mind, but I don't try to get to that point too quickly. I just treat it like a big chunk of clay. And I wrote on the paper, I know that we have written eraser or for working digitally. And I just try to get the basic shapes as fast as possible and just capture what I want the gestures. And then from there I just start sculpting and fine tuning. I love us. It's a long process, but it's a repetitive, it's very easy to formulate. Yeah. Yeah. So and then you build it up and you get an awesome result. I keep bouncing back and forth, but yeah. Yeah, it looks great, men. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. This one was fun. Yeah. And you did it fast and furious. And other than a simple Turner mount like this, you know, what else could we do? We've got these three sides. Anything else we could add to it? So typically if I do turnarounds, a lot of times I'll do like the head as well. So I'll do and I'll do without the mask. So and I know that you had a reference sheet for that. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I didn't have the opportunity today, but yes. So colors are something that I don't specialize in, but if you're trying to convey the message to the colorist, you want to add your first preference. So in your case it was red and blue and Britain it was pretty simple, didn't have too many colors. But yeah, so generally when I'm doing a turnaround, I'll add the colors I lightly on a different layer. If I'm using digital or I'll take R, I'll make a copy of my sketch if I'm doing traditional, and I'll just try out some different color tones. Absolutely. Yeah, one more thing I'm going to add to turnarounds could do like a three-quarter view or something like that. And another thing I'm going to say that I've seen done, if there's anything blocking the back, for example, cheap, you could do a couple shots, one with the kid down or moved off to the side or even I've seen arm cutaways, cutaways if there's details there or something like that, right? So when it come turnarounds, there's a lot of options that we have here. Yeah. Another good point today is I was doing that moving turnaround. And one of the things I did is I kept wolverines structure and then I wanted to draw different variations of a suit. And so you can just do that in a separate layer. So you do as traditional EPA does, yellow and black. You could do the brown Sue or you can create your own Sue Yom API. Just play around with different things. There's a lot of fun. It's a great idea because, you know, a lot of our characters are walking around in suits. You just merely think draw them in their street clothes as well? Yeah, absolutely. And seeing that gets him in his cowboy hat and his plaid. Yeah. That'll be smart. As the way we're going to wrap up here. I really appreciate it All that you're teaching us here. I love the turnaround and I love that you did Captain creative for me, man. Oh man. I'm just grateful that you had me here. Thank you. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. It's cool. And for the students, here's your homework. I want you guys to do with character turnaround. I'm going to upload some of these turnarounds that Mike has done and that I've done. And then you can use them as a bit of a base to work off of. And let's see what characters you come up with. Have fun guys. 7. World Building the Ws: Okay guys, let's talk a little bit about world-building, right? What does that mean? Well, unless you're just doing pin-ups and having your character float on a transparent or whitespace. Chances are you want to immerse them in something, right? And that'll actually help flesh older character tons more. And how do you do that? Well, you build the world around them. So I approach it with the five W's. And I'm going to start with who and see if I can zoom in a little bit for us here. You know, who, who are the people that are surrounding your character at? These could be secondary characters or just background characters and kind of background noise, right? Is it a troop of soldiers at they're all in and you know, some of their names or something like that, right? Is it set with a bunch of eight people? Which would be cool, right? Is it a bunch of kids? And each care kid has characteristics or something I get even beyond the main characters, right? The antagonists can be a Boolean or something like that, right? Or the who could even be monsters, creatures, dinosaurs, anything like that, right? So that's why I think it's important to understand the who. Once you set the WHO in your story, you can really move on to the next step. And let's see if I shimmy on over here. The next one is the what? What is the, what? What kinda, what is the theme of the world, right? Is it a capitalistic money centered in New York City, dirt and grime, awesomeness type of thing? Or is it like Soviet Russia where people are scrambling to make ends meet, right? Is it a war zone? What is the main theme behind your world? Right? And if you can discover that theme, you can discover some of the motivations of your characters and how they react within that world. I think it's really important to discover what. Okay, So we're going to come down a little bit. And the next one is when, when can be funky to play with. You can do the breaking news, the current events, something, something that we experience and that kind of works because you get a lot of reaction. You know, people are like, Oh, what is this, what's going on and what's your take on it, right? You can look towards the past and it's can be sometimes easier because, you know, you've got kind of that hindsight 2020 where you can round things out. But we're also limited in our scope of understanding. We might not know some of the day-to-day details and stuff like that of back then, right? And I mean, like I'm talking about knights here, but we can go further back to prehistoric they use or whatever it is, right? So the UEN can be pretty important. You can jump to the future and say, well, if we're in a futuristic setting, let my imagination go wild. You know, I mean, what are some of the things that can be answered in the future? I think it's important and I think it's, could be very, very cool to explore. The next one is where? Where is your scope? It could be something small, like a classroom or an apartment. You can think of it like TV shows where friends, it's a two apartments in a coffee shop, right? You can broaden the scope to make it bigger into a new York City or something like that. You can broaden even more and make it into a country. Lots of comics that I've done, have done that. They're kinda based in a city or country, right? It's, it gives you a lot more scope to play with and everything, right? And now that we have Google Earth, I love it because I just searched out and can google those locations. It down the street view and really like flesh it out and say, Oh, this is what it looks like down there. I might have been two at once, but my memory is not that good and my pictures definitely aren't enough for me to draw off of sometimes, right. So, you know, if you're doing something in that scope, use some of the resources that are around you. And then you can back it way, way out and make it Planetary, extra terrestrial, right across the galaxy and you can create your own planet. So I think it's really important to explore the who, the, what, the, where, the when. And this one gets funky though. This is kinda stepping aside from world-building and getting into the why. Why should a reader pay any attention to your story? Why should a reader care? What similarities are you hoping to tap into? Whether it's futuristic, sci-fi or medieval or whatever. You want to tap into some of the base storylines that your fellow humans find interesting, right? So yeah, that's my advice for you. A quick little rundown of the questions you should be asking yourself when you're worldbuilding as yourself. Who, who populates this world? What's the theme of the world? And how does it impact all these characters, right? When does that matter? Write the time setting up at all. Where, whether it's a small school per big skull. But most important, why? Why should anybody care about your story? Take the time to really explore these and give yourself some answers. Just whether it's on this worksheet or whether it's on your notepad or whatever, go through them and make sure they're strong. So your comic book is even stronger. 8. Worldbuilding Architecture: Okay guys, So let's talk a little bit about worldbuilding. Now. There's a lot of different approaches to this. There's the mood. You know, like even within the concept of a world, you could have different cities with different vibes to it and stuff. I think of DC, how they did that with a Gotham and metropolis or something, right? So there's a lot of different ways you can go about approaching worldbuilding. But for me, the easiest place to start Is architecture. I love architecture, I love design and stuff. And so when I'm thinking of world-building, I think literally of building the world. There's other things that are going to go into this down the road as you get into character development and character turnarounds and stuff I get for primary and secondary characters. Uh, right now. What I wanna do is do a little bit of an exercise with you talking about design and architecture. Okay? So the first one we're going to look at here is modern American know. That's a funny little phrase. You know, I started sketching this piece out. Modern American. And the funny thing about modern American architecture is it's actually not that modern. I've lived all over the world and stuff for. And what I notice about modern American architecture is it's got this weird positioning of really, really modern. So we can have something like what I'm doing here. I'm just kinda doing like a bit of a glass panel tower where the glass, for example, here you can see the glass window panes go from floor to ceiling, right? You know, they go all the way up from Florida ceiling. So there might be this the floor in between so thin and the dividing lines between the the windows and stuff are thin enough that this gives the illusion that this entire tower, this entire building here is just a sheet of window or whatever. Okay, so that's one way to look at a kind of a modern glass tower. And of course, you know, like when you look at, for example, in New York, the new giant World Trade Center, like when I see it and it's reflected in clouds and it almost blends into the sky. It's, it's amazing, right? So use big glass panels. Sometimes show that more modern style of architecture. When it comes to older style of architecture is what you can do is use, Let's see if I zoom in just a little bit. I want to keep this loosened sketchy. And so I was kind of looking at this building here. You can use these kind of classic Victorian overhangs and stuff. I got, you know, like so the buildings here. And then you've got this, this rich that lines it and stuff. Okay? So you can do, and you can do like old bumps on it. You can do some patterning, that kind of thing. Just really isn't done very much anymore, right? That, that old stone work and stuff, right? So if you're gonna do modern American and I'm using kinda big air quotes here and stuff him. You want to have this juxtaposition of very modern and kinda turn of the century, last century, right? That's really American. They had that massive boom. Everything from a 100 years ago on. And it made America the powerhouse, right? So I digress a little bit, I'm getting off topic here, but I really want you to see that when we're talking about modern American, that architecture, both old and new, the brick versus the glass, the stonework versus the shine and stuff. I get the Chrome. That's really part of what you have to have in modern American design, right? Another thing that you can have is maybe stuff like, you know, I'm pointing down here billboards. You could have. I don't know. Happy face and Cola can and stuff I got right person gripping it and zinc whatever it is. You know, billboards in America. They like that advertising, right? Sometimes in certain neighborhoods in New York, you'll see like electronic tickers and stuff going across on buildings and stuff for him. Billboards, signage, signage in English, but for very diverse market. That's something to pay attention to an American design and stuff, right? Another big thing that I remember, even, you know, almost every second Spiderman cover had some type of water tower thing on the top of these buildings, right? And then they would also have these kinda like little domes on top, right? The dome on top, the water cooler or something, right? Maybe cables holding it down or in place and stuff. You can put a lot of what we call set dressing, do you I mean, a lot of these details. Right now we're looking up on most of these. The horizon line is somewhere around here, right? So now many buildings are below that horizon line that we get to see the roof. But what you would be able to do is put some I don't know. This is you put air conditioning units. You know, you could put. One thing that I noticed in New York was a lot of elevator toppings and stuff. You know, the elevator shaft has that extra gear house and stuff on top of the buildings, right? So putting those type of rooftop dressings in New York or in modern American type of thing, right? I think that goes a long way. I would really work on stuff like that, right? You know, you can put sporadic trees in the neighborhood and stuff like that. New York isn't an especially green city, but it's also not a 100 percent concrete. You know, I, I loved the city. Central Park is amazing. It's screen, but the rest of New York has trees here and fees in the corner and stuff I get there not necessarily everywhere, right. So I'd throw something like that. But one thing New York does have is those busy streets. So you can have like, you know, cars, buses, traffic jams, you know, some people on the street yelling at each other. You could have a lot of things happening, traffic going, which way, you know, you can have the traffic movement and stuff. Pedestrians crossing the street, street lights and stuff I get have that kind of signage and stuff, right? All of this will kind of help you set the mood for your world, right? If your world is New York City, then you want to have maybe a big tour bus going through, right? You want to have the naked cowboy standing here singing or something like that. Whatever it is, you want to grab some of these things. This is in Times Square that I'm drawing here, right? But I think you're getting my drift is new York has got tons of people walking along, tons of cars moving along. And you've got to show that business of the city. New York's got the hustle and bustle. That's what you want to put into the world, right? You know, you can even put like, I don't know, awnings. Like I said, this is part of the signage and stuff. I got people walking up and down the sidewalk. Okay. Regionally, New York's got bench sections and stuff, so you can throw that in there too, with little windy paths through them and stuff. But what New York does have compared to some of the more modern cities that are really planned out that I've been to is these kind of irregular sidewalks. So like a lot of cities you'll see are laid out in a grid pattern, right? You know, the roads all run north, south, east, west or whatever, right? And so buildings, buildings, buildings, buildings, buildings, this type of thing, right? And then more roads and stuff. Again. New York has got a lot of irregular roadways. So you'll get a, you'll get a straight one. And then you will also like what we're kinda looking down at here is you'll get a road coming off this way. So what they'll do is they'll put a little plaza in here or maybe even a side road or something like that. They'll put a building here and then buildings like this and buildings will then run. And you don't maybe there's an inside street or a back alley and stuff I get. And so the roads can run this way. So if you're gonna do modern American, unfortunately, part of that is not the greatest strategy and design because these modern Americans, and again, I'm using Qj air quotes here, have been around, in some cases for over a 100 years, these massive cities and stuff, right? So keep that in mind that yes, it's modern. Yes, it's new. But only parts of it. Some of these streets, you know, our a 100 years old, some of these systems are really old and stuff I get. So you can really contrast that by these nice modern skyscrapers that are all glass. And then next to it have those brown stones, right? Okay, So keep in mind, when we're looking at world-building, you're looking at four or five design hits that will really help people recognize where the characters are set, okay, where this entire story is set, right? So we're gonna do this for a few different ones. I kinda took that same sketch and brought it over here, right? And I was thinking, won't. Let's refine this a little bit, right? Let's, let's kinda design something different, but using the same general block that we've got, we're going to keep the same block that I sketched out and see if we can do something different year and I haven't gotten anything yet. So let's see how this goes. For futuristic city. One thing that I like is transportation, right? So you can have like flying cars. I don't know. I'm doing Jetson stuff, right? Flying buses even or transport trains that are flying. If you don't want to go flying, you could do is have like above ground. I'm platforms and stuff and you can have them, you know, New York's already got this actually, but you can have them like really raised in a, in a funky way that they're not interfering with anything. You know, there's kind of a presumption in the future they get better technology with materials and stuff I get. So you can have and have them higher, have them coming around the city and stuff like that. And you can have like for example, a bullet train type of thing that's whizzing along here, right? The bullet train whizzing along up here, something along those lines, right? So you want to look at transportation. Maybe in the future, we're off the ground, right? Instead people are taking these and, and that kinda thing, right? Maybe on the ground instead. They can have like beautiful pawns or something like that. Like these gorgeous pawns that have like fountains or something. They can have a lot of different design. There could be walkways around, maybe an elevated area here that people can sit and watch what's going on. Things happening in this pond or something, right? You can play with a lot. You can play with the architecture for some reason with futuristic stuff. We often think of it as kinda round and smooth and flowing, right? Because we're presuming that the I guess the construction materials are a little bit better, right. So what you could have as the building that's on the corner here, it can kinda flow up like this, right? You know, it can have this interesting design and flows like this. And you know, there could be Windows, but they don't look like our normal Windows. You know, we're kind of guessing here, right? The point is to start to play with it a lot, right? You're going to have instead of something like this, you could have I'm domed areas or something, right? And like that kind of bubble out and just have a bit of a different design to it where the glass is looking more like. I'm starting to draw the state Hoffman here a little bit. But it's looking more like an observatory or something like that, right? And then, you know, it's coming out. You're going to have futuristic self-driving car ports or something in the front or something like that. You know, you can have them up here instead. You're going to have, for example, a bit of a launch platform where maybe there's the ears, these flying cars that are parked and stuff I got, right. And again, you can get funkier with some of the designs and stuff, right? They can get a lot more fluid or something, right? Or they can get really rigid. This one here shown, it can be like almost like jutting up, right? And it can be something like that, right? You can really start to play with the designs. You can play with inside of the design. You can do kind of a swirl, right? You can do a whole bunch of different things here with how the designs flow in these new modern cities. Okay? So I would say, you know, with future work on transport, how would they get around? How does that impact some of the architecture? Realize that maybe the materials are a lot more flexible artistically. So you can play with them a lot. You can put more water spaces or green spaces or something like that. You know, I guess I could color something green here just to give that effect. But it doesn't have to be how we think everything is concrete in a city and stuff, right? Another thing that you could do is, I have seen a bunch of times, you know. So here's the building and then there can be this projection of maybe a hologram or something, right? And you can, obviously with a sketch, the hologram is going to look fantastic. But I think you get what I mean is like you can have this digital hologram, these projections. This could be like a banner ticker of different numbers, right? And it's just constantly scrolling around this building or something like that. Alright? So that's the thing with, with the future. The whole point of it is we don't know, right? But you can start to guess. You can riff off a little bit of what we've got already and where we were in the past and just say, Okay, well, how would the future tackle some of these? How would the future tackled transportation? How would the future tackle advertising? You know, how the future tackle leisure, how the people live, work, get to work, all those types of things that modern cities we still deal with, right? Of course, they're going to be dealing with that in the future, right? So that's one way to approach it is just play with it, see what you can come up with for a futuristic city. I hope that you guys are kinda playing along a little bit here, that you're, whether it's on a sketchpad or something like that, you're trying to say, Oh, you know what? It doesn't even have to be drawn. You can just write notes. In a futuristic city. I want everybody to have jetpacks. Cool. Well then maybe there needs to be more platforms where people can just fly into their office. You know, those types of things where you put stuff like that in there. Whether it's in your notes, if you're a writer or if you're an artist, you know, start sketching them out. Let's see. Okay, what was the next one? Not modern American. I'm going down to Asian influenced. Okay. Let's see what some Asian influence. I lived in Asia for almost 20 years and I got to say, age is a big place. It's not one country, There's lots of different cultures there, right? So like I kinda bothers me even just kinda thing of how can I encapsulate this in one unit? There are certain things that you could do. For example, roof design. I think almost everybody starts to recognize Asian rooftops, right? So what you can do is you start to have the, the uptick in on the edges here, right? You start to have the little upticks, right? You can have raised sections above it, right? Okay. That kind of lend to that Asian atmosphere. You can have. If you want, you can actually stagger that and have it at different points throughout the building. Hey, this is kinda coming up here. So you can have those types of things. So even though it's a semi modern building, you can get these really funky rooftops. Let's see if I can maybe do something. I don't really like this in perspective necessarily right now. But something like this, like a bit of a fan. A fan works. Okay. And it can play out a few, few different at a few different levels. It can even play out on the street level. You can come around the building if you want it that way. Right? Okay. I would really experiment, experiment with a lot of different roof types, right? You know, like it doesn't have to be this swing up. Instead, it could just be like this. And it's, like I said, I lived in a few different Asian countries and stuff. And there are variations in architecture from Korea to Japan, to China, to Southeast Asians stuff, There's a lot of differences, right? So play with it. But really, in my opinion, rooftops or an awesome way to really give a very Asian vibe to a city. Okay. That's one. Another one that I would say is courtyards. This is a little bit tougher because the way that this current building block and stuff is designed. But you know, you could have in front of each building a priority for a courtyard, right? And in that courtyard, you can have a walking paths. You could have trees, you could have a pond, you could have different things. And listen, I, this is starting to get really stereotypical and I kind of bothers me to get, get that stereotypical, but I'm just kinda thrown options here to say, if you want to have courtyards, this what you can do, you can put the courtyards actually on top the roof. Jeremy know that that's pretty funky, right? From this, the way I've sketched this one out that I'm using, you won't be able to see that, but it doesn't have to be a courtyard down on street level, right? In fact, I kinda don't like it down there. I would change it up. Okay. The other thing about maybe some design things as I've noticed, like window patterns in Asia, especially older Asian buildings and stuff. I guess we'll have very specific patterning to their windows and stuff. So there'll be something like this. Or they could be row upon row like this. But they're kinda, they're framed within the building itself. So something along those lines, right? So you can have that with ornaments to it and stuff, I guess kinda shutter systems and stuff. Closing shutter systems, front doors could be, you know, you can emphasize the nature of the sliding doors and stuff, right? Maybe the heavy wood frames to them and how they slide, right? So you can do something like that. So windows and doors, or another architectural cue that I think you could grab onto. There's tons of stuff. For me. Street decorations are a big one. You can have. These strings are lines going back and forth with lanterns hanging off of them and stuff. You know, you're gonna have all that kinda stuff. This just lens to this kind of Hong Kong feel like. So I lived in Hong Kong for a few years and, and I, I kinda hesitate to put this in here, but like, you know. Some Hong Kong neighborhoods were the richest I've ever been in. But others, sometimes you'd see like, it's kinda hard to draw at this point, but like you'd see, here's all the windows and stuff and then you'd see the laundry hanging, Hilton air conditioning units hanging over the windows and, you know, shirts flapping and laundry lines going across and there could be shirts hanging and stuff like that, right. Okay. So usually it wasn't this big of a spread though the buildings were close together, but I would do something like that. Depending on the economic status of what you're trying to show in the city. Another thing that's huge in Asia and of course any, in any modern city. But, you know, advertising, but it's usually a little bit more company based, not so much message like often you'll get, like, for example up here will be just like Samsung, right? You know, like it'll be a company logo. And actually that company maybe had a construction arm that actually built that building or something like that. So you'll see a lot of the larger corporations tagged all over the buildings and stuff I get. So you can have like writing and a no. Because that's him some some YG's my Korean second now, yeah, I mean, you could write it in in their language and please look it up. I should look up Samsung right now. Doesn't mean, you know, do that kinda stuff, do the research because if you don't want someone who's going to ding you on it, right? And don't follow what I'm doing here. I'm just drawing it on the fly. But using some of those language hints and stuff I got in the signage, I think that's a smart thing to do. I think that would be helpful to, you know, you see Japanese writing. Where do you figure you are? And the last thing, a little bit of iconography. A little bit. I mean like so if it, if it's, if we're thinking of European things, we might put a on gargoyles, on an edge here like this. But some of the, the Asian temples have been too, will have a series of monkeys or something like that. You know, looking off the edge with their little tails and stuff, you know. So you can use monkeys, lions, It depends what you're trying to look for and stuff. But those kind of little hints will help show the viewer. They're in an Asian setting, right? Okay, Let's see. We've got another one I want to go into. What Condon will kinda horrible, horrible, sorry. I really love that movie though. This one's tough because the only hints we have of Wakanda are things we've seen in comics and on a big screen recently, right? So how do we deal with it? We don't, other than researching in the comics, which you should do. But it's hard sometimes to flesh out these fictional places and stuff. You have to riff off of what other artists before you have done, right? So you can take some hints of what they've done and you can add your own a little bit, right? But once again, you know, sometimes we look at the basic structures of things. How do people get around? Well, maybe there's a train system that goes through one building to another building and out this way or something something along those lines, you know, it's an elevated train system and stuff. I remember that from the movie. They had that cool train system that was powered by Condon stuff by bringing up blinking here. So we'll look at transportation. Is it going to be above ground? Is it going to be on street level? Is going to be in the sky, you know, is going to be building level. How do you want to approach? It? Could be on the top of buildings. Maybe the bridges go from rooftop to rooftop. And there's stations on those rooftops or something, right? And that's, that's how the nation gets around. Or the citizens of the city. They get around by train or something, right? Already. This is kinda looking a little bit cool, right? What else? You know, what I liked with some of the lower street scenes where you had these kinda, you know, tense sticking out and stuff like that, right? So you can have these tense popped up on the street. And vendors with stalls, they're selling fruits, people are walking by and stuff like that. A lot of people are walking. And you've got all these, you've got these buildings, but attached to them are all these little awnings and everything sticking out into the street where it eventually gets covered. And you get people walking out into, like I said, fruit stalls or textiles, whatever they could be in suffering. This is an horrible jumbled because I'm just kinda sketching it out, but That's something that I really enjoyed, how they brought that to life in the movie and stuff. And so you could do something like that for cotton architecture. Architecture is the buildings, but it's also the set dressing that's all around it. So what I notice about what architecture was also, usually they had this kind of buildup. So at, at, at a certain level, like I'm not going to go off to this side. But they had these kinda like almost steam punk columns like there is a certain hard industrial nature to a lot of Wakanda and architecture and stuff, right? So you can get this really almost Railroad steam punk type of thing with rivets and everything is, the building grows and then it grows over top of that and grows up into the sky or something, right? Something else that I know the designers did was they, when they denoted the levels of the floors and stuff again, they also made it a little harsh looking. They had these kinda what looked like spikes coming out. But I don't think they were necessarily supposed to be offensive or defensive in their nature, anything like that. I think it was almost like a homage to certain like African shields and stuff I got. That's what it reminded me of the patterning of some of these these panels and stuff, right? That it reminded me of, of that type of things. So when we're talking about architecture, and we've already, we've talked about character design and stuff like that. They're not so far apart. You can take some of the designs like, for example, you're looking at a tapestry work in, in Middle Africa or something like that. And you can have some of that tapestry flowing here and stuff I get in between the buildings and stuff, right? You can have some of that nice little flow and how it wraps around things like it comes off of here and maybe wraps and his pin down and it comes as a ribbon or something like that, right? So yes, you want to study architecture. You want to start that buildings in that. But you can look towards weaponry. You can look towards fashion, whatever it is to try to achieve the look of what you're going for. So speaking of weapons, you know, one of the big things was the power shield, right? And we can kind of build it across. But actually, if I remember, wasn't it shaped like this? They're kinda hexagon or something like that. I'm trying to remember exactly what it was. Not messing this up. But maybe something along these lines, right? And so you can throw in these types of shapes just hinted in the background to kind of give the what Condon flavor of this massive shield that's protecting all of its citizens, right? So of course, you know, that shield would be in the background as we have these beautiful condon. Maybe I can inspire all that up a little bit more. We'll conduct buildings growing up here, right? Okay. So you can do stuff like this that I want to make this a bit more industrial hearing. There we go. Right? It kinda looks like a bit of a fourt going on there. Okay. My point is what you really want to do is find anywhere from five to 10 really key things that we'll denote lead. This is where the viewer is seen that they're seeing Tokyo or they're seeing Moscow, or they're seeing Moscow 50 years ago where they are seeing Moscow or a 100 years from now. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to send you this sheet minus all my notes on it and stuff, right? And you can take some of my notes and kinda riff off of that and just kinda draw the futuristic city and kind of copy and follow along with me. Or what I'd really like you to do is draw it on your own, right? It doesn't have to. Some of you guys that are taking this course, you're not artists and stuff. You're doing it because you're creators. But that's the fun of this, is, you know, get creating. You a little bit of research. You've got Google at your fingertips and stuff I get. Or neighbor, if you're in career and start to research and say, okay, well, what is Asian to me when I look at these cities, what are the five key features that really popped to me? Okay. And now, after you've done futuristic, maybe a lesion will Condon whenever you can add two more. Do one, that's nature. What if it was any walk village? You know, 10 thousand years more advanced? What if it was an alien city? Are they not grounded on the ground like we are the I mean, it does gravity not work the same? Maybe they still need transportation. They still need where to live and work. But how would that change things, right? So that's what this unit is about, is taking the architecture, the buildings, the structure, the street dressing, all of these kind of things. And saying, well, can we set the world for where our characters are going to inhabit? And if you've done it right, then you've created something magical. People know where everything is set and they get invested in it. Hey guys, you got your homework yet, have you do the ones that I already did, but try to do some extra ones and stuff like I said, nature, alien or something you come up with. Okay. And you know, what I'd love is if you send them my way, that would make me so happy to see somebody sketches, I think it'd be awesome. So get to it. 9. Script types: Hey guys, we're back and we've got another how to make comics unit for you here. This time, we're going to kinda get away from the figures and the action and get back to the basics of it, the script. Now listen, I've talked to you before and I'm not here to teach how to write a sentence or anything like that. But what I am going to show you here is a little bit of difference in approach to how some comic book scripts are written. Okay, so let's take a look on the left. Here. On the left is what we have. That looks kinda easy. This is one of my favorites. It's the simplified or Marvel method. Okay? And it became famous called the Marvel method for being used back in the days where early creators would just say, Hey, this is what I want on the page. And they would jot down a couple bullets and the artist had a lot of leeway. Okay, so we can see, Let's take a look at this simplified Marvel method. We've got page for panel 1, the Fantastic Four arrive at dooms castle. Simple. And I'll do they enter but are met by doom bots. Okay. Panel 3, the doom bought seemed to be overwhelming them. And panel for Dr. Doom enters and starts to gloat. Wow. All right. Okay, so we can all picture this in our, in our minds, right? Like it's, it's pretty clear but kind of not vague. You know, we we hit the beats, we hit the points, right? But it puts a lot on the artist for good and bad. You know, when we send this off to an artist, the artist has a lot of wiggle room. You know, a lot of wiggle room in, in the flow and how dynamics some of these panels are going to be, how impactful this page could be. And even some of the design choices, right? You know, they, do. They look back and see, okay, well how was dooms castle design before, you know, a good artist does that, or maybe a great artist starts to tweak it. Alright. So you're giving a lot of room in this type of approach. In the Marvel method, it gives a lot, a lot of room to the artist. A different approach would be a more detailed method, right? And so you can see we can actually kinda go through this together a little bit. We've got page for panel 1, setting dooms Castle in. Now where is it? It's inland area. Okay. See, you didn't even recognize it. Right? Okay. So now that shows a little bit of the location, right? It's not just dooms castle anywhere, but it's in his home country. And this is where you can get even more descriptive, right? So if we want to, we can start to put the setting in and say nighttime. Right? The first one, really put this in here. So now I'm doing time a date, right? It's, it's nighttime. Castle is old European. I should spell here. There we go. Is old European style. Set on a cliff. Good. Okay, so now we've got the setting, right. Continuing in panel one, the Fantastic Four arrive at the castle. Johnny Storm is flying in flame form. But the rest are again, new shuttle designed by greed. So even here, you know, if in this more detailed method we can give a lot of leeway to the artist. And so right now, we've given them time to play that they could design this new shuttle, right? But we're still kinda catching it within a lot of details, right? What else? What, what, what we might put here? Mood a little bit. We've got the time of day, right? The castle is lit by ominous for voting. For voting, lighting. Cool. So you can see how we're starting to get into a more novel approach. Novel was an unique, but rather we're starting to really write details out here. I've seen it done both ways, actually to have seen hybrids and I've seen it like. Bullet points. I've seen all different types of ways that people have put a script forward. I'm not telling you which one to do. If you're the writer, you're going to do what you feel comfortable with. But I'm going to say that when it comes to these types of projects, if you're having anybody working with you wanted, communication is key, right? So if you're constantly finding like lead, the artist is not meeting your expectations. For example, then you gotta put more details in the script. You've gotta put, maybe even if you wanna do the Marvel method, you've gotta put like little side notes or something like that. Or if you're the artist and you're getting scripts and you feel a little bit to hedged in on them or something, you know, voice it and saying, Hey, is it okay if I have a little bit of freedom in this area or that, or something, right? So you can see like right now we've got panel one. It's kind of bumping up on me there. Right. There we go. It's detailed. Right. That's just panel one. So we can, you know, the writing is way more intense than this marvel method. And it can get even worse. You know, I'm not a very wordy person. I talked a lot, as you can tell, right? But I don't necessarily love typing it all out. There's a lot of great, great writers out there. And when I read some of their scripts, I'm blown away. It's, it's literally like reading a novel. The question is, does it convey what you're trying to get across to the person you're communicating it to. Most people won't ever read these scripts. They don't see the backend of this production, right? So this is between the writer and the artist. And you have to make sure that you're conveying all the points that you need before it gets too deep into it. Like for example, if, you know, if it's important that panel to they enter from the south side, right? For some strange reason. Panel two, the FF enter from the south side of the castle. You know, maybe this right now it doesn't make any sense, right? But, but down the story, it, it will make sense. They had two. This will become part of the plot as the story progresses or something like that, right? So if you don't put that in, the artist doesn't make any note of it. And now all of a sudden, two pages later when they're referencing the south entrance or something like that, you have to go back and change the artwork or something, right? So again, my main point with all of this is whether you choose the Marvel method, whether it's a more detailed method. The point is that it's clear communication. I have my preferences and you're going to have yours. But when we're communicating with others, we have to take them into account as well, right? So be sure to take the time and find what style works for you. Not just for you as a creative individual, but for you as a communicator. Okay guys, Good luck. 10. Scripts part2 with Steve Colle: Hey guys, we're back and I've got another unit for you here and how to make comics. This time we're focusing on writing. And I know I'm, I'm not the strongest writer out there. But that's why I've got a friend. I brought Steve Cole here to give me a head. Now Steve's got third over 30 years of experience in publishing, editing, and educating, especially in this particular category about how to write comic books. So Steve's been, you know, he's great. He's coming here to give us a hand so that we can understand how to. 11. Composition: Okay guys, we're back with another unit for our how to make comics course. This time, we're taking a look at the composition. Yes, I can feel the excitement. Now listen, you could go to art school and take years upon years of studying this. And would it be worth it? I don't know. It's hard to say. Maybe yes, maybe no. But we don't have years for this course, not the one we're working in, right? So instead, what I'm gonna do is break down a few techniques for you and then see what kinda seems to be easiest and you can find what works for you. Before we get into that though, let's get into this. What is composition? I think the simplest definition, the most concise one is the one I've got up here. It is the arrangement of elements that is pleasing to the human eye. Simple, right? This is where we can get really deep into it and talk about the biology and chemistry of how our eyes perceive something. And then send those transmissions to our brains. And then we analyze it. Look for familiarity, look for recognizable patterns and stuff like that. Or we just kinda leave it and say, that's pleasing to the human eye. I think that's where we're going to have it. So let's let's keep it at that for now. Okay? And let's take a look at a few different approaches to this. The first one here is one that's touted by many and art scholar teacher is the golden ratio. And what you're going to see is this is a mathematical ratio that is often used in a lot of classical paintings. It's this dividing a rectangle by one to 1.608 and stuff and then dividing it again and then dividing it again, dividing in upon itself. And then you've got this kinda swirling focus, right? It's okay. It seems to be a little forced in my mind, but the people that have studied it have found legitimate applications for it. And I don't know, this is where it gets weird because they said, you know, I've seen lots of studies where they recognize this one to 1.618 ratio, this golden ratio in nature, that it repeats itself again and again and again. And I've looked into it and it makes sense. But I also think it's, it's a case of us kind of like casting ourselves into nature, our vision and stuff again. So I always come back to it as like listened. The easy thing is just how it looks to us. All right? And I don't think it has to be that much more complex. This other one is the rule of thirds, where we divide a rectangle into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. In this one, what we'll try to do is put a focal point of our piece on an interests, on a horizontal and vertical intersection. Okay. So you can put it on any one of them that you want here. It's your choice. And one kinda cool thing as well as you can. Maybe if there's any vertical or horizontal structure, you might want to position it along one of these lines and that just gives an added little oomph to it, right? Okay. I kinda drew those ones in already. This other one is a pyramid structure. What you're going to see often in this pyramid structure is something along these lines. You're going to see a pyramid. What this pyramid does, generally speaking, is pull the focus to a certain point, right? So you can have like a focal point here, a focal point here, and then a focal point here. And all things lead in these directions type of thing, right? I gotta be honest here. I kinda don't care which strategy you use, what compositional strategy you employ. It's really up to you, like you can make your own eye. I've seen a lot of people do this kind of like spiral showcase type of thing, right? Where you've got a focal point, focal point, focal point of focal point, and then a focal point here. And there's directional indicators that kinda move you in this way, like clouds or something. I was just talking with somebody about a piece like this, right? So you can have this kind of seashell spiral type of thing. It doesn't not gonna say it doesn't matter because I think when you really get deeper into this, it will matter. But what matters most in my opinion, is that you have a strategy, that you have something in mind when you're doing all this right, that you're focused on. How you're composing your piece right? Now. Why you're composing in a certain way? That's kinda up to you and what you're trying to achieve with that piece, right? So here's an example, here's a little rectangle. And so I'm going to do, do the rule of thirds kind of bisected. And I'm going to put like a little dude sitting badly, sitting on this thing, reading a comic book, right? Okay. So when it's a hill, sitting on a hillside and you know what, I can even put something here and then the mountains in the background or something like that. The sun behind them, something like that, right? The main focus of this will be his face. Now if I wanted to change it and have the main focus of the book, well, you know, I could do that. I could have switched it up and lay it out. Right? And what would I do? I could say I could have the book here. Oops, let's switch to black. You have the book here, have a sands, and actually is face could go here. And how cool is that now? Now i've, I've got his body on two of the intersection, more focus points, right. So that actually that might work out even better for what I'm trying to achieve here, right? Again, it's developing a strategy. You could do this also for like a landscape rim. So, you know, divide, divide and I'm taking this rule of thirds kids hits the easiest one to divide on the fly. In my opinion, like I find it super easy, right? So let's say I want a windmill. Now I can put the windmill here. And forgive me. I can't say the last, if I've ever drawn a windmill on my life and I can use, I can use this, this vertical line as, as kind of a focus point here. Right? So I've got this intersecting line here as part of it. I've got this and I could, if I want to, I can kinda put mountains in the background and they kinda work this way too. I can put some, some rocks to balance it out here or something like that. Alright. Okay. You can do that as well for like a close-up shot. You're going to have somebody's face here. Maybe, you know, they're looking down or something. I actually move this. If I was to do it again, I'd have it like this. And so their their eyes that is right on this point here, right? I'm making an ugly Cyclopes going on here, right? And then he's coming off screen and maybe have the word bubble up here, right? Something along those lines. Okay. My main point in all of this, all of my ugly little drawings and stuff I get and my cramming years of art school lessons into something like this is not to belittle the time people have taken into doing and constructing smart compositional strategies. But rather just to say to you, Hey, Think about it, what are you trying to do? If you're trying to bring the reader's eye from here to here, how are you going to do it? Are you going to lay it out this way where you have something here that leads to something here and there leads off page, you know, one of the biggest mistakes I see is that somebody lays out something to just look kind of cool and pieced it together and whatever, and just threw it on the page. And there wasn't a strategy in this. So if there's one takeaway from this nice and short and concise unit. It's to put some focus into this in your layouts before you lay it all down, before you start to render, before you do any of that. Think of how are you going to compose it and why you're doing it that way? That's it. Just take a pause for the cost before you get too deep into it. And you could choose one of these compositional strategies that have laid out here, or kind of create one on your own, whatever works for whatever P2 doing. Just put thought into it. That's it guys. Want to have fun with it. 12. Composition exercise: Hey guys, another little unit I wanted to talk about. Not so much a unit, but an exercise that I do sometimes that I thought you would appreciate was taking a look at movies. Yeah, that's gonna be my homework assignment for you to go and watch whole bunch movies. Well, almost actually what I want you to do, whether you're looking at it for storyboarding or composition. I want you to take a look at some of your favorite shows and movies and just see how they break down a scene. Now, when directors do it in a movie, you know, they're limited in their aspect ratio. You joined me like they're projecting it horizontally on a screen type of thing. And that's what they have to play with. As comic book artists were allowed to play a lot with panel variation as you know. But even with that in mind, I think it's important to take a look at how they do that. So because of copyright issues and stuff, I kinda, I'm just using this free movie on YouTube and stuff, right? But we're only going to use it for 110 seconds, so it doesn't really matter anyways. So I want you to take a look at this one I had Jack's, right. And we're just going to play a little bit. Guy observing a farmhouse down in the bottom there, we see one scene switches to a close up that obscures his face because of the stupid dust. Right? Do down there yelling at the boy to help them with a bag. Bag drops, coins, follow you. It gives a big reaction. Kid looks up and says, Oh down, and there we go. Okay, so hope was that death is an uneven like, I don't know, ten seconds. So if we were to look at that for us, how we would break it down into those shots. I took a little screen captures and I said, Okay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, we've got seven shots here. We're going to establishing panel. Although I don't really love it. This establishing shot shows maybe this is the village down below are little homesteader, whatever it is, we've got our character. You don't get a good view of, but maybe he's already been introduced previously in the story, right? We've got a close-up shot for him that's weirdly obscured. Then we've got this interaction. We've got these kind of medium shots. Waist high on this, right? We dropped down into the money shot. Sorry, dad, joke. Over into the look of disappointment and I'm in trouble. Look, rep, interesting storytelling. We could see that they didn't go extreme close-up on any of these shots. The only one that might even be semi-closed to a close-up is this is the money shot, right? The rest of them are either medium shots, establishing shots, or general close-ups right? On these two here. So for framing, this is an interesting exercise for composition. You'll see almost all of these characters are within the middle of the frame. Here. Jeremy, nothing, nothing's going on, way off to the sides here and stuff I got except for here. This one leads the eye this way and then drops down into the money. I thought that was kinda interesting. That's an interesting choice, right? You also obviously get the interaction between him looking left and him looking right. This is the exchange, right? So listen, there's more exciting movies out there. I know I just picked this was this one because it was free on YouTube type of thing, right? Take a look. Take this as an exercise, and look through some of your favorite movies or just ones that you can handle. Sitting in front of it for a long time and breaking down like this, right? You'll watch the whole thing. That's not your homework, Simon, what I would like you to do is just catch one scene like this where you get shifts in camera. Within this one scene, it could be a half dozen, could be a dozen, could be 20. And often you'll find them bouncing back and forth to the same shot, right? And just see what the director is doing with this. And then think, how would you do it different if you were to tell this story? I like this shot. I kinda like this shot. I think I'd show them a little bit more in this establishing shot though. If this was me at the beginning of the story, I make the homestead a little bit more clearer, more recognizable, and then I'd make something recognizable down here and stuff for him. Anything else? I might zoom in on this one here, like if this was my directing, I I zoom in on this shot of fear or something, right? But it depends what he wants to emphasize with the storytelling, right? So take a look at how the director is choosing those shots, those compositional strategies and stuff. And then think to yourself, how would you do it? What would you do different. You can even do something like that's just screenshotted a little bit and then start to reposition things, move things around, you know, put it wherever you want to put it so that you can tell a little bit of a story. Yeah, and this is, this is where it all begins, right? This is understanding storytelling. Okay? Hope that exercise helps you out and you know what, send it to me. I'd love to see it. I'd love to see some examples of you breaking down these the storytelling shots. 13. Panels: Hey guys, we're back with another how to make comics unit here. This time we're talking about panels on, yeah, as you can see, you've got a whole bunch of panels laid out here. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how you can construct panels, or the different types of panels that you'll sometimes see in comic books, right? So this is not about Panel flow from one panel to another. That's, we're going to talk about that in another unit. This is about just kind of the shape of the panels, right? So you can do a panel like, you know, you can do rectangle, horizontal rectangle, vertical rectangle, just a square, right? Whatever kind of works for you. And this is what I'm kinda showing here first is like this is just a simple panel. We've got just a basic square. But you notice, I got it laid out three times here. There's basic square, right? So why is that? What's the difference? Well, Border weight, right? Now, listen, Border Weight can do two things. One, it's a stylistic choice. Throat your comic, you can have just big clunky borders through your entire comic. And that's cool. That's your choice. That's the vibe you want to give off, right? Or you can vary it within a comic and to give emphasis to certain, you know, certain panels, right? So I don't know what do I have here? This first one was maybe a six and then I think I've bounced to a 10 and then maybe this is like a 20 or something like that, right? And you can tell where does the ego, the eye is drawn to that heavy Border weight, right? So keep in mind that the thickness of the border can be used to your advantage, right? You can draw the person's eye to it, to the reader's eye. Another thing is about variation of shape, right? You can have some rounding in the borders if you want, you know, does nicer rounding and stuff gives kind of a softer feel to it. And if you really want to go soft, you've got this weird Hello thing. I've seen this used for a kind of flashbacks and stuff for him on this, this rounding gives me almost classic TV feel. So I've actually used that when showing TV screens. You don't like a panel will pop up and it's a news item, something going on in the world in that comic or whatever and stuff. And I will round the edges of that panel and give it that TV vibe, right? The pillow. I'm actually never used it, but I've seen it used in dream sequences and stuff, right? Or flashbacks. And then we've got this nice jagged kind of border, right? And you can see that you can use like irregular lines on it. You can, if you want to really step into it and start to thicken it out in places if you want, right? There's so much fun you can have with it. But keep in mind that like, what's the mood here? If we go from, if we've got a comic, basically that's all these simple panels and stuff. Again, it gives a nice simple flow. The focus is maybe the dialogue or the action that's being contained within, right? When we start having these jagged panels that catches the eye a lot. And that's okay. I just want you to know to do it with intent, right? Another thing that you'll find is that you can have irregular shapes to the, to the panels, right? Instead of just a plain old rectangle, you can start to angle it, right. And this will, we'll talk about this a little bit more in panel directional flow, right? Because it starts to move you in a certain direction. But it's a cool way to have a panel break. You can have this rectangle and just cut it this way in and break that panel so you can still have the movement coming across, right? And also you can go into panel overlapping, right? You can rectangles within rectangles. Careful how I wouldn't go more than just once, but you could definitely overlap, overlap, overlap as you can go, right? One that I can't really draw here. But I can kind of write it as a full bleed. This full bleed panel. It's basically covers, but you can also do it within the pages and stuff again, is there is no border boundary. It just bleeds off the page. So you can have this if this is your page, you know, you might have a panel, another panel and then this whole background, the rest of it is just a full bleed panel, right? And that's pretty cool. Like this panel panelists could be a person's face and other person's face, they're having a dialogue. And then here's the setting of the dialogue and stuff like that. I didn't, you know, you can use it that way. All right. I've seen some creative things done with panels. I've seen it done that. You know, the panels actually defined by like I've seen some some buildings built into it. All right? And this kinda defines the panel. Maybe a character is falling off or something like that and it's half open and then have contained within the structures of the buildings. I've also seen stuff like, you know, and this touches on a panel breaks, but it's kind of not the the building itself creates part of the panel or something like that. You can have, it's things like that. There's a lot of things you could do with panels here. The point that I wanted to emphasize when really looking at this is that line weight brings emphasis. Standard versus irregular will bring attention. And cutting it can actually help add to your flow. Whether it's making it soft like a full bleed, that it has almost no flow to it. You have to have the flow within the panel or whether you are bounding it with some of the images and stuff like that. It's your choice. Just be sure to have some intent and strategy behind it. You know, don't just randomly lay it out. Say, well, what is the message I'm trying to convey with on this page, with these panels. Is this just a simple dialogue page? So I can kinda get symbol with the panels, right? Is something amazing happening here. Some massive action scene that I need to show energy with. Well, maybe you can do that with the panels to write. Just don't get stuck. Basically, don't get boxed in by your panels. You're the master of them. So make sure you show that. 14. Panel Flow: Okay guys, we're back with another how to make comics unit. This one is about Panel flow. Now, grab your coffee or whatever it is you need because this one might take a little bit. There's a lot of things at play here, and I think they're all really, really important. And so this might take a little bit, might be a little bit longer than some of the previous units. And that's okay. Yeah. Okay, so the first one we're gonna talk about here is some of the basics that we run into. Okay? So now I've lived in a lot of countries in different continents and stuff. But I'm addressing this mostly for the Western world. Big air quotes there. And in that case, how we look at a basic page is we read it from left to right. It's actually like we might start here and end up somewhere here, right? So we either move it along this way, keep moving it along, move it along, move it along, move along. Or we are, I generally starts up here, moves itself down here, and we're on to the next page. So we're going with that Western premise of reading left to right and Kim, and of course, if you're working in a, in a different pattern, just reverse kinda every year, right? Okay, So with that in mind, one of the easiest pages that we can lay out with panels is what's called the Z flow, right? So you're going to find it goes from left to right, Starts again to write, starts again to right. Okay? So you can see how this has got this z type of formation, right? So that the brain, again left to right standard format that we're using wants to read it from left to right, and then it will restart itself and go across right. I don't think this is surprising anybody at this point. This is pretty simple, especially when we're looking at this nine panel per page flow. Even if you do it like whether it's three panels, whether it's six, nice and even you're going to have this kind of flow, right? Okay, where it gets a little bit more complex is when we have something like this. Because you're wondering, do people go this way or do people go this way? We start here in this panel, right? Uh, which direction do they usually go? Now listen, there's actually been studies on this and they've tracked people's eyes and stuff like that. And it's really kind of fascinating. I don't think I'm going to post up all the university studies. But there were pretty cool. I was starting to look into it. And with all things being equal, meaning, you know, the borders were all the same thickness and all those kind of things, right? In this case, about 90 percent would move down first and only about 10 percent would move this way first. So this is 90 and this is ten. Again, that's with all things being equal. We'll talk about some things that can mess with the flow. But if we're just looking at what we've got in front of us right now. Just this page of general flow. Then we're going to have most people going one. Let's try that again. 1, 2, 3 at the start of this. Okay? Now, that can change a little bit depending on the sizing and stuff. And we'll get into some things that make it look a little bit different. Like basically, if we're looking at a panel that's all these similar sizes and stuff where there's no overlapping going down here. That type of thing where there's no overlapping going down here. Then it will go 123. When we start to get overlapping, then you can get a little weird. So that's not what's happening here again, what I did was actually made it like this. In this second one, we will get into another page where we find out what blockages, right? But in this one we'll go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the way most people who'd go without any interference or anything. Okay. So just realized that usually, even though we want to move this way, when we move this way, find it uncomfortable to move down this way, right? So most people will move this way and then come like that. Okay? Something to keep in mind that most people will do it without a nudge any other way. Okay? Now, here are some strategies to help nudge people and one of them being overlaps. So when we start this page, we're going to start here. And we're going to come here. We would come down to here. And what did I say above their way above? I said that the body wants to move down here, right? That's the inclination of what's going to happen here. Except in cases where we do something to manipulate that. Ok. And one way to manipulate it is right here. This panel overlap. When we have this overlap, what that does is it brings the the I into this. It'll come back here and move this way. Okay. So a panel overlap. Well hope move you into the panel that it's overlapping. Pretty cool, right? So that's one way you can use a strategy to drag the viewer's eyes somewhere. So what do we have? We've got one comes across, comes down here, overlaps here, comes back cuz that's a logical one, comes down, and this one's overlapping. It'll bring you into this one. And then we flow off the page this way. Okay? So overlaps are a nice panel strategy that you can use to try to manipulate the flow of the eye. Another strategy you can use is how you split the panels. Yes, I know so far we've talked about this type of panel and stuff, I guess just simple rectangle, squares type. But if you want to use angles, you know, you want to start splaying out like this. You're going to find that you can guide the eye in this kind of semicircle type of flow, right? Okay. So whether it's splayed a public, this are splayed at the bottom. You're dragging the viewer across. It's very interesting because now what happens is we've got the viewer coming here and then bouncing down here and then coming over and ending up down here, right? Okay, so you can use angle splits as well with your panel strategy, right? So, so far we've got overlaps, we've got angle splits, and then we've got trouble. And this is what I hinted to a little bit earlier here. We've got blockages. Blockages is where it's unclear where the eye should go. Okay. So we're going to start here, right? And then what did I say? 90% of people will move down if, if all things are equal. But what happens here is confused. They get confused. Do I move down to here? Down to here? Normally would be up down here and then up, right, as we can see in this one here, right? We would come down. But then it brings him to here, and then here, it gets really, really confusing here. Okay? So when you have these blockages, don't think of them like absolute heavy lines like this as blocking something. What it is is it's a blocking in the process of which way the eye should move, right? So how do we use strategies to deal with this, right? Well, we've already learned one. We've learned at least one where we can use an overlap. And then we know that we're, we're shuttling in through this way, right? So that's one strategy you guys can use for trying to deal with these different blockages. But I'm gonna give you some more here. Another one would be word bubbles. So let's see. Word bubbles will help us determine the flow a little bit. So let's say all things are equal. And I've got my panels kinda plotted out here, really nice and basic and almost cinematography, graphene type, horizontal, slant rhyme. And I've got talking heads going all the way down. I can start to manipulate the word bubbles to try to move the I threw out that type of thing. Right. So what would happen was it would go something like this. And lt, the page, okay, so even though the reader would normally go starting here and here, here, here, here, here. You can use dialog bubbles as a bit of manipulation of the focal point. Okay, Now we'll get into the focal points on the next one. But realized that when people are looking at a comic page, you've put in Sometimes 5, 10, 20 hours into this page when it's all said and done. And they're only going to spend 20 seconds maybe, right? And so what do they hit? What are they really looking at? What do they spend their time on? Well, one thing they really spend their time on is reading the words. And to read words, you've got to look at them. So, you know, I think it's awesome that we can now recognize that the Lake, of course you, you are like in the back your brain you like, of course they're going to read it, I get it. You know, no, no, no. Use that as a manipulation. Draw their eye in the direction that you want them to go in using those dialog bubbles. Okay? So we're bubbles are one strategy, right? Another one is focal points. Now this gets a little bit more interesting when it comes into storytelling in that kind of stuff, right? Where it's, it's tough as in like what is a focal point, right? And that depends on your story. But let's say if the gun, so I'm going to draw the ugliest gun ever created, right? Okay, so we've got a gun. And now I can use this gotten to a point. Like you can use focal points, basically the points of focus, right? To direct the viewer. So if, if I really want to, I can have the gun as it hovers V her whole logic at all, right, but now I've moved the direction to here and then I can have an ugly bullet piercing through something like this. And I know a bullet doesn't necessarily look like this, right? As it's punching through the atmosphere, whatever It's like punch, punch, punch. So what did I do? I use this really, really ugly gun to drag the focal point, the eye through our page. All right, so we started here as usual. We brought it over here and you'll notice even the panels are doing this funky little overlap and stuff, right? It's, it's kinda working for us. But even if they don't, I now pivoted that focal point, turned its attention to look in a certain direction. Okay, Now you can do that with somebody's face. You can have it pointed in this certain direction. It could be a face, it could be a hand. It could be a finger is pointing forward, right? You know, that's pointing a certain way and stuff, I guess it can be a lot of things that grab the viewer's attention. So an object that's really important to the story, faces and especially eyes and hands. People. As humans, we really focus on those types of things. Key story points, right? Faces, eyes, hands. So if you point them in the right direction, literally, you're pointing them in the right direction. You're going to move the viewer in that direction. So it's kinda awesome. Another one you could do is panel breaks. Now, this can be used and abused. It bothers a lot of people because it is, right. But what is a panel break while you're basically breaking that panel, right? So what does that mean? Well, let's see what's a good example here. Let's go back to our little ugly gun, right? And let's say, I've got some character is standing in the background here. And this character has this big ugly gun. He's pointing it off and he's going to shoot. He's got as, you know, as the hands come down, he's got this hand, right. And he's aiming at somebody. Right. Now I've got a choice. I can crop this crop this off. And it doesn't, you know, it looks legit, right? Or I could have it break into this panel. And now I've pulled the viewer's eyes back into here, right? You can do this with a lot of things. Like I said, you don't want do it with the same thing as focal points or you can do it with like no falcons wing or something like that. You know, his wings can be coming like this and breaking into the next panel and stuff. You often it's with figures. Like you might have. The figure standing here. Their head breaks this panel and then they're looking down here, arms crossed or something like that. Right? Okay. So what that does is it links this panel and brings you down in here. I wouldn't do that in this particular case because I'm like already here. And then I want to come down here. And it would bring me down into here. And there'll be a horrible idea because I wouldn't know how to get over here. So if anything, you know, I'd want to come this way, flow up, flow back down and flow out. Does that make sense? Okay, So just a little bit of a review here and see if we can bound. So generally speaking, we're going with the format of reading left to right, flowing from the top-left to the bottom right of the page, right. With basic storytelling. And let's say a 69 are told panels. You can easily kind of flow on this z flow formation, right? You'll notice though that there's a bit of a psychology to that flow. Usually people want to kind of fill the space. They want to drop down into the space that moves into this larger one and then come down. It's really weird. But that's what generally people go for. What you will find them. Let's see if I can just erase this little bit for us here. Is when things start to get divided more, then it starts to get even more confusing. So if I was to divide the panel here, what actually wants to happen is here to here to here. And then here and over. Really weird, right? Just realized that most people want to drop down a little bit, come up and fill that equal space. The fact that these are equal really helps people understand it. We can go down into the brakes where things become unequal. And the I gets very confused. Okay, so we've got blockages. We've got blocks here. We've got this flows, but then this blocks here that because it goes down, I basically put a whole bunch of blocks here. This wouldn't be that bad. It would flow into here and maybe here. But then we've got this one here. There's so many blocks in this one page. I made it horrible to get away from that. You can slice your panels with angles to kinda give like almost a fan formation where people like to follow the rim of the fan. Or you can use stuff like overlaps, where it's overlapping another panel and it wants to bring you in there, right? If you don't want to use those or you can use them in conjunction with each other, right? You can delve into manipulating spacing of word bubbles. And here's a little hint. When you start to get into using these bubbles and stuff, make sure you kinda plot them out before you get drawing so you don't run out of room. So it's really important when you're thumbnailing and all that kinda stuff. Keep in mind, where are you going to put these bubbles, right? Not just a centerpiece, not just the focal points, not just the characters, but how you're going to drag that i along, right? Because that's what we're doing here. We're dragging it from here to here, to here to here, and down out, right? You can play with the focal points. Whether it's a gun, whether it's a finger up there, so obvious, you could point, right. But sometimes it's just the way an eye looks, the direction of that side II or something, right? That can carry a lot of weight. And then we'll jump. You can jump in US panel breaks, but my advice on panel braces, use them sparingly. They can really be overused, they can be abused. And then it gets kinda ugly. Then you no longer have panels. But you know what? Now that I bring that up, I am going to say this. I have seen some books that are really well done without a single panel, or at least they'll do an entire page without panels. Instead. The panel will form. The form. They'll have like the former round a figure or around some furniture or whatever. And they'll use maybe a thicker border or a halo rim light or something like that. That'll create that panel. They still manipulate like it's false panel in a way, right? But it will still drag your eye through it, right? Okay. So good. Less on panel flow. I think it'll really help you if you use it before you draw everything out. Won't help you if you go backwards and say, Well, how can I make it work actually, you know what? No, I'm going to take that back. I think it could help a little bit because you can still manipulate your word bubbles a little bit. You can still push and pull on a panel or an overlap or something like that, right. But trust me, do it a little bit ahead of time. Do it in your thumbs. Have a strategy of how you're going to drag that across that page, right? And if you do that, it all comes so much easier after it's done. Okay, guys. So ruffled some thumbs. Something nice and simple, right? Even just stick men or whatever it is. And make sure you can get that nice panel flow from top to bottom. Have fun with it. 15. Understanding Tangents: Okay guys, We got another quick unit for you here. This one's kinda interesting. It's not in a way, it's how to draw bit, but in a way it's related to how to make comics. Because when we start putting our commerce together, as we start putting all these panels together, we're going to find that sometimes we get snagged up by some of these little simple things, right? And so one of the things I wanted to point out to you today, we're tangents. Okay, so what is a tangent? Let's see if I can kinda explain. A tangent. Is when as your eye is looking at a line or an object and it meets or overlaps another object. But the overlap or the touching is confusing. That's basically a tangent, okay, it's something that confuses the eye. Now of course, if we were to just pan just a little bit, then this object would be off to the side or vice versa. The overlap would be greater or something like that and would clear up the tangent, right? So sometimes it can be done intentionally as an illusion, but a lot of times, especially in illustration, it can distract. And so that's what we're going to address here is a bit of that distraction. So I drew this picture of rogue, I don't know, a year ago or something I got right. And so I'm using her as my, my main subject here. And then I sketched out just a minute ago. That's really ugly background, right? But there's a method to my madness, okay, because I wanted to point out some of the tangents that were going on here. Okay, So let's see if I can point some things out that and see if they make a little bit of sense for us here. Okay? The first tangent is what's called a long line. So we've got this line going on. I don't know if you can see where rogue rows jacket is, her short cropped jacket, right. And it continues on that horizon line, right? So what's happening is this line is here and then it continues out. Okay? So that's called a long line tangent. It's an extension of one line into another line. And it really confuses the I write it. It makes it look like this is actually maybe I'll put this one in Boulder, OK, so we can kinda see it makes it look like this as a continuous line. All right? Okay, so that, that can mess people up, right? Another type of tangent isn't necessarily touching, but it's running parallel. Okay. So this could be right here running along with her hair, right? This is running parallel here, right? That can be some confusion. Right? Rope doesn't have any straight lines going on here. But for example, if another one way might be like if this line was extended and then there's another line or something like that, right? So any, any unintentional parallel lines, especially to the subject of the piece, can really start to confuse the eye, okay, you wanna make sure that the subject, in this case rope pops, right? So you don't want these tangents, right? Okay. Another one is the corner. And see, I think I made a corner here, ah, right down here. This is the corner tangent where it looks like it's here, here and here. Um, you know, it's funny because as I'm doing these tangents, I did them intentionally, right? And you can almost see some intention here, right? So it's really weird because it almost seems like I'm drawing a little arrow here, right? Yes. But mostly when we do these tangents, It's by mistake, so there's absolutely no focus, okay? And it's a distracting focus, if anything, right? So just really watch out for this, this, for example, the corner, right? Another one might be, hey, there's something called a bump. When something bumps up against an edge here and stuff, right? It's just it hits, it stops, like it's kind of bang, it bumps into the edge, stops in this case, it's pumping into the edge of the panel, but it can be bumping into the edge of something else. Do I mean whether it's more of the cylinder or whatever they are and stuff I got right. So bumping and being bought up against the edge of something and the merging becomes indistinguishable. It's, it's tough and it distracts your eye. Okay, so this, this is almost similar to the original, the long line or something like that, that it, it gets really wonky. All of these subjects and listen, I'm just giving you a few different types of these tangents. There are a lot of different types out there, okay, these are just some little cues you can pull off than that. But there's all types of tangents that can distract, right? So another example would be the directional tangent. We've got a directional sweep in this leg and then we've got these directional lines at sweep up after, right. That can get confusing. Right now. It's not confusing because she punches with color. Right? But if this was all just black and white and there was these lines and lines and lines and lines in the same direction, same flow. It could definitely confuse the eye, right? And another one, especially in storytelling, is the panel to panel type of, of tangent. Where as you know, we've got a hunch going here and then any type of line coming from this side, and then it continues into this next one. But a different object, right? Like something unrelated or something like that. Okay. You're kinda getting the drift that tangents, unintentional tangents are very, very bad, right? They, they're distracting. But I'm going to flip the script a little bit and just say, Hey, listen, an intentional tangent might be used for something. So for example, maybe not exactly, but exactly this one that we were talking about here. You know, we could have a panel break that leads into the next flow of this panel. Bang and it flows into whatever is happening in this next panel or something, whatever it is. Right. So my warning to you, and like I said, this is just going to be quick one. After you kinda sketch out your page or whatever and stuff, right? Take a quick look to see if there's any unintentional overlaps or parallels or extension lines or anything like that, right? And if there is, address it, right? But if you really want to get tricky again, consider how to manipulate them. If you want to bring a focus into an area. Maybe this is one little trick, right? Okay. So, you know, how do I get rid of this? Well, uneasy way would be just move rogue away from some of those trends. Tangents, right? You know, that's an easy fix. I'm lucky that I drew her on another layer so I can move her away. And she could pop like that. And now I've just gotten rid of almost all of those tangents. All right. I'm not suggesting that you, I'm actually suggesting do it in a sketch phase. You know, I'm, I'm lucky that I'm using her on a different layer here and stuff I get right. But address it. And if they're unintentional, get rid of them. You don't want them. You don't want to distract the eye. And when you get a little bit more advanced, Let's see how you play with them. 16. Dynamic vs Static with Chris Graves: Hey guys, welcome back to another unit of how to make comics. In this one, I've got a buddy with me, Chris. Thanks for having me, man. I'm glad to have you here, man. It took a while to track you down, but I'm really excited about what you're going to teach us today. You are going to talk about the difference between a static shot and a dynamic shot, especially within panels and stuff, right? Yes, sir. Okay. So let me ask you like Let's see if I can load this up. I saw you drawing this earlier, right? Right. Your first panel up top there. So I thought process here was just to kinda just show you what a straight on shot is. Yellow. It could work like, you know, it could be a fine panel and books aware, but my idea was a kind of make the motion pop a little bit more and kind of have her looking like in the distance, like she's really concerned. So sure. Yeah. I kinda changed the maybe just change the angle a little bit, maybe crop up closer to are a little bit. Right. Just a just a quick kind of bring you closer to her, making her like have that feeling like you're with there with her. It definitely brings more emotion into it. That first one is so just stiff, almost a narrator's voice type of things. She's staring at the viewer. This one, I'm all up in those wrinkles men a little. But it definitely conveys a different emotion, right? Like you're, you're close up to the face that the first one again is like, you know, I don't know, boo been up, shock type of thing. I don't want to talk moves, right. But that second shot, you came in nice and tight. I'm just like I said, it's just about get up close and personal with my thought was like It's a dramatic scene, like she's telling a story. With her age. She's got a lot of stories that tell. I just wanted to seem like it was a serious situation and bringing the close cousin the angle. Adjusting the angle a little bit. Yep. I'll help do that. Now. Do you find like, when it comes to angles? For me, this will sound, I don't have a figure with me which is strange, but I guess they're all back on the rack, but I sometimes keep a figure in front of me and just kinda play with the header. Here I am on camera. Just pivoted around and just say right about there or even with myself and a camera like all, just kinda try to hit some angles and say, that's the mood and that's what I want. So how did you choose this angle For sure, man, on believe it or not, It's just one of those things where when I was sketching it out before I decide which way I was gonna go. It just I just decided that termed a three-quarter turn. Yeah. Holding the cigarette kind of like that's what I wanted. And it was more just about sketching as opposed to holding heads. Where I do do that when I'm sketching and just for fun or doing studies are what we do. Do things like that with figures that I have or I even use. These 2D apps, are these 3D abstract other body around? Yeah, I think they're great. You can actually snapshot the angle you want. And you can trace it and it gives you the muscle memory to have those angles. And then all the sudden they're in your mental Rolodex and you can just pull from that. Yeah. Now that you've mentioned that the ones that I use are called Art pose and easy pose or my phone. And I wouldn't trust the musculature on it or anything like that. But like camera angles and the general general structure for camera angles, I think works really well. Oh absolutely, That's the stuff we wouldn't need them for. Like, you know, you give some of those weird downward shots or upward shot, right? It just helps like that. Get you there. And then you've got the Arctic over? Yeah. Yeah. Most definitely men. And when it comes to figures, like I obviously I've got a lot of figures in the back that I sometimes use. Something that I'm very aware of is that using my camera on my phone, there's a big lens distortion. You can play that sometimes it works really well and you know, you see people taking their own shots at distorts, right? But with fingers it distorts to right. All right. You are doing this Batman? Yeah, man. Pulling it would be our low. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this looks great. And he's straightforward, do a dynamic things. Sure. Himself is dynamic. Yeah. So it's actually hard to put him in a static shot. So I did my best. So how I did it wasn't just a straight all shy, extended will regard oil that comes through and he's just like looking over the city. I like it. Yeah. I think it would probably work as a one-shot. You can dig it, but the kinda bring energy to it. I'm dropping the camera down just a little bit. When you're kind of looking up at all now, you've got this salt like he's ready to get, like maybe just dive off this guard Goyal the gargoyles delegate different angle tool. Like, uh, like, uh, me look like I'm just trying to bring energy may have visual interests. Is huge for me. And I get that from the McFarland, just guys that I admire. And I think they're, the main thing is energy. Anatomy can get a little wonky sometimes, sometimes here. You can always learn that I feel it but, but the energy and making a character look like or seem like it's jumping off the pages for me. More, Not so much more important, but that's what speaks to me. I think you're right. You know, it's interesting because you're talking about energy. And when I look at that first panel that you drew up, It's a nice panel like it's made by man, looks like Batman, the gargoyles looks like a gargoyles. There's a cityscape behind, but there's, There's a bit of brooding going on, you know, brutes, straight on. There's nothing at all ominous about it, gentlemen. He's not hanging over us it so many times. When you picture whether it's Spiderman, Batman, whoever that the gargle, true, right. That hanging out on the ledges for sure. That there's that there's that hang over the city. And when you do it's such a straight on shot. You don't capture that energy, right? So it's either got to be kinda downward where they're from, their point of view. They're viewing the city type of thing or upwards where it has that ominous feel to it. Yes, I agree. And part of it is like being dramatic with it to you. Dynamic dramatic energy like all those things. Storytelling, most important, but like if you can add these elements to it, then I think what makes or breaks a panel book, you know, things like that is having that great storytelling but also that dynamic page or panels that you're working on. One thing that I notice speaking of being more dynamic ads, when I'm looking at that first shot, everything is just head, straight, shoulder, straight hips, straight, straight, straight, straight line. When you look at the second shot, you've got a turn, a twist, a look down. You know, like you've got a more, just the poses, more dynamic. Not only did you move the camera a little bit stuff, right? And yes, of course the legs are more bandwidth and more actually type of thing. But the fact that you've moved those pivot points really adds to it, I think a 100 percent. I can't remember where it was, you know, so on. So I use the word self-enclosed goes a lot of it's YouTube and your videos, or you go into the gym leaves and that's how you pick things up. And one of the things is making things dynamic can be like you have the hips facing one way, like you were saying, you, you slightly turned the upper body. So these look in one way, but it is body's ready to go. The other thing, just as little twist that you're talking about, always add like, like I said earlier, visual interest. I think. Like looking at it now like I could have even put like a little something in the front, in the very foreground. So almost like you're looking through something to see him. It's little things, little tricks like that I feel make the reader just more interesting, like more focused at the character because you're able to look through and see him. Yeah, I definitely agree. You know, I'm a big I'm a big fan of good anatomy, right? And I'm loving what you're doing here, but you're not. I don't feel like you're you're hedging yourself fan or restricting yourself as per like, Oh, I got to draw all this anatomy. What I feel is you've got to, like I said, you've got this kinda dynamic scene that you want to present. You throw a menu, throw an action line in and kinda just put it in, and then start to use almost like a clave fill in the character and stuff, right? And funny, he said, I was getting ready to say like the scope of thing. So why may, even when I do think pieces, little pieces, the first thing I tried to do is my thumbnails is all energy. It's all lines. Yeah. And then I try and pick and choose, like all you can use eraser a lot of time because there's so much lines there and I start sculpting things out with the eraser, keep it moving lines. And I think when you can do that and then pick the, what I call energy lines or it's just a silly term, but it's the ones that I feel have been most character to them. And I try and keep that in the back of my mind when I'm fleshing it out. And they got helps keep the dynamic shot that we're talking about. It keeps it on the page. Definitely, You know, like I could just I know I feel the energy there. Absolutely. Like I can feel that twist. Okay. And your last one here, the last panel is we've got a couple that's arguing. It seems like, you know, we did. It's just a side-by-side right? Street shot. It looks really simple. It's actually, I remember when I was first drawing comics, everything was a side-by-side. Yeah, my comics were like, I think I played 2D side-scrolling video games. They're all like 2D. You could, you could, you could react. Moved across the page speaking my language there. Right? Like, you know, it is hilarious. I was looking back to some of my old books, right? And it's just like everything's up side-by-side. But obviously that gets boring right now. So what do you do with them? Like we're talking about sizable video games. I feel we're dating ourselves with perpetual her story. I mean, you're right like that. You kind of saw things and even some comic books or you see a lot of side side shots like that. And they are boring, but it gets the point across their findings. But my thing was Ari. Let's just twist angle of twist the shot. You can get a better look at her face and how she's feeling. Yellow body language like you can clearly see she's upset. So you'd look in the right through her and see her body language. She's clearly annoyed or upset yep. Here to him. And then you see his body language, his aggressive bees, pissed off. I don't know if we can say that on the channel. It's clearly aggressive than just, I think it's just a more dynamic throwing that word a lot, but a certain dynamic shot. And it works two ways. You can have her sitting out the panel where you break the panel when you make it more fun and that becomes more of a cool like, well, it's a panel break right now. And I can have a unit in this course about Panel break. So it's all good men. It's also interesting because you could have taken that those exact same poses that was in the first panel of the side-by-side. And just turn the camera angle, turn the camera angles. So when we see TV shows, that's what they're doing, right? You know, they've got the camera, they turn it a little bit, turn it this way. You give the people the different perspectives on it, right? But more than that, you gave her this. She's still in the same pose but she'd side shouldering inside eye on him. Right. That gives a more attitude or a girlfriend, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then and then you give him instead of just like, hey, I'm lecturing you are, Hey, I'm unhappy. This contorted like you, you know, he's he's really getting into it and he's digging it. So I know we overuse the word dynamic, but what the helm and that's what this unit is about. And that really shows how much more dynamic that shot is, right? Well, I like to think so. Yeah, I absolutely love it mandatory that I don't think either shot the first shot isn't bad. You could use that first shot. But I think that first shot is overused. I think along with that first shot being overused in a lot of books. Agree? Yeah, like you're this could actually be a part of the page which is kind of what I noticed as I was still in it. That could have been like your first panel and then depending on how much dialogue here that could have been your second battle? Absolutely. Just it's I think like you said, it's not so much a bed shot is just an overview shot. Yeah. And I think that's the issue that when we're gonna get into this, the reason I made this unit, the concept of it was because like I said, I'm notorious for those straight on side static shots. And I love people with vision that move the camera, move the pose and put other objects in the way and stuff, right? I think it starts with thumbnailing and storyboarding, that you can really do it there. But as you showed us, you know, you can start fleshing it out. And boy, these look awesome. This video. I really appreciate it, man. Now I prefer you haven't me matters of glass. Yeah. So if you were to give one piece of advice, just one to say, you know, how to change a shot from the regular straight on static shot to something more dynamic. What would be your piece of advice you would give? Don't go think. To be honest, I just don't think about it too hard. Don't overthink it. We were talking about just go go and try different angles even if you're no good at trial. Because the only what's sometimes the only way you're going to be able to Denali the shots at the jump in feet first, start trying to draw them, so are trying to flesh them out. And, you know, eventually you're just going to, it's going to come to its end. It becomes a snack and then it's just one of those things that you have. You'll start looking at things differently. You won't see the static shots and more you start looking for the dynamic shots, right? Perfect. Perfect. Okay guys, so for the students that are watching this, Here's your assignment. I want you to, whether you're watching TV or if it's a movie. Movies are pretty dynamic. So let's go with TV. Whether it's Seinfeld, friends, whatever it is, look at static shots that you see around. It could even be something from a magazine. Take that same static shot and turn it, make it more dynamic. Do something with it that punches it harder. Okay. So it could be just a thumbnail, you don't have to flesh it out that Chris is an amazing artist here, right? But what I want you to do is take some basic straight on boring static catalog shots and do something with it. Turn that camera pan and a little bit, or twist that pose or do it all. Guys, I hope this was helpful. And Chris, man, you're awesome. Thanks for coming and hanging out with us. My pleasure again for having me. All right, man. 17. Storyline: Okay guys, so in this unit, what we're gonna do is talk a little bit about storyline. How to slightly plot out a storyline, not write it, but how to plot it out. So you can get some of the temple down and recognizing just an overview, what you're looking at right now. I know we're talking about comics here, right? But not everybody has read every comma can. I kinda don't expect all of my students to recognize a lot of the storylines from different comics. So instead what I'm doing is I'm going to take some storylines from different movies, hopefully movies that Everyone's fairly familiar with and stuff. And then let's see if it helps a little bit. Okay, so what I did was make this kinda just little template of showing the plot, the main character, maybe a subplot and secondary character. But you know what? You can kind of assign these however you want. All attach a copy into the files and stuff so you have it. But really this can be sketched out in your notebook. This can be done anyway. So what you could do is kinda like, you know, put it into the first, second, third acts, right? And you just kinda have like a timeline going through it, right? It could be really that simple. Okay? And so the first movie we're going to look at is Star Wars, a New Hope, right? Like I thought that this would be kind of an interesting one to start with, right? And so if we're looking at the plot, you know, what do we start with? Well, if you guys remember the story, the original section starts with Leah, you know, she's on board. This is crews are fleeing something or whatever and she gets bordered by the cruiser HIT-supported play Vader and such, right? And then it switches quickly into, actually, I should probably write aliyah, because there's going to be another L here. Look, right? And this shows kind of his simple upbringing. Everything from we have an event of introduction of Luke to the butchering of his aunt and stuff, right? So you can, you can kinda plot out these kinda key story points that are going along. It flips into the second act of that, that goes into Luke's training with Obi-Wan. Than him searching for the team, forming a team with Han Solo, that kind of thing, right? And then, you know, they get on the Millennium Falcon, they eventually get captured. And then the big one is, uses the force to destroy the desktop right? Now, listen, It's funny because I kinda did a big one here. And this is up to you how you want to denote importance or power or flow in the storyline that you can make. What I do is kind of a small dot and then I kinda make a big dot for something that I think is important, or a star or like a really big dot. I've seen some people plot it like kinda like a line. You know, I mean it comes out like this. And what this line is showing is kinda be motion. So what you could do actually, if you really want to plot this out in a certain way, is have the end of the first act, have a rise, end of the second act have a rise. And so we get through this capture into the end of the second act have arise in the third act. Have the rise, right? These are all like, like I said, this is the storyline timeline, right? How you want to show it, how it manifests or whatever. Whether it's by doing big dots or little dots or a flowing temple line or something like that, right? That's really up to you. It's up to you how you want to approach it. I kinda do both. They do these little dots and flowing couple nines. Some other people might have another approach to it. I'm not quite sure, you know, like I've seen some different ones, but I like this, right? This is what I'm doing. So we can start. Some of those carries down into Luke storyline, right? The his family being butchered, his training and stuff I get this would be Luke, right? We can have something like that. Coming down. The slight training and the force, right? And then his awakening with the force right? The subplot, if we really wanted to be like this Skywalker's with Lia and stuff. You know, this is something else that you can develop some of their interaction together and stuff, right? As they quote, unquote rescue layer right there. And you could do that kind of thing. It depends how you want. You can have multiple sub-plots if you want here and stuff. You can do a second carrier character like solo. He doesn't really come into it. Until we can see him coming in the second act here, when we see them in the in Mos Eisley, the container, whatever it is right. Where everybody's performing anyways, you get what I'm saying, right? So it's your choice how you want to plot out these different ones, right? I just wanted to give you an example. Maybe we'll go for one more quick example here of something about Mary Wright, the plot, the timeline or what? I'm going to back that out because I'm going to do the little important thing, right? So we've got 10 as the main character. We can maybe think of Pat Healy as second character, right? The plot, you know, it starts off with the story of Ted as a geek meeting Mary, and then all of a sudden bone, we got pranks and beans. If anybody remembers this one, it's where Ted zipped his nuts into a zipper, right? And then it comes down into hiring Healy. Right? At the end of this, TED discovers that Healy was lying to him, right? The lies that Healy so here's Healy. Ted discovers the lies. And then Ted travels to go meet Mary and tries to get together with her. Then maybe at the end. There's a little bit of the possible of love with Mary, the Crush, but then it peaks once again, right at the very end with the confrontation and meeting with everybody and then backup to love. Okay? So you can see how the plot kind of swings like this and you can put other events in your comic timeline that you think are important, right? Or, and then that's the thing you could draw them down to the characters. You know, like for example, this was a pinnacle moments and Ted's life for something, right? You could do the same thing with the subplot if you want. You could follow this pattern and have it hidden in there. Or you can, what you could do with the subplot is just, here's the main event and then you could throw something else underneath it. For example, there was another character that didn't reveal himself until the end. Woody, I think it was right. So woogie was kinda hiding through this whole thing, this whole thing that he would have revealed as yet another love interest for Mary, right? Are married and he loved Mary and stuff, right? So what his stuff was, he introduced Healy, he introduced Healey to Ted and stuff like that. So you can throw this subplot of like woogie is involved with this, woogie is involved here. Woogie has all this underlying and he follows the trend of the main plot, right? But he's got this subtle little thing in the background. And so you can use that. Like I said, you can change these around if you just want to have the main plot, plot it out. If you want to throw a character development, throw that in a can follow the main plot. It could chart its own course or whatever however you want, right? So with Captain Korea, this was one of my books I did just a little while ago. It's, you know, here's the first, second, third act. First one is kind of very simple. It's, it's, it's, it's a short book, right? It's only 24, 22 pages, I think. So the first one is kinda like, boom, at the beginning, at the top of the first act is his discovery of like the powers and stuff. Again, if you read the book, you know, there's some character, just little setting. The settings and soul, a little bit of character buildup and stuff I got. And this can drop down into here and then boom, there's this big discovery, right? That he's he's a bit of a character and stuff, right? Where I know that he becomes the main character rather, sorry. Then it kinda comes down into this where we've got some training points, right? Some funny little points that happen and stuff. And then boom, at the end of the second act, He's called out call to action. Okay. And actually at this call to action, something happens to him. He gets kinda squished, right? So this is kinda dramatic and stuff, right? And this can drop down into his character development that he has to, he has a low point he has to overcome. And boom to the finale where he kicks him button, right? There is a subplot, but the subplot, how I did it. It's a story arc that goes over a number of issues. So it's just introduced in the beginning of the book and the end of the book. Usually I kinda bookended and stuff I get because I just wanted suddenly in there until it starts to really like we'll just get kinda glimpses of it until the reveal and it's plotted for book number six, right? So you can see like there's different ways to, to do the strategy and all of this, right? This is ugly. I get it. It's supposed to be ugly. It's supposed to be just your little scratch notes of a dot here and a point there and what you think should be put in and stuff I got right. If it's pretty I don't know. I think the only time you need to pretty it up as if you're making a presentation to somebody or whatever. But for yourself, have something like this and it doesn't have to be this one. Like I said, I'm going to attach some some sheets TEA so that you have them in everything, right. But you don't need to have an even this color coded or anything like that. It could be just a little timeline in your notebook that is like, boom, boom, boom. And you plot the key points along the way. And sometimes they can double up and sometimes they, they magnify and importance or something like that, right? But that's all that this has to be, right, is just this nice storyline tempo. And so you start to look at yourself and say, Okay, well, you may be talking about tempo. Towards the first end of the first. I've have a peak towards the end of Second, I have a peak towards Anna third, I have a giant peak or two peaks, bang, bang, right? Or if you're Michael Bay, It's pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick through the whole damn thing. You guys, I hope this helped you just to kinda wrap your minds about how to approach, plotting out your storyline and the tempo. 18. Story Beats: Okay, I'm going to stop that before I get into copyright issues, right? Like got to watch myself. Anyways on and talk a little bit about beats. Just jamminess a meats, and we got meats and comics to. Now listen, this is how I look at some things. So you might want to skip over this unit like this is going to be a little bit hard for me to explain because it's just kind of internal in the end stuff, right. But I think if you can get it or at least get a little snippet of what I'm talking about. I think you might really appreciate it. It just might help you kind of approach things with a different awareness. Okay, so let's talk about beats. We're just live at listening to summary. But what I want to show you here is this is a comic book page, right? For example, we've got a comic book page here. And okay, so when I think a comic book beets, I think of like a temple like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And you can have that temple drawn out like bang, bang, bang, bang. You could have it come up, bone, bone. I visualize the flow of music a lot, right? Whether, you know, whether it's soft and melodic or whether it's spikier whenever we know that the tick of a beat will have a certain pattern to it, right? There's also temporal when storytelling and especially visual storytelling. So when we look at something like a panel, Here's our first panel. And don't mind the roughness. What kind of beat does this present as the person's looking at it, right? They roll through this panel and it takes them a while. It might be a slow pan over a hill or something like that. And there's a character off in the distance, right? It has that boom, this nice slow tempo to it, right? And you can break it. What if you break it into three panels here? I won't get hit, right. You know, it hits that nice. And I didn't draw them even, but you can trot him even sized panels or what a boat, a big, a small, a big, a small. You know. This visually has a certain tempo to the reader. As they're looking through the page there. You know, they, they jump on it, right? So I want you to think about this, that if you want to hit hard, you can hit with a series of panels like this, right? And what does that do? It's bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. Then has a rapid-fire feeling. Or slow it down. Slow. Long panel that has the face looking off into the distance and that slow pan as it all agree, even drag it off the page if you want or something. Think about this for beats. Also. Let's say it's a large panel. And it's not just the size of the panel or the size or shape of the panel that determines the beats, the pacing of the reader. But it's a reader, right? So this reader is going to be reading bubbles. So if you've got something here, whatever, and you've got a speech bubble or a narration bubble or whatever it is. They're going to read this and then taken that entire scene, right? So it's going to be a little peaceful, it's going to be calm. But what if you have bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, right? You know, all of this adds in beats. I hate to bring his name up, but Michael Bay, He's he's the director of famous for like just overindulging in beets, right? He's just like slash slash slash slash. And you have to be careful when you do that in a comic. You, it's okay to do that like if you want action, action, action, action, action, action through every single page. Cool. That's a kind of a comic you're making, right? Generally though, you want to have some type of buildup. Climax, buildup, climax and build up and a big climax or something. And so then it brings you into that next chapter of storytelling, right? There's no hard and fast rule to this. But I wanted to give you this little unit to just say, Hey, be conscious of your beats. Be conscious of the temple. Be conscious of how panels and word bubbles, and even the occasional action within a frame, how they're going to affect your beads. Hope this helps just a little bit guys and hope by expressing, well enough what's in my brain. 19. Real Estate: Hey guys, welcome back to another unit I've got for you here. In this unit of how to make comics, we're going to tackle real estate. That's right. Real estate, but not this or even this. And I wish it was this, but it's not and it's not even this one. What it is is this it's a comic book page, real estate, right? When we're looking at a comic book page, the real estate, the land, the amount of space we have, and how do we use it? And that's what I want to talk about in this unit here. So we're going to talk about Here's a page and this applies to both a page and pages as well. We're going to talk about this page and how we might break it out into determining what is important for us for real estate. And listen, I know what's going to happen is you're gonna be like, Oh, I do that. Yeah, maybe maybe you do it subconsciously. But have you ever really stopped to think about it, right? Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is kinda do some color picking here, and let's say setting. And let's say on this particular page and all back a little bit here. On this particular page, the opening panel within the bleed is right here and this gives me a setting. Right? My setting that That's my opening panel that I devote to the setting. And then what do I do? Well, I want to have a little bit of my characters, probably some talking head dialogue, right? And I'm going to spend some time talking head dialogue. And maybe, maybe even more. I'm spending some time on it, right? And you can probably see where I'm going here. And then all of a sudden some action, big action comes into it. And when we look at this page here, if I'm looking at this page, I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, okay, well, maybe a quarter Is, is done in setting the scene. Maybe one-third is the dialogue and one-third is action. And I know that doesn't add up to 100%, right? But I'm their gutters. But it's not what I intended. Sometimes I do this without even thinking. You're just like, Hey, I'm telling a story and it's gone. It's gone and yeah, but what was important to you when you were writing this or when you're reading the script or something, right? Was the setting worth a quarter or a third of your time, space, and energy, and of the readers as well, right? Did you give it thought that that's how much should be dedicated to it, right? Maybe we need to switch it around a bit, right? Maybe e.g. it should have been a little bit different. Like maybe the action was big and I want to dedicate this much to the action. And maybe I wanted to dedicate maybe a sliver to the setting. Then also come in and have the dialogue. And the dialogue could be here, here, here. And it doesn't mean that they're totally separate. There's defining lines between all of them because, you know, sometimes dialogue will carry over into action. Word bubbles going on as people are pulling each other and stuff I get. There could be dialogue within the setting and stuff. Just because these talking heads are here, doesn't mean that it's exclusive of these other types of things, but I want you to really think of it as like, how much of my page real estate am I going to spend on this? Because I've seen it so many times. Where there's somebody. What they do is they spend really like a lot of time, lot of Page real estate designing this beautiful Colosseum or something like that. And, and buildings in perspective, you know, everything's going back and here's the Coliseum and the rows of their spending all this time setting up this scene and stuff like that. I'm like, oh, this is beautifully rendered and the perspective is great and everything's great. And then maybe there's a little, little dialog box here coming down in the corner and a couple little things. You gotta get those Talking Heads. And because there's an announcer announcing what's happening in the Colosseum. And it's an, you need space for those word bubbles and they gotta go somewhere, right? And it kinda tagging on here. And then finally, finally. There's some action, right? And it's a big fist coming your way. Bomb. There's some action coming in. But is that what was intended? Is that what was called for in the script? Was really this worth 50% of the real estate on this page. And that's what I want you to question yourself in. A lot of you will do this subconsciously and just say, Yeah, I can prioritize and it works and it flows and everything like that. But a lot of you don't. Because then the next bad thing that I see is people spending a heck of a lot of time or real estate in the gutters. Here's, here's some action, right? Here's some action. Here is some little bits of dialogue. And then maybe here is the setting of the scene. I don't know. It's a funky little I don't know what I'm doing with this panel, whatever right now, we might look at this and say, okay, well that's, that's still kinda proportional here or whatever. But look at all this gutter space, right? Look at this is all gutter here. This is all gutter that's going on in here. And I would say, you know, I'm no mathematician, but if I was to add this up right now, 50% of the real estate that I'm spending on this page is in the gutter. And again, is that a choice that you want? Was that a conscious choice? Because most of the time when I see this, throwing all statistics that don't make any sense, like 90% of people do this, right? But what I'm seeing very, very often is that the people that are doing this are not doing it by conscious choice, right? They are not. If they were doing it by conscious choice, often it would look something like, once again, here's setting the scene right into my even bleed off the page. It might just be a banner looking thing with a little bit of dialogue popping up. And then dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and maybe even word bubbles moving off of it or something like that. So they're kinda making us flow-through the page this way. And then it pops down into the action. Now, this can have more intent, but keep in mind that we're still, we've still got this weirdness going on when it comes to this huge area of non wasted space. What that does often is denote silence or something, this big white void or a black void or someone get to a reader, it can give kinda silence and calm. So let's say you've got a Kung Fu Masters sitting on a hill and you set up the hill scene. He's sitting on this hill and he's pondering life, pondering life, pondering life, and then just jump them, right? That might be the exact pacing you want for this page. That's how you want to invest in your real estate for this, right? Cool. You know why that's cool? Not because This looks cool necessarily. It can be reconfigured and stuff like that. But it's cool because you gave it intent. And that's the theme of this unit here is I want you to, when you were approaching real estate on a comic book page, I want you to have that approach with intent. So whether it's one page here or whether it's a series of pages here. You can look at it and say, okay, well, this gets into the beats of a comic a little bit, right? To say, okay, well, you know, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to invest this much time in my setting and that setting kinda pops up a little bit later that it changes a little bit. And I'm going to invest, I got to make sure that There's some dialogue. It's happening here, there's some things happening here. And it happens right at the end of this scene. But then action really takes, takes hold and actions moving, moving, moving, moving, actions moving. And then it switches the scene. And it goes back into a little bit of dialogue, some talking heads, panels and stuff, right? And it might be a lot of it or whatever. And then boom, action hits again or something, right? So when we're looking at whether it's an individual page or whether it's a series of pages, you can kind of plot out how you're using a real estate to make sure you're not only managing it, but you're also managing your temple, which we talked about in another unit. Okay, guys, I hope looking at this, if it didn't give you like an aha moment, That's okay. But if it nudge you towards giving it a little bit more thought, giving it more consideration, and especially just that bit of planning. You're on the way to making a much stronger comic. Have fun with it guys. 20. Thumbs Basics: Okay guys, So let's talk some basic thumbnailing. I've included this sheet and that was done up by a buddy of mine named Jesse. And I love it. This is a really easy way to approach or how I approached thumbs. You know, everybody's got their different techniques. Some people get a little scrapbook. Some people put it all in details and stuff. What I like is just off to one side. I've got my my basic script. Sometimes with dialogue in it because you might need to keep that in mind for leaving room and everything, right. And then I've got a page, right? These are not panels, these are four different pages. Now, we're going to use these four pages for the same page here today. But in the future, you know, if you want to, you can use this as, for example, page 1, first attempt, page 1, second attempt page to first attempt page to second attempt rate. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do 1111. This is the same page. We're just going to plug away a few different attempts at and stuff and see how it feels, right? Okay, so let's take a look. All kinda zoom in here a little bit, so it's a little bit tighter. I don't want it too tight though. That's really kinda defeats what I'm, what I'm going for here, right? I do not want a really tight sketch at all. Okay. This is thumbnailing. I want it nice and loose. Okay. So panel one, X-Men entering an old Soviet warehouse. You know what, why don't we do this? Here's panel one. Right? Nice and simple. And we've got maybe 1234 X-Men entering a Soviet warehouse. Here's the flooring. Here's the door. Maybe we can have some shutters of the door. They've been lifting it up. Maybe clauses is reaching up or something like that, right? Wolverine is in his hunch, he's coming forward. He's moving around. One character is looking this way, another one's looking this way. They're kinda looking around as they're moving in or whatever and stuff, right. And keep in mind it soviet. So I want some, I don't know, I can have some. This can continue on this way, right? If I want, have some cases, some crates with some Soviet iconography on it or something. I got to write something really simple. This is how rough it can be, right? This is just one approach. This is our first one. Next one is a panel number two, so this is P1. P2 is a close-up shot of suspicion and concern. I could do it nice and simple like this. Maybe it could be, for example here, wolverines sniffer, right? And it can be Sniff, Sniff, right? And he's kind of concern something something's going on here, whatever, right. It could be that simple. Right? Number 3, panel number 3 is somebody gets yanked. Let's see. I can have like one of the members a nice line of action there. One of the members being pulled off to the side here. You know, they're they're reaching in, reaching back, grabbing this coil and the coil is wrapped around him and it's pulled this way or something like that. Right. So there's this motion going off, right? And then panel number four, as large shot of team facing off with omega read. Well, I can have omega read standing here holding up holding up whoever was that got yanked. You know, they're they're standing like it's the the horizon line is going to be something like this or whatever, right? So they're standing up on some blocks. Write Omega, the red standing up here looking all ominous. Hands like this. Actually, this person would be bigger but like, you know, whatever I can to have them holding on. Hanging here, right? This is again, Let's call it new gambit. Okay, so gamba got gang gambits hanging there. And then I can have, you know, aside shot of Wolverine, aside shot of another character here. Something like that, like, you know, so this is p4 now. Okay, so that's one rough attempt, right? I want to back this up. Yeah, I like it even backed out more. I'm not loving it being too close with thumbs. You want to really back away, right? Let's try something different here. Let's try some angled pennants. Okay. So panel one is them entering the warehouse, right? So we can do the door like this now instead, maybe Colossus is holding it up with two arms. You know, here's the shutter of the door or something right? Glosses is holding up. And unknown. Wolverine can be coming in here. Rho can be flying in here, something along those lines right there. This is P1, so they're, they're just entering, right? We come up here and we have a bit of a shocked expression on No. Maybe it's, it's rogue. And forgive my my shocked expression here or whatever, right. She's all confused, right. She's like, Well, what's happening? Something, something shocks are right. That can lead us down into like some type of panel here. And I'm getting kinda funky with my panel designs or something, right? Whereas in she saw something and maybe wolverines getting yanked, right? She saw she maybe she saw a coil coming or something like that. Wolverines is a coil coming around. And again, you know, wolverines reaching up to grab this coil. His leg is like this, this other ones here. And we can play out how the background looks or whatever, right? And then we've got like for example, this next scene is omega read jumping in on an action scene, right? You know, like his, his normal thing coils wrapping all around. Wolverine getting yanked back here. Rogue, kind of off to the side here, dodging this one, right? Nice hair, that type of thing, right. So hold on, Just so I'm clear on this. This is p1, p2, this is p3, and this could be p4, right? Okay. So that's another way to go about it. You know, I mean, like looking at it that way that I've kind of started angling some of my panels here and stuff, right? I don't know if I love it. I don't know if I love any of these so far, but that's kind of not the point. Yeah. I mean, like they don't have you don't have to be in love with anything, right? You know, like you can just kinda look and say, okay, I'm kinda digging some of this, right? Like but loved doesn't have to come yet. Okay. Next one. Let's see. I'm still that opening scene, right? So what did I do this? I'm gonna do some, some panel overlapping. So imagine this is my opening scene. And it's the same thing. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4 X-Men entering a warehouse. I'll make it kind of the the entrance of the warehouse was actually maybe I'll do something like this right at the entrance of the warehouse is further back and they're coming forward off of it, right? Okay. So there and I literally just plot them in like this as little sticks with nano Q-tip look and things right? Until I want to show the action or something like that, right? You want to stagger them. Maybe some people are closer, some people are a bit further, right? Then what we could do is some type of OEM number two is reaction shot, right? So it could be an overlap, right? And we can have, for example, I don't know, it could be Wolverine. I like using wolverine is reaction because he gets the Sniff, Sniff, right. He gets the Sniff, Sniff, right. But we can have other characters in the background as they, you know, they're they're back there, whatever. And, you know, it's wolverines. Do you like my little Wolverine here? It's his reaction, right? It could be anybody, right? And then so this is P1, this is P2. P3 can go under lapped under this one, right? And somebody's getting ganged here, right? They've got the wide-eyed expression. The coils are wrapping around. One arm can be coming up to the coil here or something like that, right? So there's a lot of overlapping. P1 lead us to P2, leads us down to p3. And then we can come down to P4, which is like, I know, omega read in this corner or something like that, right? And he's fighting or he's facing off against everybody, you know, in a, in a power stance or something or raised arm. I like them. Maniacal arm up here and stuff I get. And the other explainer rushing in this way so you can kind of plot their heads first or something, right? And then their bodies, the line of action, they're moving this way and stuff, right? Okay. So that's P4. I know I'm going through a lot of different variations here, and none of them are necessarily the most beautiful thing in the world. But again, I'm going to emphasize that that's not the point of these thumbs. The point of the thumbs is to just be rough with it. Now, I'm not talking mean or anything, you know, I mean, like I'm talking like play with it and stuff and just don't commit to anything yet. You know, just be really nice and loose with everything. Okay, so why don't we try one more here and see, see how it feels. P1 is that opening shot, right? Make it tighter. Well, not too tight. I want it from the waist up so I can have, I want to be able to show that characters are and what they're walking into. Alright, so I can still have that door behind them. I could just make it a bit tighter of a shot. I don't have to always show a full body for the characters, especially with familiar characters, right? And we can kinda monotone, like I said, you want to have that Soviet set, set dressing behind or something. You don't want to forget that kinda stuff for the reaction shot could be. All of their reactions, Here's one head, Here's another one, here's another one. And they're all kinda like looking around. But this and again I use Wolverine here, right? This one has the, I, Like I said, I wrote this script, so I have it in my mind that he kinda sniffs and he catches something, right? So there's that maybe the reaction is not so much to what's happening. But these guys could be looking at Wolverine, are looking around or reacting to him. Right. Okay. And then we've got could be a panel overlay, something like this. Be careful because already I can see I'm running into trouble squishing into Wolverine here, right? So I would have to really adjust how the phases are here. Maybe I'll bump them in. And then it could be one of the guys with the coils, right? The big eyes, the hands wrapped around it, that type of thing and their body here, right? Okay. So when then for P4 for example, I could have the like the back of Omega right here. You know, him facing off. I don't know if I want the back of them, but I could kinda have backslash three quarters. And the rest of the X-men staggered here coming towards him and stuff, right. So that type of thing, maybe even if I want whoever he's got could be here wrapped up in a coil, right? Okay, so now once I've done these thumbs, then I kinda come over and look at them all and I say, well, how's my float? Not bad, I can move, I can move the flow this way type of thing, right? This one comes up to here. I like this, that the, the eyes bring me down here. And this movement kinda pushes me into this direction. This second one is this one simple. And that's kinda how I laid it out, right? But the second one, I'm kind of liking so far. This one is nice. We've got this kind of angled here, right? This angles slopes us back to the reaction. The overlap here on both sides from P2 into p3 brings us pretty good. The angle of P3 shoots us down into P4. So with these thumbs, we can use these hints to move her eyes a little bit. And you'll see that in in the panel flow unit and stuff like that. I just kinda, after I summed this out, I kinda think, okay, well how do I like it? This is straightforward, becomes the reactions. I kinda don't like this overlap here. With this one could do is look back this way. Brings us down to this one. And something about the body can bring us into this one, right? So you can see now that I've kind of done some thumbs here and stuff, right? You can see there's a simple layout. There's some angled ones and give a little bit of motion here. There's using overlaps, There's using all these techniques. But as I'm kinda moving my thumbs are, as I'm moving through these thumbs, kinda looking at what I like about them. I'm also doing a little bit adjustment. I'm like, Okay, well the body is going to sweep this way. So it brings us into this character. The angle of the body should be this way. So it brings us down. The horror on the eyes can be down here to bring us down into this direction, right? I'm starting to do these little, little tiny tweaks. And then I start to decide, okay, which page do I like? And of course, even after this then what I would be doing is making sure if there's no dialogue and this one right, but making sure I have room for my dialog bubbles. Yeah, I mean, like if I've got a big rammed by omega red here, it's only got, so I've got maybe three dialog bubbles. Do I have room for them? 123. Do you know? I mean, like I'm guessing let's say P1, P2, and P4 have dialogue moles, P1, P2, and P4 having dialog bubbles or something. So I would start to plot out my dialog bubbles just a little bit. Again, a lot of this stuff you're going to be learning in other units. But I wanted to show you how I quickly and really ugly and dirty approach thumbnailing. I hope this helps a little bit, guys. 21. Storyboarding with Jean Claude: Hey guys, we're back with another unit and how to make comics. This time, I've got another good buddy with me. I pointed the right way again. He's going to help us with storyboarding. So Jeanne-Claude, what he got for us today. Thank you for having me. Today. We're going to take a really quick overview on the process of storyboarding, either for animation or for live action films and TV series. The basic premise of a storyboard is you take the directors script or to seem that he's sending you. And then you read the script. And then according to this script, you have shots coming in your mind's eye, right? Because you're imagining stuff. Your job as a storyboard is, is to try as much as possible to take the vision of the director and put it on paper. Sorry that it's the first quick edit of his film before he goes on set and starts shooting the film. Because that way, you know, it's going to save him money if he if he has a blueprint to work from. So that's the that's the main goal, right? Today. What you sent me was a script from the X-Men, right? Right. The real simplified one I wrote out for a quick contest. We're running in the group, right? I remember seeing that passing by a few weeks by. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna take the same script and org just going to take like one or two shots. And if we have time, we'll go through Shah 3 and 4. And now I know you guys work in panels. One, historian, storyboard. When you're doing storyboards, all the panels are shots, right? Terminology changes a little bit. Yeah. So what we have here for Shot Number one is X-Men entering an old Soviet warehouse. So you choose your team members but must include at least for known X-men. So what I did is I went and chose my tag team or we're okay. We got wolverines. Take long. Yeah, the blue team. We have sorry, lock and gambit and big baddie is omega. Read the script. So we know that it's a Russian military base. So the first thing that comes into my mind is a distant playing covered with snow when maybe some mountain rocks behind them, the base, sterile environment, the dead silent and vary a little bit creepy, cold. So that's the kind of ongoing for so the first you Yeah. Go ahead. I was going to say, yeah, that's somewhere out in Siberia where nobody knows type of thing, right? Exactly, exactly what I had in mind. So so you start sketching basically a rough, very rough, quick outlines. You know, you work your, your composition and you, you, you just play with forms a little bit like what comic book artists would do? Absolutely. And there's nothing, nothing really fancy about this. Thumbnails sketching, and figuring out your shot and placing your most important elements. And now what you see here, I don't know if you can see this on screen. There's a grid here. Absolutely. I can see that for red, for red dots, this grid is known as the rule of thirds. Yeah. So basically my frame is split into three equal parts. Okay? Yep, so we've got 1, 2, 3 section over here in the middle and three on the right. The main ideas, whatever you have closest most important element in your design, you want them to be where the cross-section of these does grit is. Okay. You basically have four for places where you have the option of putting your most important element of the scene. So we know in our case, we have our characters that are going toward the base. And we have the base, which is like in the mountain or amongst the mountain itself, right? We got one dot here, we got one dot here. So I'm thinking, okay, let's put our characters over here. Going something like this. And the closest that you are, like I said to these red dots, That's where your eye is going to be attracted first. Absolutely. And we have the base and the back. And it doesn't have to be, like I said, any fancy because your most important skill as a storyboard artist is not illustration. What its communication. Clarity is. The utmost important thing here. I love that. Okay? It has to be clear. If it's not where, scratch it off, go back to the drawing board. It has to be clear. So clear and a monkey has to understand it. That's how, how clear it has to be. So you have to use basic shapes, okay? With basic tones. 2, 3, 4 tones, max. So we got our characters over here. Let's put them in black, right? Yep. They already X-Men have the base and the back. So let's put a little darker tonal we hear about. You don't want to go too dark. Dark enough so that you know, you know what you're looking at. And so it separates the elements, right? You're using into the different tones to just signify whats what a little bit from the other? Yes. Yes, exactly. Because your ears, one of the things that you want to respect while you're doing a storyboard and you want to have that foreground, middle ground background sure. Depth within your image, right? Right. Phones are there to separate those layers of depth. So whatever is in the middle tones going to be in the middle, the middle ground, treasure, middle ground, middle tone, background, background and depends, you know, you can go light or dark. But they have this nice. Let's put some white in the back. So this dark shape over here is going to be brought right in our face, right? And let's put some water here. Let's go quickselect we here. Just to give you yet make it easy because that's what you want to go for. Sorry, my mistake over here. In animation, the thing is you got so much boards that you have to go through within the day that you don't have the luxury of spending too much time on flushing things out. In live action. It's a little bit different because movies or not produced in film within a month, right? Right. You got a certain amount of multiple weeks or months to work your things out. So the last gig I did, I I storyboarded a horror movie and I was on it for eight months. Well, okay. Well, the boards have a little bit more flesh color underneath him. Well, looking at this simple thumb, simple board is taking you five minutes, but it's not a rushed five minutes. You are thinking you are kinda just to get through. And I think that's reasonable for when you're applying our thumbs. And the thing with this is just because this is your first ticket. The can doesn't mean this is the one you'd necessarily stick with. Exactly because your part as a board artist is to think a synchronous shot through it. And so, you know your ear being hired yes, for your illustration skills, but more for your storytelling skills. But no more important, like I said, out to clarify that that story or that sequence or camera movement, it has to be clear. Absolutely, no. So that's why you have to use basic shapes. And by using your basic shapes like that, you're going back to the basics of drawing. You draw with. You start with your basic shapes and then you move on to the more complicated things. But trust me, if you practice this every day, your drawing skills are going to go rocket. I agree, people forget these basic fundamentals, right? If you have a problem in your drawing skills, you have a problem in your fundamentals. And don't, don't, I'm not perfect either. Trust me, I got plenty of flaws I have to work on right? Now. This is to say if you're going to be a comic book artist and you want to work your stories telling your story, telling skills. And your, your, your, your drawing ability because you have to know your perspective and move that camera around, right? Right. Storyboarding is the perfect, that perfect entry job for you. If I would say. And this shape over here, let's say it's a big rock or something like that. It's going to be a little bit darker. So as you can see, I'm going for now, might be a little bit Star Wars E, my stuff over here, but that's all right. I mean it works. Simple shapes like that. And don't be afraid to just a scribble around and make random shapes sometimes gives you your, your, your wanna, you wanna point your eye toward those four points, right? Put elements here and you just try things out. And if it doesn't work well, you haven't spent the three hours or any crazy time like that. Absolutely. I'll say the thumbs. That's the time to just plot it out. Taking, take a step back. Well, yeah, it's the coolest stage because your ear figuring your story out. And in year 0 came and I got like 20 ideas when I could. As the character as well. And the thumbnails stages there for that, you know, exactly. So yes. So basically that would be our first shot man. Normally, I would like work 23 more thumbnails, but I think just one is right off the bat. It's working. Yes. I agree. You know, your darkest element normally near the camera or your ear, your foreground are usually dark. So that's what you're, are you going to be referring to as your foreground elements? And then the mid ground, like I said, you go middle tone in the background. The more you go into the distance you have that atmospheric perspective. This is what it's called. It's the layers of molecules between your eye and the object in the distance. You've got dust and you've got particles in the air. Yeah. This will influence how things are looking depending on how close or how far things are from your eye. So in my I teach of background and perspective course, and I called it atmospheric occlusion. It's just exactly what it does. It gets less visible. Yes. Yes. So the saturation value drops as, as a discipline has its own to them. It's, sometimes, it makes you wonder because you're thinking, wow, is that really possible? You know, when you've got so much saturation and on an object right in front of you, but like maybe 25 feet, you know, a thing just drops when he got the saturation dropping on the next objects, like it's too radical. Well, sometimes it is, it is, I'm lucky that I live in the mountains. Mountains are perfect for that, that you can see the layers of the mountains disappear right before you, right? Yeah. Okay. So shut number two, what we got is panel to close up face shot. No, sorry. Well, it depends actually what you wanna do it you want you want because technically what I did is there it's an exterior shot of that when they're getting at the base. Right. So we can take a shot number 2 and put it inside and see the character is coming in. What would be the logical step to do when story-boarding? Or we can skip that and just go straight through panel 2 and an a comic format. I think that would work either way because logic dictates well, if the interior is darker than you, you kind of put and two together and you, you you figure out things on your own, right? So what I was thinking was that, yeah, they're entering the door, they kinda have this suspicion or whatever as they're entering the doorway or something along those lines, right. Okay. Okay. Let's do that. All right. The good thing is you've got the writer is sitting here right now so we can kind of bounce ideas off of the thing. I mean, when you're doing a storyboard for film or for a TV series, you know. Sometimes most of the time actually you're going to be sitting down with the director is right there. And he's explaining the shot with you because it's it's dance, right? It's like you're in your ear following a certain rhythm and as you find your, uh, your, your beat, when things will start, the flow better between you and the director. So when you're going to draw, everything's going to be smooth and silky. Yeah. Alright. Interesting is as you start this, it's just so interesting that in this course we've got, I've got so many units on composition, on shot types, on beats, on flow, on all these types of things. So bringing you in as a guest lecture, fascinating to me because so much of what I've already laid out in this course, you will do, right? It's just, there's so much overlap and that's why I'm so happy to have you here, is that so people can see how they're not really that separate, that there's so much that matches. Well. Yes, because the both field of work is, is this main, the main core of it is telling a story. Telling a story through pictures. That's the basic. Whether you're doing storyboards or, or, or comic book work or video editing. You're always telling the same story. It's a duty formats 2D format story. Yep. So the same basic rules apply. It has to be clear. You have to follow certain rules. There are bending in which feel you are, you just learned the lingo and then basically you learn them. But often a lot of the basic premises are the same, right? Yes. Yeah, exactly. So walk me through this a little bit of what you're looking at here. Okay? So right now we're going to be I'm pointing the camera amongst boxes and crates around here on the left and right. These are going to be like maybe some polls with signs on them. And in the background we have the door. Okay. Yeah. And I'm just going to reduce my size here a little bit. And we noticed, let's open the doors, making the big, big like military BIPOC complex know that's huge. It's huge door and he gets from panel lines on the door here and there in the warehouse. So let's put the roof or something like that. And if you see me during my hand write notes because I'm looking at some photo references and just using some basic elements from the photo. Always smart. I loved that you have the character references off to the side, but on another screen or on a desktop, somewhere in Soviet icon ology, you've got warehouses, all that kinda stuff. Well, you gotta, you gotta try it and do your research as much as possible within the timeframe that you have right now, otherwise, your stuff is not going to be very credible, if I should say your are believable. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So many people get stuck on thinking they have to draw without reference. And I think it's one of the biggest mistakes a lot of young artists make. Then what? I totally agree with you, I mean, it's, I don't know where that concept comes comes from. Just being afraid to use references like it's not. You know, if if in your mind, this is cheating your urine. Pardon me, but you're insulting all the artists that came before you for the last 300 years, including Beethoven and Mozart, right? They, they did, they just didn't learn how to write music out of, out of the ether. They have the copy somebody at some point in their lifetime and the views that knowledge, you know, okay, learning a piece of music and they adapted it to their own. And it's the same thing with withdrawing. What's interesting is I actually worked in a warehouse in my teens. And so I've warehouse experience, I've been in warehouses, you know, spent hours upon hours of maybe too many hours and working in one where it doesn't mean it's fresh in my mind and I'm able to recall the details that might help me make a drawing. That's a really convincing, all right, Well, that's it. Exactly. You said it. One of my teachers when I was in Boston and Montreal, I did the illustration and design course. And one of my teacher said, whenever you're going to draw something, do not draw what you think it looks like. Go check out the reference and draw what it is. Yet. That's not. And like I said, get that concept out of your mind because if you think drawing is a drawing from reference is cheating, you're not going to be working professionally like that. Absolutely all the professionals, they do professional work. There. It's quality. There's a reason for it because they use reference. Yeah. And that's really important to understand for thinking about this stuff that you're working on. I can see the figures a little further back, right? Yeah. We're right in the door right here. What I might do and like it, maybe you don't have to do this right now. But what I would do is they're they're showing concern or apprehension. So right now the rough ER the rough figures coming in the door. But if I was to flesh it out even more, maybe in the next stage, I would have them kind of hunched over or like, you know, looking like each person looking at different points in the room for something, you know, stepping in with caution and stuff, right. Okay. Yeah. Maybe maybe I don't know who do you got? Maybe somebody with arrogance, gambit might be just walking in, whittling a stick or something. Green would be crouched in a crouched position. Taking in the air, those types of things. So you can do that in the thumb stage, I think, or you can do it in just this. Like for me, there's thumbs, then there's rough sketch, then Ben linework and so on. Right. So I would do an in-between those first two stages for okay. Okay. Let's skip right through that and let's how about we we take this shot and we go closer on this shot. Again, that would work. We had to bring the camera a little bit closer on this one. Let's go, Let's create a duplicate. And I'm going to say the other one. And this shot over here, what we're gonna do is when you bring it up like that. Yep. It's like you're zooming with your camera? Yes. Okay. I think something like that would work. And you know, what's interesting is, and I'm not about to strip down for this or anything, but sometimes I use my own body as reference. I guess. I'll take a picture and I'll be like, you know, like some apprehension or join me in like some kind of stance. Yes. Sure. My introvert and say, okay, well, that's that's caution. That's the body language for caution or it is, right? Yeah. No, for sure you do whatever is necessary in order to convey that. That vibe or that emotion or the body language, you know, because that's what it's all about. So what wrong layer? Okay. Just to read, reposition our stuff. We got the door, got the ground plane over here. This poll is in front and let's put a sign. May mean perspective like this. Yeah. Just a crop year I even more. And off to the right, you'd have a hint of a crate or something like I could just see the tickets narrates. So just a corner. Just so you know, you're punching that foreground, middle ground and then the character is coming in, are punch back, right, right. Okay. New layer. Now we're going to get them to the characters. Okay, so let's say we have a wolverine. Let's go for Wolverine here. Well, I don't know if you guys are going to see this, but it's okay. Zoom in and it's looking good. It's pretty faint. So again, you know, I just use basic shapes. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what I do. I use a basic kinda articulated stick man. And from there, you don't want triangles for later use and cylinders, fore arms, whatever kinda for me it's whatever flows for your brain best. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Some people silhouetted in, block it out. For me, stick figures really work because I liked the articulation, that movement and stuff, right? Yeah. That's the way I see it. Oh, yeah, I can see that come into you know, it's like, yeah. Don't don't stress over the quality. Especially at this stage. Exactly when I send off thumbs. My only hope is that it has enough readability that the client can make a choice on it. Exactly. Yep. So basically what we did here is we took a camera and we zoomed in on the entrance of the military base, a big giant doors in the background. And we can put some snow banks here, maybe some trees with the you know what, you know that this is the exterior shot outside. Right now. They're coming in and we have crates in the foreground here. And that pole with the sign on it and stuff yeah, pulls over here. We can maybe put a sign and black over here just to give that extra depth to to the foreground, middle ground and background thing. We have our character is coming through the door. Now what I want to stress out here is it's important to have clear silhouettes of each character because it's a quick read. And you have to remember when you're doing storyboards. The shot that I'm drawing is probably going to be onscreen only for maybe a second. And within that second, your brain has to the time to do a quick read, a quick snapshot, and analyze it. And if things are not clear, well, you're going to be lost. You know, it's the same with comics. You know, how much time the eye spends on one panel is not much right now and how much text is there or something like that. There's a few factors coming in, but generally speaking, it's boom, boom, boom, boom. You catch a quick where you don't exactly. So you see right here, what I'm finding is the whole idea was kinda cool, but it's not worse yet, right? Because we're losing gambit here and they're entering four side-by-side, so we haven't moved that pull over even further to the left there. Yep. And just just it's still in the shot, but it's just. Out of the way, right? Yeah. I'm just gonna put it on its own layer and move it here. Now we have some space. Okay, Perfect. Go. So now you have a good quick read coming in. And now it's going to be time for put some, some tones on the door. There's we want to be able to see our characters a little bit better, so we're going to go darker 4 to the door. Okay. Okay. Not too dark, darker colors this so we're going to go a little bit darker. And we're going to do a quick selection here. Boom. Okay, so know it works. Same thing on the other side. Again, this isn't about making it super pretty or anything like that. It's really about storytelling. You know, it's, it's, it's really about telling your director, listen, you got your own vision. I get it. But we have to be on the same page here. And in order to do that, the most efficient way to work is to keep it simple, stupid, and just straight, straight to the point. Absolutely. And that's how you work. Your story. Telling skills more efficiently. Yeah. I mean, that's about it. I'm guessing you have similar similar techniques or approach when you're doing comics, right? Absolutely. And, you know, thumbnailing is the premises basically the same. I just loved that. Watching how different people will approach different shots. Where you want to choose your camera, where's it coming from, what kind of angles, those types of things. And so watching you coming at it from a film perspective, I think it's teaching myself and the students quite a lot. Well good. That's the point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To learn from each other in order to do your job a little bit better. Basically, that's what I'm going for here. White background. So that we have our character popping up. Everything has the BOP. Absolutely. And all the rest of it when it comes to lighting and everything that totally comes later. This is just about readability and composition. Yeah, I mean, again, don't, don't get me wrong. I mean, rendering is fun. But there's a certain amount of rendering that you're going to be limited to do. Unless you have three hours, three years to work on a film like Star Wars or something? No, you have the luxury of doing every panel photo realistically if you want, and where the afterwards might actually sell and make you some money for sure. But normally, if things are clear and you keep it simple, you know, maybe a little bit refining. I got an example actually of this shot. I, I kinda cheated. Surely. Boom. Okay, perfect. That's C. So it's the first shot that I sketched out there earlier. Yeah. We zoomed in, but this is it's black. It's great. It's white. And if I if I really zoom in, it's not that clean my friend. Okay, That's reads perfectly. Exactly. That's what you wanna do, right? You want to be able to read it at a distance. And this works. Does this, this would be considered an effective final storyboard panel for production. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, any chance you've got penalty done up like that as well. Yeah. Let me jump right ahead on this one. We've got one, right? Yeah, That's the next day. I got so many folders in here. We go. Panel three. There we go. So it's a little bit more closer to the camera. But the main idea is there. So why, why I went that way is because in our previous shot we had the four coming in through the door. And then a quick cut. We pull we we we we pull in the camera closer to Wolverine as he's turning his head. And he notices, sorry Loc, she's being grabbed by metallic tentacle of omega reds main weapon, right? And she's, she's choking right now is like that. And then she's trying to get free and gambit. He's surprises turning around the old man. I haven't I didn't see that coming. Right. Basically. Yeah. That's it. A minute and mid-size shot from basically from the waist up on. So if we, if we go through our chart over here, our main focuses on silos, right? So it would be a medium close-up shot for shot depending on which you want to. I think our focus is sy log, so that's mid to medium close shot. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, That's it. Keep keeping keeping in mind your ear, your foreground, middle ground, background. Yeah. You don't want to compete when there's an important thing like that and you know that somebody's going to get grabbed or kidnap or whatever. Usually the background, you don't put too much details in the background because that's going to compete yet with the main action of the scene. And you don't want to suggest, is part of your job as a board artist is you want to suggest things simple, most effective way. Again, clarity. You have to go somewhere. And 4 shot for AI. It's not done like this. But it was in the process of doing the quick thumbnail. This looks more like my thumbs. I don't I don't usually put in the tonal values on it and stuff like u du, which I love. I just for some reason don't put my thumbs often look like this. Okay. And then what I do is weirdly, is due almost a halo outline of the figures or the elements foreground and background just to, just a quick Halo to kinda separate those layers, right? Okay. So you're going to do like a fat brett outline of around four grams or whatever just to give some separation. Yeah. I see what you're going in here. So let's say, let's just give it a shot just for fun. But for readability, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. R1. So we got the dude in the foreground right here. Let's say it's Wolverine light. Yeah. Guys clause. There we go. There we go. Yeah. You could already just punched whatever it was. Full answer. It's right in front of the camera lens, right? Yeah. Yeah. I guess you would you would play more with your your line thickness? I do. And then I go mid ground and half the line thickness you're going to run might not and stuff, right? Okay. This is awesome. Yeah, that's basically it, man. You have to keep it simple, stupid. Against stresses. Stress this enough. Clarity. Clarity is going in, has to be clear. If it's not clear, go back to the drawing board. Down on the details, there's too much details and if it's competing with some of your elements within the scene, cuts down under details. It's no good. You have the why why risk it when you can. Do, you know, not a half-ass job, but you have to be clear. And that's very clear. So what I've learned from you during this is clarity basically comes from composition. Yes. From silhouettes? Absolutely. And from even introducing tonal values, yes, yep, for the separation of these three elements together are going to be able to sell the shot in terms of foreground, middle ground, background. Perfect. Jeanne-claude, thank you for spending this time with us today. I think the students are going to love it. Some might say, well, it's not exactly formatted for comics, but they're wrong because every lesson that you've taught today has been very clear and very applicable to working in comics. Thanks for coming out today, man. No problem. Rather see you next time. All right, and for the students, Let's see some of your thumbnails. I want you to send them off to me. I think there can be some pretty cool storytelling going on. Okay, Have fun. 22. Color Theory: Hey guys, we're back and I've got another cool unit for you here and how to make comics. This one, we're gonna talk about color and color theory, and specifically how it can be used to manipulate the eye to have the viewer work through your comic book the way you want them to. Okay, we're going to start with some very basics and just see how we can now apply this going forward into a comic book, right? Let's talk about value for a quick second year. When it comes to value. What we're basically looking at is going from light to dark here you can see how, you know, like at this end of the spectrum there's basically nothing. And then I brought it all the way to black. As a kid when I was first studying art, you tried these little value swatches where you are shading and trying to bring it all the way. Like it's kinda hard to do with this tablet, but bringing a value swatch from light all the way to dark in your shading, or you'll hear the term gradient often used as well. Okay, So when we look at value, what does it do? Well, the contrast between black and white can draw the eye, right? So you can use contrast to pull the eye in a certain direction or to confuse the eye. You can also use it just to drag the viewer in this direction. Imagine if we were starting off a scene or something like that. And by the end of the panel or end of the page, we work towards this darker saturation that can be manipulated to pull that i. Okay, now we're gonna take a quick look at saturation. Saturation is from kind of a high point of the color to almost no color being visible. And you can actually bring it, I could bring it even further down into black. I grew up in the 80s. So this high point of color seem to be everywhere. Those fluorescent greens and yellows and reds and pinks, right? You can use this a lot in, in your coloring, but it can also be abused, much like the eighties. What happens? Well, once again, your eye is pulled to these extremes, right? You'll find though, that when you are desaturating a color, usually you lose the viewer. Okay, it starts to become less intense, less I catchy. And so if I have everything with this saturation sitting around and all of a sudden I throw this in. Well, that's where the eye is going to go. Okay? So once again, value is just from light to dark in tonal value, saturation is from extreme color to not so much. Moving on to a little bit of color theory. We've got a nice color wheel here. There's a few different approaches to it. We can talk about some of the primary colors. Red, yellow, blue are primaries, and those are the basic ones we start to learn in early elementary school. A more what I want to talk to you on color theory is color relationships. One that is used very often is complimentary colors. That is using a color from one end of the wheel and using it to combine with the other end of the wheel. Okay? So you can see in this complimentary example they used red and green. You can use almost any of them and they punch really hard. There's a nice contrast between them and that's why they're used there, the punch hard, but they compliment each other. Okay? We can also use a little bit more complicated is the split complimentary where you're working the, again, the opposite side of the color wheel, but splitting it as it comes down here. So be read as our primary and then splitting it to this off green and teal, right? Okay. Another one we can use is a triadic. This one's tough. There's, can really pull the eye in different directions. You know, we're already, the complimentary is pulling the eye in two directions here. It's triadic as much tougher. What it does is it splits you. And if we're going to go with these primaries, we'll be using red, yellow, and blue when you use the triadic approach to color theory. My recommendation generally is to back it out a little bit to punch the saturation on one of the colors and then back the saturation out of the others. So if I really wanted to use this theory or this approach, what I would do is punch red and just surrounded with blue and yellow. And I'm going to show you how we apply some of this a little bit later. The next one is analogous. And that's basically working within colors that are very close to each other. You can use three or four in a row and you'll find that the kinda push each other, help each other, but don't contrast as much, right? Okay, So these are some basic approaches and you're going to have this sheet in your resources to always be referring to it. Okay, So why don't we apply this to one of my old pieces. Here we go. We've got a spawn piece. This is the original piece that I've, I've done, so I have an alter the colors at all. But what I wanna do now is go into saturation. So let's go in here and adjust the saturation, just see how we feel. I can bring the saturation down. And you can see how muted it gets right down even further. And I've washed almost all the color out of it and down all the way, and now it's a black and white. Okay. What if I bring it back up to the original and then I start to bump it and punch it more. Okay. Well, it's getting pretty punchy. No longer looks like it's at night necessarily. Yeah. This is getting really really punched up an almost fluorescent right? And you can see how, how punching it that far has distorted any of my my actual normal colors, right? What do we think? I think this can have a nice effect. Sometimes if we punch the saturation really, really high. It can have that kind of eighties poster look or something like that. But it can also get really ugly, really fast. So I think you've got to really be aware of what you're doing here with that. All right, the next one we're going to talk about is the tonal value. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to bump this out and bring it to black and white. Okay, So we've got that now. And we can see how there's not a lot of contrasts. The biggest contrast is up here in the moon, the rim light on top of venom, and then just a little bit down below, right. But what if I start to play with that? What if I come in and I start to change the contrast? I can punch it up or down. There we go. You can see how dark that can get right. Like but what did it do? It just changed the mood and darken her out, made it scarier, made it more ominous. What if I punch it up this way? Well now it lightened everything, made it softer, kind of faded everything out, right? What you might want to do with something like this is select certain pieces that you want to punch harder and then do exactly what I just did. So we'll go back and see if we can punch this a little bit more. There you go. Now look at how that changed the mood. He's dark and punching over, grabbing over top here, right? Yeah. It can become obviously this, this is too much, right? And what does that do? That weakens it up, right? So I think you can use contrast to push just one area of the piece. If you really want to push one area of the piece. Another technique that I use sometimes for both saturation and contrast is I paint over, over the main character or main emphasis of that panel. And then I switched the layer to something like an overlay. And what it does is just adds a little bit more punch to it. Okay? So there's a lot of little tricks you can do using this basic approach of Moving tonal value, right? And like I said, if we want to, we can even move her back just a little bit. And that lightens or upright. So now we've got kind of light. It's over, he's all dark. And then it goes back towards her being light. This is ugly because I'm piecing it together for you. But I wanted to show you how just adjusting these values can adjust where our eye goes on this piece. Now, it went from relatively even to now. Our eye gets drawn in the middle here on venom. And then if, if I was painting this now using these values, obviously I would try to highlight the face a little bit more and punch it forward so that, you know, that tongue maybe pop a little bit more, something like that, right? Okay, now let's talk a little bit about color theory on this. The different approaches. You can see what I've got going on here is in this picture, what do I have? I've venoms actually more of a dark blue. But the lighting that I've used here has placed him into this kinda semi green. I would say it's he's kinda in this zone. If I'm looking at this area right, like I've got it here. And with the character down below, she's here. So do we remember what theory we're working on or what approach? Analogous, right? We're using the analogous approach. I could change it though. Let's see if I want to change this up just a little bit. And this is going to be a little bit tough. So bear with me here as I tried to change it. What if we want to go with complimentary colors? So I'm gonna go with a blue. I'm going to actually pick it from here. And I'm going to go with the complimentary of it, which is the orange. So now what I can do is use this blue color over him. Okay? Now, this doesn't look great because right now I'm just coloring over him. It's, it's kinda blurring out the details. What I can do is switch the color layer or the layer setting to something called color actually. And I'm going to come down here and give her more of an orange. She was already a kind of an orange, so it's not punching too hard right now, right? There we go. But we can see how that complimentary approach could really work. There's this huge contrast between the blue and the orange, right? And income. So that's a nice approach. Okay, So why don't we try the triadic approach? Let's see what are we going to do? We can go with this red, yellow, blue, keep it primary, nice and simple, right? Okay, So blue, I'm kinda staying consistent coloring vitamin blue here. There we go. Okay. And like I said, I'm going to switch that layer setting to just give it a little bit of color there. Okay. What else have we got? We've got blue, red. Why don't we go red in the background. See if that how that punches. Give red behind. There we go. And then if it's red, blue, it is yellow for our last one. And we'll come down below here. And and do an yellow. And like I said, she was already a yellow, green. So I don't think that changes too much. Not bad. I think there's obviously using the triadic system here. It's got a lot of punch that separates the three basic zones, the back, sky, venom, and silk. But what did I say about using this approach? Usually I prefer to punch 12, punch one of these. Right now, I feel like the red and the blue are really competing with each other. And so if I was to do this from the ground up, I think I would approach a different I think that I might keep a soft, soft, soft. And let's let's do that a little bit. I would keep a very soft red in the back. Okay. Meaning like just really low low flow. Just just touch it. There we go. That's better. And then that'll punch him forward enough without our eye being drawn to the sky. And one more approach I want to talk about is mood. Mood with colors, and how he can use that in manipulating the eye. So if I want to punch something forward, I can often use warm colors. Just by doing this right now. What happens? Now? All of a sudden, if you were to back away or squint just a little bit, right? Venoms pop-in. I used a warm color to pop venom. Ok. And then I can use a cooler color to punch everything else back. Look at that. Yeah, that works. Okay. So if I want to manipulate this, if you want a character standing in the scene and you want to pop them just a little bit extra compared to the background or even compared to the other characters that are standing around. You can use a little bit of a warm overlay on top of that character and just get them pop and forward, right? In this one you could see there's only two characters, so it looks kind of funky, but what if we were to reverse it? And I do the same thing. Emphasizing down here. Okay, so now she's going to be pop forward and venom is going to be push-back. There we go. So now she's pop in and he's lurking, right? We've taken her and I can use a little bit of orange if I want here. We've taken her and brought her forward by using this warm coloring, looking at even just put that on the face and that look how much it pumped the face forward, right? Okay, so to recap, value is going from light to dark. Saturation is going from color to almost none. When we talk about the color wheel, we can talk about the relationships, everything from the complimentary colors, the triadic split, complementary, hold that type of thing, right? And then we can also get into how colors have different meanings. The red, being warm and passionate, bringing energy forward, right? Blues can be quiet, cool, making things calm. Orange often brings like an autumn feeling. And so if you look at movie posters, you'll see that they use this to manipulate the audience into being attracted to a certain part of the poster or a certain mood for the movie, right? And I think, like I said during the example, that you can use it in your comic. You can use it on a cover as I'm showing here, but you can also use it within the panels. Imagine trying to pull the reader from one panel to the next. What could you do? Could you warm those panels as they progress? Could you use cold versus warm as a contrast between settings within the storytelling? Heck, like I said, even in one panel, you could punch one character by bumping up the saturation or using the tonal value to just put the background further back. All of this stuff. All of these approaches to color theory will help you be able to tell your story better. Guys. I hope this helped. And I hope even though it was just a brief introduction to color theory, that it gives you a lot of good ideas. Have fun playing with it. 23. Fonts and Dialogue: Okay guys, we're back and we've got another unit for you here. This time we're going to be talking about fonts and dialogues. Now, this is far more exciting than making that title sound right now, right? It's actually a really valuable units, so unknown. Let's get to it. Okay, so this first example, one and I kinda zoom in here for us. We're going to focus on some different issues when it comes to using dialogue fonts, especially. The first one we have here. Let's see what's going on here. I put a big X, you know, I'm kinda of work ahead of time here. What's wrong with it? What do you see? Before I answer, I'm going to give you a second here. What do you see that's wrong with this? And that's enough time was wrong with it is if we look the spacing between these lines as horrible, the lines are mashing together. So it depends what program you're using. In Clip Studio Paint here. I can come in to the sub tool for it and then adjust the line spacing. There's a few things I can do here. I do it by percentage and I can just kinda bang it out on what you're generally looking for is to being able to have enough room to space so that it gets bold on both sides, like the first line and the second line. But you still they're not touching, right? So I can see there's still touching. So it kinda move it down to say about there. I think that would give us enough spacing on this to do what we want, right? Okay. Next one. What's the problem here? Yeah, you've probably guessed it. It's the spacing between the letters. So something's off here, right? Let's see, where did I had that? Same. Okay, so we've got the word spacing here. And so in Clip Studio Paint one I'm using, this is the one I would use to kind of expand it out so I can go, this is the text I'm using, right? They also have things like character spacing, which nudges it just a little bit more so you can, you really want to adjusted to see I want to have a relatively tight but not so they're squished together or anything like that. Right. So I can kinda like the spacing there. Yeah, I think that's what I would go for. So you can kind of play with some of the settings here. And whether you're using Photoshop or metabolic or whatever, Procreate, whatever. When you're using. You know, it's your choice or it's the programs nature rather how you adjust, right? Like it's, it's, I can't teach every program here. You've gotta kinda gotta learn your own programs, but I just want to show you the common things that happen here. So the first problem that we have on the first one is the line spacing. The second one was the word or character spacing, right? So you can adjust both of those and make sure it's working for you. What's the problem with the third one here? Almost the opposite of what we ran into the first time. There is the spacing was just too spaced out. Now this is good because i've, I've kinda staggered this soil will be aligned in a bubble a little bit right at the formats little bit better. But we can see if we compare this one to the one below. Let's get this off the screen. We can see that this one, It's too spaced out, it's too ugly. This one's nice and tight. Maybe a little bit too tight, I think. But no. Now that I'm looking at, I actually think that's legit. That's what I would put it into a dialog bubble. Okay, So speaking of a dialogue, this is a stylistic choice. The choice of fonts. It's up to you which font you want to use in your comic for dialogue. It's partially a style choice. It's what you feel comfortable with. It's also what the comic book is it a horror? Is it kinda fantasy and stuff? So you might want to play with a little bit just to see what kind of works for you. I included what was this about eight different examples. And so you can kinda look and say, well, this is what I like, right? And there's a lot more out there. What I would suggest doing is take a look or just Google it and say free fonts. Play with a few of them, go into those in and if there's ever anything you really want to consider buying it. Yeah, yeah, I think that it's worth buying. You know, when you find a font that you really like and somebody's put work into it, consider buying it. So these are my favorites that I have on my computer for dialogue, right? The one I probably use the most is letter automatic. And web letter, but it's up to you. Apparently you're not supposed to use Comic Sans though. Okay, rolling onto the next part, we're gonna talk a little bit about bubbles here, not in the bathtub, but rather dialogue balls, how they fit. We've got this one here. And there's something wrong with it. I feel like I need interaction here. I think I need some interaction with my students so you guys can be guessing what's wrong with this one. What do you think is wrong with it? Like it's actually not bad and what not I think about it. It's not that the word is not wrong. The word is Something's off and it's a choice here of how you want to present it. Basically, what's going on here is the the bubbles too big for the dialogue caption, right? But that's not exactly true. I'm going to give you a basic guideline in format to say. Generally speaking, you want the bubble and maybe I'm going to go even more here. You won't like this is not bad. I actually like this. But you want the bowl to be able to have only a little bit of space around. So what I'm gonna do is see if I can transform this even more. And I'm going to tighten it up just a little bit on the top and the bottom. Let's see if I can do this. Yeah, I'm kinda, I'm liking this. So generally speaking, I want to be able to fit maybe less than a letter around it. So it's fairly tight. That's a basic, That's what we're basically going for. That words or the letters and everything are close enough to it that you wouldn't be able to expand on that word or anything. Okay, So when it comes to dialogue, the bubble should be relatively tight. Here's a quick exception I'll give you. Sometimes you'll see a dialog bubble that's huge with small writing in the middle. This is very interesting. When you see this on a page, it'll kinda denote like a whisper. So you might see a regular dialogue bubble size. A regular size bubble. Oops, that's an point. Let's go here. Regular size bubble. And then the Writings really small inside. So it makes it feel like it's a bit of a whisper or something, right? So that's, that's the effect when you enlarge the bubble. But make the dialogue really small inside it's, it gives a kind of a surrounding silence, if that makes sense, right? So I think that's a nice little tip that you can use. I don't use it often. It can be overused a lot, right. But I think it's worth noting that every time I teach you guys a little bit of a general guideline, just know that there's ways to break that guideline. All right. There's ways around it. And yeah, I think it's really important to know. Okay. So we've gone through that a little bit about the sizing of the bubbles. This is once again a stylistic choice like if you really want, what you could have is a very thick outline, just like how when we talked about panels. You can have a thicker, bolder outline. And what's this going to do? You know, if you've got characters in the background or some scene going on and stuff, a huge thick dialogue outline will really punch this dialogue forward, right? A very thin line. Or like that. It might seem software might seem push back a little bit, a jagged line. What will that do it, it will give some action to it or some power, right? We covered this a little bit when we were talking about designing panels. And so the lessons that you learned in that unit, I think you could carry over into the, these word bubbles and stuff. Okay? So just realize that the variation is your choice. There's a standard and then there's a variation on it. Okay, moving on a little bit, we're going to talk about dialog bubbles within a scene. Let's see there's some simple rules. Don't cover somebody's face or any key point or anything like that, right? I thought this went without saying, but I've seen it a few times. Right. I get that things can get kinda tight, but really like don't. Okay. Let's see when it comes to moving it out, Let's see, There's a lot of things going on. It's a bigger bubble or something like that. You can punch it to the side like this. You've got two choices. When it comes to the side like this, okay? First choice would be, and I think it's the smartest is to cut it. I think cutting it along. Something like this and something like this, right? So that the dialog bubble stays within that, still within the bounds, right? But, you know, it's just cut off. The slivers are cut off, right? That would be usually the first choice. Whenever you have to punch it and that it's the bubble was slightly out of the panel. I would cut it off. Second choices, not cutting it. And this is getting braver, right? When you don't cut it, what does it do? It's the exact same thing we talked about in previous units about Panel bricks. Write this, now, draws us out of this panel this way. Right? So I don't recommend doing this very often, but you can use dialogue to bring you in to another panel. Again, I don't recommend doing it very often, but you can use dialogue to lead the viewer into another panel, especially if it's related to that of the panel. But it's almost like breaking the fourth wall or something. It's something that you want to do sparingly. Okay. Yeah. Be really careful with it. I wouldn't do it very, very often. Here's another one. He's saying this. She saying this. How are we going to do this? Right? Some people would say this. But that's a whole lot ugly. Really. You don't want to cross the tails at all. You can see how ugly this gets and you're starting to cross over people and stuff that's bad. Number one way to avoid this is plotted out in your thumbs. You don't want to run into this situation at all. You know, you want to avoid this as much as you can. If you can find another way. For example, let's see, I might take something like this guy, move it down here. Move hers over here. C. And this is even me trying to experiment or something, right? I'm trying to move this into an area that is not vital but still related to him. So we would go something like this. And then it can be here, here, right? So we've got 1, 2, and here's our flow. That could work. Alright? So like I said, the best way to not have this happen is to deal with it in the thumbs in the first place that you plot out, where are you going to stick? You don't have to write every word, but where you're going to stick a lot of the dialogue and then you're not fumbling like I am right now trying to figure this stuff out. Okay. Plotted out. But worst-case scenario, come up with a fixed like this that you're not covering anything essential. You're not overlapping tails. And it's not confusing and convoluted to the reader. Okay, that there's some reasonable flow to it. The reasonable flow that would happen on this panel. Okay. Speaking of tails, actually, we didn't really talk about this that much. Let's see if I can. There's ways to do tales. Obviously there's thought bubbles and stuff, right? But generally speaking, you want a short tail going in the direction of the person speaking and where they're speaking from. You can make it a little bit longer. You can make it slightly curved. You can stylize it. But again, you know, like state, kinda with basics. And then go from there. I prefer tight, short tails pointing in direction of the mouth. That's my preference. Keeps it simple, keep it tight. But it's cool if you want something different, right? And obviously what I'm doing here is I'm just kinda sketching it in. I'm not using what I would actually use for my tails here, right? I, using this program, I get to use something else. But you would see, you would make sure that you have the bubble, something along those lines. Don't aim it. Just generally at somebody's head. I don't I don't think it's very effective. Try to aim to from where they're speaking. I think that's a better lesson. Okay. Yeah, I think that I keep thinking like, jeez, all of this seems really basic and elementary, like people should know this stuff. But I'll kinda wanna make sure I cover these things just to make sure that you know some of the basic rules to it. So let's go over it. Some of the basic rules when it comes to fonts and dialogue. Don't squish the lines. Don't squish the characters or words. Don't expand it too much. Or when I just started something else, I'm going to throw in here for you. This is decent. Choose the dialogue font that suits you. When you're writing out a dialogue. Usually you want to stack it in the shape of the bubble that it's going to go in. If you write out a dialogue this, and you're going to have this long bubble. It looks goofy because you're going to have these curves going on here, right? For a bulletin caption or something. It works, but not when you're using ovals. Okay. When it comes to the border of the dialogue, thickness matters. Thin. You know, pushes it back. I've even seen them without a border. That's fine too. The thicker it is, the more punches it forward. So if you want something with emphasis, have a massively thick order to it, right? This is the same stuff that we covered in panels. You can also, as I've got here, get it all jaggedy, get it all funky. Make it irregular, whatever suits the style of communication you're trying to convey. When we talk about dialogue and between people. Try not to cross tails. Try not to put it over anything vital, especially faces. And try to have some nice flow that brings you through the panel. Okay guys. There's some really good information here. So I hope it helps you. And I hope that you're able to conveyed into an actual comic page to use that flow. And like I said, this is really well used in conjunction with panel flow. That isn't a previous unit. Hope you have fun with the guys. 24. Titles: Hey guys, we're back. And this time we're going to take a look at titles. How to make titles. No, I'm not going to teach you how to make the title for your comic as in like write it. But I'm going to teach you how different people approach visually presenting it and hopefully come up with something cool, and then it looks cool, right? That's the name of the game. So the first one we're gonna get into, first approach is what I like to call the basic font. With this basic font, you can see these are two, and it's basic. So it kinda throws back to some of the earlier comics, right? From the 50s, 60s, maybe even into seventies. Now I still see it used sometimes, but it's usually with a very customized font. The basic font gives basic focus, right? The name is there, it's recognizable, but you don't have to be pulled in by it necessarily. One thing that does help though, if you want to be pulled in by something a little bit. Let's see if I can do this. I'm going to punch in here. Title would help if I could spell title. Okay, maybe I'll even bump up the size a little bit. But I hate this font. This font is not what I want for, for, for what I'm doing here. I'll do something funky where there's gonna be a funky font and see if we could find something very interesting and we just kind of scrolling through. Okay, I don't mind that, right. That's not bad. Will make it a little bit bigger. So I've got the title here, and this is a basic font. It might be actually a little bit more exciting than one note. Now that I'm looking at Fantastic Four, they did a good job, right? But here's, here's a basic font. I don't necessarily love the color on it, but it'll work. I might, well, you could do is throw a gradient in here from little bit orange-ish red, and then it lightens up as it goes up, right, There's a lot of little tweaks. So I'm going to show you the first little tweak I wanted to show you on this one. Okay. The first one, and this depends on how you're doing. What you could do is you could come in by hand and stroke it. Let's see if I can go a little bit bigger. You could do a surrounding stroke around the letters. Obviously by hand. It takes more time than I'm giving it right now. But you can see how this could be used to punch the title a little bit, right? Okay. So by hand is possible. You could do it by hand and then you could, if you want to do it by hand, you get the cool thing about it is you could add weight into certain, certain parts of the line, right? You can add some weight in the under underbelly of, of it. Okay, so that, that can be used that way where another way to do it is to use a computer program like I'm doing here. Select tool. And then it's aligned stroke. So I'm going to go like the line width on this one. It's kind of a guessing game at first, depending on the size you're using. And there you go. So that's a quick way to do a simple font with a line stroke, with a surrounding stroke around it, right? You can vary things up. Tons. Okay, there's, there's tons that you can do here. It's really up to your imagination. I just wanted to show you a simple font with a stroke. Next one we're going to go on to is, what do I call this modified fonts, right? That's taking a normal font, but pulling, twisting, adjusting it to match whatever desired title or mood you want, right? In the case of Iron Man, they put the rivets right? In the case of vendors, they kinda dragged out and give a nice little arrow sign, right? So let's see if we do this again. And I'm going to punch in the same thing. I'm going to put in title. But once again, I absolutely hate that font. It's great for lettering, but not for any type, a title work or anything, right? So I'm kinda scrolling through and seeing if I could find something that looks interesting. Well, that's I don't know if I'd call it interesting. Honestly. I don't know about everybody else's oh, there is a modified one. Okay. Well, this has already been modified somewhat, right. So I'm going to use this one and then I'm going to play with it even more. I don't know about anybody else's font collection, but I've got like a lot. Okay, so I'm gonna go with that. Even though I really don't like the readability of this, I would not use it. What I'm going to do here is what I have to do is take this out of a font, format, rasterize it, and make it almost into just an image, right? So once I've got that image done, I'm gonna do something with this t. I want to enlarge it. And then what I can do is come in. And what don't I grab this and drag it over. There we go. Okay, so you can see how easy it could be to modify a font. You can extend the first letter, you could drag it, you could add a little arrow or image, or if your character has a circle logo on their chest, you can add that into the O or something like that. You could find ways to really modify the title's fonts to see if they can punch and be recognizable for your particular comic. Okay, so modified funds. Next one is a 3D font. You can see what happens is they've got their original text, right? In this case, instead of straight on, they've kinda warped it. And then they've dropped it down and made it into 3D scene with Superman here they got their original texts, they worked it a little bit and then drag it back and made it into 3D. It gives impact as in it's being punched off the page, right? That 3D effect punches the title forward. That's what you want. Then this is an awesome technique for you. Let's see if I can do something again here. Once again with my, my very simple title. And once again, I'm on the hunt for maybe a bit better. You know, what? Do I like this? This one so simple, it's called low writer. And I find it a real simple block font to deal with, even though it's got some bevels with it, I can switch up to something really crazy. Let's see if I can something like this. It's too big. All right, This kinda 70s vibe. Actually know what, I'm going to go with a 75. Okay, we'll do that. Now. Once again, if, once I start customizing things, I want to take this out of the font format unless the program you're using allows you to modify and adjust within that, the font format. A lot, a lot of programs don't. So it depends on what you're using here. I'm using Clip Studio Paint and they won't really let me. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to maybe distorted skew this one a little bit. There we go. I'll do it that way. Just tilt it. What do you think? No, I'm not loving that. I am loving that. That looks good. Now the word title looks stupid like this, but I think you're getting my drift right? Okay, so now I've got this title and I think it looks kinda cool. But I need that 3D effect. So there's a few ways I can do it. One of the easiest ways is to take this bottom layer and I'm going to fill it with something just gray for now. I can fill it in. And you can't see anything yet because I haven't moved it or watch this. So now I put it down like that, right? Okay, So now that's giving a 3D effect, but it's a little hole because it's all it was was a drop it's like a drop shadow at this point trip. So what I can do is if I really want to, I can come in and either use a pen tool or it depends what I want. I can start to fill. Fill this in as if it's true. 3d drop right from corner to corner. The proper corners that would correspond with, I'm kind of moving in this direction for my, my 3D effect. That's where I dropped it to, right. So right now I'm bringing, filling it up this way, keeping it consistent with this perspective. Right? There we go. Looks pretty cool. If I really want to, then I can add a stroke around it or something to that effect, right? Okay, So that, I think, I think that worked out really well, how that looks right. The other thing that I wanted to show you before I go on to this last one here, is taking something a plain flat color like this and adding a gradient to it. Okay? So if I, let's see, I'm going to pick what color I want. Maybe this a light orange, but I'm also going to pick kind of a fiery red. And it depends on the program you're using. And this is where it gets kind of funky because like, you know, like the programs vary so much in how they apply things that I can teach you every program, right? You're going have to experiment. You can even do this with pencil crowns though. You know, you could do this by hand. It doesn't have to be done by a program. I just find it easier to do this, this way to record it in short you. So what I'm gonna do it, so I'm going to play around with a little bit of a gradient operator and see how this works. We'll see if this thing, what was too much, don't necessarily love that one. And if I go the other way. Pause too much red. I just want to read, touching on the bottom. Maybe even less and less. There we go. Something like that where it's just rimming the bottom. Now, if I wanted to, I could come in and paint this by hand, right? Like I could just Bevin airbrush and kind of stroke it in if I want writer or a bit of a harder brush and start putting it in harder, right? It really depends on what I'm trying to achieve with this. You know, you can have some texture effect, whatever you want, right? I just wanted to show you that it doesn't always have to be a flat title. You can also throw a gradient into, great. Okay, so, so far we've covered basic fonts. With a stroke outline. We did modified fonts, dragging things out, right? We did 3D fonts, not just with a 3D, but adding a gradient into the coloring, right? And now we're getting into icons used. This one's a lot tougher because, you know, you can see there's maybe some success and some failure. I'm going to put why I have it on that pen. Obviously, some versions work better than others and you can see they've modified this font, they've dragged around. This one is from 60, some odd years ago, right? So it wasn't, It's creative. It's up to you how you want to do this. If you want to have the, the B, a, T, M, a and type of thing, you have to know whatever icons you're working with, whatever logos and stuff I got and see if you can modify it to what works for you. This one is very specific to your own comic. So I can teach you how to do it for each one, right? Like you gotta figure it out. I just wanted to put it in here as one of the options that you keep it in mind when you're working on projects like this. Okay guys, what I would love to do, what I would love to see you do is send me some of your title ideas. You don't even have to send me the names, right? You know, like if you've got the coolest comic book name ever and you don't want to get knelt there anything, right? You don't have to send it to me. It's all good. But I would really like to see you guys mix it up and do a lot of different approaches. Just like I've given you some examples here. And I want to see what you come up with. Okay, That's your homework. Play with it, you know, modified, twisted, and get creative with and have fun. Thanks guys. 25. Text effects: Hey guys, we're back with another unit. This time we're going to be looking at was worried I'd actually mess up saying that this first section that I'm wanting you to take a look at here are just some different fonts that I've chosen. I, when I'm doing effects on a page like this is what we're talking about, the big Bam, Wham slam type of effects, right? I'm looking at a font that presents thick and well for that. And not all fonts do that. Another unit of talked about just dialogue lettering and stuff. And fonts like that don't usually lend themselves well to effects as well. Some of them that are for covers don't work as well either. So I'll give an example. Like I think if I'm looking through this list here, I like bada, boom, maybe BT, VD, cartoon, chocolate cake I kinda like, but there's a problem with it. It's what it's got imbedded in. It is some little effects at the beginning that I don't like. So what I'm going to do is kind of flatten this out. And if I was to use this font, I would come in and erase this goofy Anise. It just isn't doing what, you know what I really wanted to do. It, it might be fun for, for whatever it was conceived of. But like for the effects that I'm looking for, I would have this as a straight effect font or something. So I would come in and clean it up. It seems to be the first letter out of the phrase. Maybe even I might come in and thicken it. Sometimes you can come and do this. It would be nice if I did it in the right color, black. But you can come in kind of clean things up, right? And so just like when we talked about with doing title fonts, you can add effects, you can do sweeping things. You can swirl this in if you want, whatever you want, right? That's just one example that I'm working on. Chocolate cake, I think is okay. Like I said, I don't like some of the effects that are added into it. This one, Ido, I could see it being in a Japanese fight scene or something like a sword swishing, right? It's got this brush stroke effect. I really like. This is something I don't necessarily like freshmen. Now, this is an example of what I would say would be a good cover font, like the title of a book or something like that, right? But not for effects. I want a little bit more flow. So if I'm, if I'm looking down my list here, but a boon BD. Maybe if I clean it up, definitely ETOH, maybe government agent, That's it looks a little strict for me. I don't like the hooks and stuff usually on effects. I don't always like that. So that's a maybe they're hobo looks fun. Impact and Comic-Con, right? What I've got, this was only a selection of 10 that I picked out of my font list. There's tons out there. You just gotta kinda search for what you like, what, what suits what you're trying to give effect to, right? Okay, So down below here, I've typed they'll boom. Nice and simple, right? There's some things that before I make this into an effects type of lettering, what I would do is clean it up a little bit. Now, right now this is great. It looks like boom, and I could use it in a book as is. But that's not what I'm going to do. What I usually going to do is just space it out a little bit more. See if I can split this up just a little bit. There we go. So in this one I'm using the workspace functioning Clip Studio Paint, but whatever program you're using, you gotta figure it out. Okay, so I've done that. And I'm just going to make this, I'm going to rasterize it into a, basically a flat layer, right? The reason I do that is because I find it a little bit easier to work with when I start to add effects to it. You don't have to. It depends on the program you're using. Some, some programs allow you to bend and warp text really well. It's just a habit I've gotten into, right? Okay, so now that I've got this, What am I gonna do with it? Well, you know what? I'm actually going to give you a few examples here. So I'm going to copy it, drag it down, copy it, drag it down. Let's see, four should be good. And drag it down. Okay. This first one. Do you guys remember how we do a stroke line? One thing that I do with a lot of programs is select around it, then inverse that selection, and then do a stroke. Okay, let's say this is six pixels. How does that look? Not bad? And now I've got this nice room effect, right? I like it. I think it works really well. I think it's a little too spaced out though. So I'm going to leave that as it is. And actually what I'm gonna do is maybe copy it and drag it down because I want to show you something. What you can do once you've tightened something like this up is start to tighten it up even more. So I'll come in a little bit closer and all select. And now I'll start to do some overlap. You see what I'm doing here, right? So now it looks like there's actually maybe they'll come from this side. And it's your choice, you know which direction you want to do this. And I like to sometimes switch things around and just give some variety to it. You can see this first one. It's so spread out, right? And that's not necessarily what we wanted. I don't know if this is exactly what I wanted, but it's kinda looking cool. Last one here. And like I said, you could totally play with it to see what works for what you're trying to achieve. You can even start to go in a bit of a direction here, like moving it. All right? Okay. So this first one was way too spread out. But what that spread allow me to do was to do this nice stroke around it, each letter. And then what I did was I condensed at all. And it's nice and tight, right? So I love the overlap. The overlap technique is great. Another effect that you can do. Next, I'm gonna get rid of these. I'm gonna do this one here is not just the overlap, but for example, a staggered overlap. I'm going to grab it from here and have it like this. Grab it from here and start to shift it around, right? You can see what I'm doing here that, you know, it might be angled, there might be sweet. I could have it going however way I want, right? Sorry, built up. Another one you might want to consider is just a warping effect. And you could do this before or after the stroke. So this can really like punch it out towards you. This is a choice whether you want the stroke to get thicker as it comes towards you or obviously thinner as it fades away. It's kind of up to you how you want to, but you can play with different perspective tools and see how it feels for you, right? There's a lot of different things that you can do here that really give movement and emphasis. You just gotta watch that it doesn't get so distorted that you can no longer read the word, right? And that can easily happen. It can be so distorted and you can no longer read it, right? So that's a judgment call. You've gotta choose on your end to see if it's beyond what's reasonable and readable, right? Okay, so there's another example is distortion. So we've got simple stroke, we've got overlap, we've got staggered and formed. We've got perspective and skewed distortion here, right? And maybe the last one. Let's see if I can do it this way. Let's say I was sketching out an explosion or something like that, right? Like Everything's exploding this way. I've got some choices. There's a lot of choices that I, that I've got going on. You know, I can do by hand, sketch it out this way. I can use a font if I want. I can also, what I would somewhat recommend is incorporating like maybe bringing a Fontan here, warping it, and then having the explosion shoot in north through or around the particles and stuff, you can combine some of the background elements with the effects, right? Okay. So keep in mind that it doesn't have to be so clean and separate that you can incorporate it somehow using some of what's happening in the actual page itself. Okay. So if anything, you know, it can take on some of the shape of it. You can see how the bellows of the explosion are starting to do this, right? Okay, so that's a little crash course on using effects and lettering in comics. Choose a font or a style that you feel really gives the impact that you want. For this effect. Play with it, play with the wording. Use a couple of tricks, whether it's overlapping or staggering or distortion. And even consider how you would incorporate it into the actual page or panel. One thing that I've done sometimes as feed the opacity back on the, on a solid so that you could see through it. And you can see some of those effects happening when you're sure to play with some of these tricks, whether it's using speed lines or whatever, that really help you move the viewer, move the page and hit with the impact. Okay guys, hope this helped a little bit and I hope it gave you some ideas moving forward. 26. Typography with Todd Cowden: Welcome back. Welcome back. I know you're thinking, Hey, you're not and you're right, I'm not good. But Ed has generously reached out to me to help out with this next unit on one of the most overlooked, underrated elements, upcoming books, typography. And I know I know you're saying we've already had a couple of minutes on typography. And you're right, you have. This unit is going to focus primarily on font selection to give your characters that voice that you want them to have. Not only that, but also it's going to teach you to look at letters, not just as a, B, C, D letters, but also as actual graphic elements. That way they can become a part of the illustration itself and you can make them pop and really zip and accentuate your composition and your layout to make it a better overall calming. A little bit about myself. First off, my name is Todd Cowden. I am a designer, not specifically in comic books, but I've spent 25 plus years working for companies like Universal Pictures, Lego, National Geographic, Lucas Film, doing hundreds of projects, wide variety of projects for them. So I am a designer. I worked a lot with type. And I think that's probably why I had reached out to me to help out with this unit. So without further ado, let's take a look at typography and font selection. All right, so one of the first things I want to talk about is font selection. This is critically important and the most overlooked aspects of design. I get a first-time designers come up with creators think they can just take some handwritten font like Comic Sans. Don't do that. No, don't do it. Comic Sans is bad. And they can take that font, put it in a bubble, speech bubble, and that will represent their character. This is a huge mistake. This YOU text does not repeat itself. It's just text on a page. So all you have going for you is the images that you draw and the font that the text is written in ide. So imagine if you were movie director and you spent all this money on writing incredible script, and then you just didn't bother to hire any really good actors. And then you wondered why your movie bombed. It's the same thing. The font you choose, what gives your character is a voice. It's like hiring your actors. Some fonts by loud. And they're like grandiose. Some bonds are mad, sponsor, Frank, client, and each one has their own sort of like character and their own voice. So we're about to do a really quick experiment. I'm going to take a made-up phrase. And this is the text that people use when they don't know what they're gonna put it in there. I'm using this specifically because I don't want the words to convey any actual mean. I only want you to think about what the font looks like and what it sounds like based off of what the text looks like. So we're gonna take the same made-up words. We're going to place them inside dialog bubbles and you're going to read them. And I think you'll see really quick what I mean when these fonts have their own voice and their own character. And therefore selecting the right character in the right font is critically important. Possibly the most important, Yeah, important, super-important. You'll see what I mean. Come on, shake it out. The first thing we're going to take a look at is our placeholder text. This is called Lorem Ipsum is not random text, it is actually from some ancient Latin manuscript. Unless you speak ancient Latin, you're not going to be able to understand it and that's fine. You're not supposed to understand it. This is simply supposed to represent text, in this case, dialogue of a character. This is typeset in the most boring way possible. This is like Helvetica Arial. And there's like no character there, no voice to this. And I think you'll soon find if we do something as simple as changing the font in dialog bubble, you'll see that it gives the dialogue new meaning and it is written in a different way. It gives it a new voice. This is futuristic texts, sort of sci-fi. You might imagine it coming from like a robot. Norm ipsum dolor, sir, I'm at constructed door of ICT. And if we go in and change the font, again, take a look at this second example. Take a good look at the font. This is like the scribbled and scratched almost was like a nail or fingernail or something. It's very rough. Some of it is bolder than others. It seems maybe, possibly sort of evil or monstrous. So this many red in this way. And Lorem ipsum dolor sit on it. 22 or spicy. It's very different voice that gives this dialog bubble. If we're to change it one more time, we get this which could be construed a little bit as sci-fi or futuristic and has sort of a circuit board look to it. But it also could be viewed as something sort of otherworldly, like extra-terrestrial, possibly an alien or something. I see me again changing the font, changes the entire voice of the character. One last one. And this one has more of a fantasy or medieval field to it sort of like it was. Scrawled are read by some powerful wizard and some grand chamber. So in that case, it might be read in this fashion or moral concern. So as you can see, simply by changing the font, it gives the dialogue a whole new character and a whole new voice. Sometimes you don't even need to use different fonts. Sometimes using the same font and make it larger or smaller, or making certain words bold or italic can also change the way that dialogue is read in somebody's head. Let's take a look at these examples. What you see here is a font called Bottle Rocket. It was designed by bland, but who aren't like the king people in designing typography and fonts for comic books. We'll take a look at them a little bit later. This is the regular version of the font and this is great. This is a beautiful dialogue font for comic books. Were about to take three examples with the same font and my changing the scale and the way it's presented. See if we can't get to be read three different ways. So the first change we're going to make is we're simply going to bold a few of the key words. So in that case, we're going to have it so that the person is speaking as dialogue, is punching those words, saying them more emphatically. So take a look. We've got the first two words, Loren ipsum, and then the last two words, all spicing eally begun to apologize on the pronunciation. This person's character, whoever saying this is emphasizing those words. Now, it just happens that in the Bottle Rocket font and bold version automatically italicized or the font, which is honestly a little bit strange, but we'll go with it because all I did here was use the bold version of the same Bottle Rocket font. And you can see how it makes it appear that the character saying this emphasises those words. And that's what we're looking for if you want to add punch and pop. And some words are obviously going to be more important than others in a sentence or phrase. Then Bolding those words is going to be a great way to do that. Don't overdo this by the way. You don't want every dialog bubble to have emphasized words, but where you really want to hit key points home in your dialogue. Don't be afraid to bold select words in a dialog bubble and not the entire phrase itself. Let's take a look at another example. All right, and this last example may look like a mistake, but it's not. This was on purpose. This font is reduced in size and scale to give it a lesser appearance inside the dialog bubble. Almost as if somebody were whispering this scene it very quietly, as if they didn't want to be heard simply by just changing the scale of the text inside the bubble. And given a lot of negative space, that extra white area around the text, but still inside the dialog bubble. That helps give the impression that this is maybe whispered or sink quietly, maybe even internally, like internal model. So that's using the same font, three different ways. You can make the same dialogue. The red three different ways. Choose wisely when you're typesetting your dialogue. Inside your comic book. Guide the reader to read your comment book the way you want it to be read by a. So now that you've seen how much choosing the right font and affect the voice and your character, you might be thinking, where do I get these wonderful fonts? So I'm gonna give you a list of places that you can find the fonts online. And as well as we're going to take a look at some technical legal terms. You're going to want to know to make sure that you are using them correctly and legally, legally buy the book. All right, this first site is called bland bot, and you can fin