We love Understanding Comics and Creating Comics, but as we started drawing our own comics, it turns out that there's a lot about pacing and what goes in a panel that he left out.
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Useful “Writing Excuses” episodes for comics storytelling
It's really hard to find good advice for storytelling in comics.
Has this happened to you? You search for advice for writers on how to tell a story. What you find is a bunch of articles about...
- how long your sentences should be!
- avoiding passive verb constructions!
- what kind of "he said/she said" tags to use after lines of dialogue!
- not making your paragraphs of description too boring!
"Great. Advice for putting words on a page. Completely useless for writing comics."
so you search for "writing for comics", which gives you a bunch of articles about...
- how to describe a panel to the artist who will be drawing it
- how to express sound effects in a script
- how the industry expects a script to be formatted
- how to submit your script to Marvel or DC
OK, slightly more relevant, but still not very useful if I'm the writer AND the artist and I'm self-publishing it.
What I actually want is non-medium-specific advice on stuff like pacing, character motivations, raising the stakes, developing relationships, plot twists, keeping the reader's interest, etc.
Well I finally found an excellent source for this stuff: the podcast "Writing Excuses". It's four professional writers, all with an interest in science fiction and fantasy, talking about how they write and how they solve story problems. Unlike every other podcast I've ever listened to, it stays on topic, gets right to the point, and does not degenerate into 90 minutes of people-you-don't-know laughing at inside jokes.
Some of the episodes cover the "putting words on a page" kind of advice, but more of them are about storytelling in general. One of the four is a webcomic artist and provides the voice of "OK but how do you do this in a visual medium?".
There's 11 "seasons" of this podcast so pretty much any topic you're interested in they've probably covered multiple times.
Here is a list of links to episodes that I've found particularly relevant to my own story problems:
Basic concepts that they reference a lot:
Three-act structure
Fulfilling promises to your readers
The MICE quotient (Milieu - Idea - Character - Event)
Pre-writing (outlining vs. seat-of-the-pants-ing)
Stakes (what does raising the stakes mean?)
The following two explain the difference between "thriller”, "mystery", and “intrigue” which is all about the difference between audience knowledge and character knowledge; useful even if “mystery” isn’t your genre:
Writing mysteries
Intrigue
A trilogy of casts about making characters the reader will want to root for:
Adjusting character sympathy
Adjusting character competence
Adjusting character proactivity
Season 10 is especially good since it goes in-depth into each stage of the process, from idea to finished story:
I have an idea, what do I do now?
What do you mean my main character is boring?
Who are all these people?
Where is my story coming from?
Where is my story going to?
How much of the beginning needs to come first?
How do i write a story, not an encyclopedia? (a topic near and dear to my heart)
What makes a scene?
Why can’t I just jump to the ending?
Why should my characters fail spectacularly? (the concept of the “try-fail cycle” is extremely useful)
How do I control the reader’s sense of progress?
Season 11 is about the idea of "elemental" genres, or reducing a genre down to the essential emotion that it elicits in the reader (fear, laughter, curiosity, etc.) and using those as building blocks: adding a little romance to your war story, adding a little mystery to your sci-fi story, etc.
Elemental Thriller talks about adding elements of a thriller to other genres to increase the pace and tension; the part at the end about making an emotional beat chart is great
Elemental Drama talks about the process of character transformation
Elemental Humor has some great discussion of what makes jokes funny
Elemental Idea (”idea” as a genre) - telling a story based on “the cool idea” without letting it just turn into an essay
Writing Excuses is also available in transcript form if you can't listen to podcasts or just don't absorb information well from an audio-only medium.
click on the transcript links:
Hi there! This is an absolutely fantastic blog and I want to thank you guys for putting this resource together. Could I ask for a favor though? The font of your current layout (grey and thin...) is a little hard on my eyes, and I would be very appreciative if you guys changed it to something more immediately readable. Thanks again!
Oh! Sorry about that! (I usually read things on my dash, so everything’s just ... dash-colored.) I’ve fixed it. If you need the font bigger and such, just say the word! :)
Part 2 of @jonomancer ‘s many feels about backgrounds continues after the cut. [Part 1 here].
Economy of detail again: Otomo has shown us a dark highway in the middle of the night using just a few converging lines and the light of the motorcycle headlights.
Switching between panels of Tetsuo’s face and panels of what Tetsuo sees is a very movie-style technique. Panels 2 and 3 are from the same “camera angel” but the boy in the road is closer to us in panel 3. This is to create the illusion that we’re moving forward -- as if we’re seeing film from a movie camera attached to the speeding motorbike.
In this panel I want the reader to clearly see the small shuttlecraft which is about to detach from the larger starship. I gave it a thick black outline, made it mostly white and the background starship mostly grey, and I used grey lines on the background starship for lower contrast.
In addition, if you look closely, you can see I took the eraser tool and erased the background shading from around the edges of the shuttlecraft, so that there is a white outline outside its black outline. I call this a “halo effect” and I first noticed it in One Piece comics by Eiichiro Oda, but it’s used everywhere.
It would be easy to miss Nausicaa’s tiny glider flying above the gigantic Ohmu swarm, so Miyazaki drew a white, s-shaped vapor trail that cuts across the whole page and ends at the glider. It has an “in-universe reason to be there but it ALSO acts like a giant arrow that guides the reader’s eye straight to the character.
You don’t have to use color “literally” (coloring things the color they really are). The red people in this scene aren’t literally red. (Doctor Manhanttan, the blue guy, IS literally blue, though.) Instead Dave Gibbons had made a complex, multi-layer scene easier to read by giving each layer a different color.
Most of the panel is red/orange, which the artist probably chose because it’s the complementary color to blue. This makes Dr. Manhattan stand out from the scene, and draws our attention to him. Also, the explosion is drawn as the brightest part of the scene, which draws our attention there, too. Hue contrast and value contrast are both used to call attention to the two focal points.
(Dr. Manhattan is making a dude’s head explode! This comic is messed up, you guys!)
Speaking of explosions...
(Akira again)
Notice how the lines from the signs, buildings, windows, etc, point toward the center of the panel. This is the standard single vanishing point perspective. But all those converging lines also serve to direct our attention to the focal point of the scene, where something is blowing up. The vanishing point serves double duty.
Plus there’s all the bystanders looking towards the explosion. We like to look where other people are looking!
Back to that Ms. Marvel page:
This page demonstrates several techniques working together really well. It’s got establishing shot plus a bunch of close-ups.
Starting with the establishing shot: it creates a huge sense of depth through
combination of perspective and layering techniques. The converging parallel lines of the building, the pier, and the lines in the pavement all go toward the vanishing point in the upper right. If we follow these lines, they lead our attention to the high-tech tower on the other side of the river, which is an important setting detail in this comic but not immediately relevant to this scene. Putting it where it's visible but out-of-the-way of the main panel flow of this
page is like a reminder: "This high-tech tower still exists, if you were
wondering." The "white/black/grey" three-layer value contrast method is used in the distant background, behind the river, to separate the white (well, light blue) tower from the black and grey (well, dark blue) rows of buildings.
The vanishing point always defines "viewer eye level" so putting the vanishing point higher on the page than the characters creates a camera angle where we're looking down on the characters. (From a great height, in this case. They look like tiny bugs!) The characters don't get completely lost in the background, though, for a couple reasons. First, the blues and greens of the background are
well chosen to make the red and yellow of the heroes' costumes stand out. Second, there's a big empty space in front of the door they just came out of, making them easier to spot. Third, they are right along the line your eye takes from the first inset panel to the second inset panel. These three factors save it from being a "where's waldo" panel.
The remaining four panels have barely any background in them. They have only "reminder background", like the ocean behind Tisquantum's head -- there's a building skyline, some stars, some lines in the pavement, that's it. All very easy to draw! I'm sure the artist was glad to have a break after that monster of an establishing shot. Those four panels keep changing the "camera angle" on the two characters to add visual variety. One style thing that sets a superhero comic apart from say a comic strip is that superhero comics always try to show you a full-body head-to-toe shot of the characters at least once a page, even in dialogue-heavy scenes where a comic strip would just show talking heads. Knowing where everybody is standing is important when a fight could break out any moment!
So, to summarize:
- Use the classic establishing shot - closeup - closeup, or reverse it to do a “reveal”
- Aim for Legibility by using contrast between foreground/midground/background with techniques such as:
Value contrast: black/white/gray
Rendering contrast: simple background/complex foreground or vice versa. (Avoid making everything to complex, or you’d be stuck looking for Waldo)
Making the backgrounds be fuzzier/have less contrast
so @jonomancer got really excited about backgrounds, which is not surprising, given how much he loves backgrounds in his comics. Anyway, there’s more behind the cut, and [Part 2 is here]
In summary, here are some functions of backgrounds:
communicating information needed for the joke/story to work
giving the reader (and the characters) some space
emotions (Rose of Versailles)
establishing a time and place, creating atmosphere
giving personality to a place
worldbuilding
setting up spatial relationships between characters
characterization by background (Homestuck)
creating a sense of spectacle (Fantastic 4)
showing another story in parallel with the dialogue (Mickey Mouse)
signally a major change in the story by a change of background style
I never really noticed it before, but I was going through the handplates au and I noticed you have quite a distinct style difference between your characters and backgrounds. How do you generally go about making your backgrounds in comparison to the characters?
uuuuugh backgroundssss i hate doing backgrounds, haha. But the lab at least is a pretty simple place, so it’s not too hard most of the time.
Basically early on in the stickfigure stage, I very loosely outline the important elements of the background. For the most recent one, for example
The important part in my mind was chairs and table, so I just very loosely tossed an idea of them in there.
For the babbling one, I had a clearer image in my head of the layout of the room, so I put a bit more detail into it. Usually after this point, I do the roughs for the characters so I can get a better idea of how much space in a frame they’ll take up when done.
Like so. Once I know how much space each character/object will take up, I start doing the backgrounds. This is mostly to try and prevent myself from lazing out on them, cause once the characters are finished I just want to be DONE BUDDY. If I do the backgrounds first though, that usually makes me spend more time on them.
In terms of the order I do things for these, I guess it would go script, thumbnails/stickfigures, text/balloons, panel borders, roughs, backgrounds, inking, coloring, then special lighting effects or shading. :B
But anyway, the backgrounds are generally solid blocks of color without any dark outlines, mostly to help the characters stand out since they’re the focus.
Going back to the recent one, usually I lay down a base color for the room, then begin laying down solid blocks of color underneath the guidelines. In this case, the table is going to be all straight lines and planes, so this is easy to do with just rectangular marquee. Then I loosely lay down the colors for the other things in the scene, like the paper and pen. You can’t really see it and it’s ugly, but it’s just to give me an idea of where the object is when…
I turn off the roughs layer. Like I said, the blobs are all misshapen, but now I know where each object is and can refine each shape until it looks more like it’s supposed to.
After a bit of work, everything looks way more presentable, haha. Mostly I just strengthen up the shapes following my guidelines, and every now and then I turn on the roughs layer to remember where the characters are to adjust shading, for their arms on the table for example. There’s also some loose shading in general here on the different parts. I use one brush for this kind of soft shading and it’s my favorite brush in the entire world.
100% density is fine for me most of the time, but 50% is good for blurring soft edges to get a smoother gradient effect. I use this brush all the time, you don’t even know. As a side note do not refer to me for lighting or light sources because I’m so gd lazy about them, haha.
Anyway this room is mostly featureless otherwise, so the rest of it is doing some soft shading on the back to lead the eye upwards, and then I add some lines on the wall to break up the monotony. The lines are loosely based on the walls in the true lab (and pretty much any lab in any rpg, really), I figure the whole place is made of metal plates and that’s where those seams come from but mostly it just breaks up a solid wall of color in a more interesting way. And sometimes the lines can help define the shape of a corner or whatever. Once I set them down in the first panel, I do try to keep them consistent in the next ones though if I can.
This is the basic pattern of it! If there’s a scene where there are going to be a lot of objects and a lot of scene changes though, I may put together a room in SketchUp and use that for reference. A good example of this would be when the brothers first met - I pictured that room as very cluttered and I knew I’d be swinging the camera around (so to speak) a ton, and I have a LOT of trouble visualizing 3D spaces so I knew this would be a nightmare if I did it without help.
So what I did was make the room in SketchUp using this tutorial! SketchUp was really easy to use and very handy for this exact purpose, haha. After I put the room together, I went and took screencaps at the angles I needed, then painted over them with the same basic method as above - I’d lay down some loose blobs of color, then turn off the reference layer and refine them. I posted more caps of the room in the entry about it.
Here’s the base I used for painting this panel for example, haha. I simplified several parts as you can probably guess, but it was a godsend for keeping the positions of objects consistent. If I ever have another background heavy one, I’ll probably use Sketchup again for it, but most of the recent ones have been fairly simple bg wise, so I haven’t worried about it.
Two weeks ago I decided to talk about dialogue at comics club! :) Some of this stuff was taken from previous posts about dialogue, but some of it is new. Anyway, here’s the PPT:
The way that this often plays out for me, is that if I do panel composition without leaving space for the dialogue, the panel itself is going to look GREAT, but then I rip my hair out trying to fit in the dialogue later. On the other hand, if I leave space for the dialogue, the panel composition is going to feel REALLY WONKY, *until* I fill in the dialogue later.
Anyway, there’s so many different ways to visually convey the tone of dialogue -- speech bubble size, fonts, etc. Then there’s the whole “caption = internal monologue” thing that superhero comics like to do -- they even go so far as to color it differently depending on who’s thinking.
One big problem that I struggle with is speech bubble clutter -- sometimes there’s just too much I want to say with words, and I end up creating “traffic jams” -- where you don’t know where to read first and where to look first. :-/ This is in part bad visual design -- the issue of leaving enough space in the panel for the words to flow properly. (In the example below on the left, the placement of the people in the 2nd panel sort of forces the bubbles into a weird flow. In the example on the right, the super artsy circle stuff on the right makes it really hard to track who is speaking what when.)
But part of it is also dialogue writing, because...
Thankfully, this is one of those things where writing advice books can be helpful in honing character voice, dialogue flow, etc. Of course, with the caveat that ....
So often I find myself doing A LOT of tweaking -- getting the right word order so that the lines break into the right bubble shapes, picking the right font and font size... (the ideal font for me is legible but dense, without very tall T’s or long y’s that poke out too much -- I like using lower case, and many comic fonts are designed to be upper-case only). And as far as font size goes -- you can see on the left, the Ms. Marvel page is designed for print first, so the font size is much smaller -- maybe 12 or 14 pt. Whereas Gunnerkrigg Court, which is designed for web first, has a larger font (18 pt?). I know that Erfworld actually completely resizes all of its speech bubbles before going to print, which sounds like a super hard thing to do!
And after all that tweaking, I might step back and realize that all that optimization has completely killed the personality and voice of my character -- everyone starts sounding the same. It’s like the Same Nose Syndrome when drawing. Unfortunately, I think the solution to some of this has to happen earlier in the process -- the panel layout stage. Quiet people need more panels for silent emoting, loud people need more dialogue bubble space, etc. Sometimes setting establishment is better done via art (those expansive background shots), but if you didn’t plan for it, then you’re stuck trying to slip it in via dialogue or captions.
So when I reach this point in the dialogue tweaking process, it’s a good time to take in the big picture and ask myself --
I picked 2 random dialogue pages, 5 panels each. But I think you can tell that the page on the right was probably written dialogue-first, with the panel layout / art direction written in later.
I’m not trying to say that it’s always better to have the one or the other take the lead on any given page -- just that it’s something to examine as you move through the story. Sometimes I have all this dialogue planned, and then when I step back, I end up scrapping all of the dialogue and letting the art tell the story. Sometimes it’s the other way around -- the panels just aren’t providing the story nuance that I want, so then I use the dialogue to carry more of the weight.
In either case, it’s really important to be able to get the words and the art to flow and match each other. And thus --
And this brings in the whole workflow problem. I’m trying to learn to do everything in Manga Studio so that I can tweak everything at every stage, because when I draft layout I do it *extremely* loosely. But I also know people who have everything locked in at a detailed pencil stage, so then inking and rendering and text can be done anywhere convenient.
The last point though... Sometimes I’d spend hours agonizing over some dialogue phrasing, and then I’d show two versions to a friend and they wouldn’t even notice the difference! It’s because comics are often so spaced out that the whole page just passes in 20 seconds, if that. I guess that’s a ... relief? (Or depressing as all heck)
Jing from comics club decided to talk about panel layout! :) Panel layout is a big topic, so we actually have other posts already in the panel framing (stuff inside the panels) and panel flow (flow between panels) tags.
For the content inside each panel -- there’s always the classic Scott McCloud stuff.
Here’s two examples from Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which keeps the panels itself static and just changes what’s inside.
I really like how he uses color and the static frames of the building to force you to notice what’s different, while keeping it a muted sort of horror.
When you get into composition of a page, Chris Ware does some interesting things with using panel shapes to accentuate the movement and structure of a house, in Building Stories below:
And here, in weaving and intersecting different stories
But things are very different in manga, where panel size and shape is used to control pacing, and not story structure. The following is from DeathNote, where Light first meets L. The first page starts pretty straight-forward, with a setting panel, and some mid-range shots...
And now in the page below we have a ramping up of tension using an ever increasing series of close-ups.
Notice that it’s okay to repeat the same shot -- we see Light’s eyes looking back 4 times, each time closer, but the same angle. It doesn’t seem boring because it’s interspersed with gradually revealed shots of L, and this build-up leads to a page turn and a two-page wide panel...
... where the whole scene suddenly opens up from the zoom-in tension before, and there is a great horizontal sight-line between L and Light. Notice how the entire panel’s perspective is tilted to make the sight-line work.
This next example is from Slam Dunk, where roughly 10 seconds of a basketball game is spread out over 12 pages.
Here we start with a dramatic character moment where two rivals decide to actually work together, with him choosing the pass the ball...
A bunch of angled close-up shots here draws out the character tension, that lead to a full-page vertical action shot...
Followed by brief tense reaction shots
The character moment over, we have a few pages where the panels, instead of drawing out character tension, is used to tighten a tense action sequence as he actually goes for the basket. The panels alternate between medium, wide, medium, close, then wide shot for the final basket...
The vertical panels here accentuate the jump.
Then comes a series of silent audience reaction panels where time actually stops, giving the in-universe audience and the reader time to catch their breath...
assess the situation ...
Until finally we have the cathartic cheering. The artist uses panels to show lots of different tension -- character tension with close-ups, action tension through a quick interchange of medium/wide shots, and story tension by stopping time altogether before the big reveal.
The next example is from Attack on Titan, where we see/experience the same explosion by intercutting between two different locations:
First, there is a two-page wide shot
followed immediately by a close-up from right next to the explosion, going vertically down the page
As well as what they’re seeing from that proximity. And strewn throughout the panels is the オ (o) sound of the explosion, tying everything together.
That オ sound brings us back to the far shot, which is also appropriate because that’s when the shockwave reaches them
And then finally, a page where you see both locations and both reactions.
The last example is from a webcomic, where the artist decided to redraw her manga chapters from several years earlier. On the left is the original, and on the right is the new layout: (read from left to right)
Notice how the wide shot in the middle of the new version does a much better job of setting up the characters’ physical relationship to each other.
And here, the two original panels of the page were condensed into the top half, which leaves the audience with a much more intriguing page turn. The artist has also grown more confident with different angled shots.
So, at our local informal comics club, we’ve started doing occasional 15 minute talks about different aspects of comicking, which is essentially the in-person version of learningtocomic. I’m posting them here, slightly edited to be more tumblr friendly.
The first one is from Nindokag, about Inciting Incidents:
Let me tell you about Yuki Hoshigawa. She's the character from a comic I
started in 2003 (!!!) that I never finished because I couldn't get the
story off the ground.
She's a very idealistic computer programmer and she wants to work hard and prove herself and make world-changing software, but she's also verysocially phobic, conflict-averse, and afraid of embarassment.
I had this idea back then that i just make up characters with a bunch of personality quirks and put them together in a setting and a plot would just sort of emerge. I was wrong: I kept adding character details and setting details but after drawing 38 pages there was still no story.
Even then I knew stories need conflict. I thought I had conflict: Yuki wants to throw herself into building something amazing, the boss just wants everybody to sit down and conform and grind through bug lists that aren't getting them anywhere. So, there's a conflict, sort of. Except that it's a background conflict: It makes Yuki unhappy but not enough for her to change the status quo. She grumbles but when the pressure's on she does what she's told to avoid embarassment. This is what I mean by a passive character.
Example: FINDING NEMO
Marlin is a very good example of a passive/reactive protagonist.
The Inciting Incident: Nemo "touches the butt" and gets caught by humans. (It's a coincidence that separates the character from everything they care about.)
The predator fish eating the mom fish and all-but-one of the eggs is the BACKSTORY, not the inciting incident. It SETS UP the background conflict
(overprotective father vs. adventurous son) by explaining WHY Marlin is so overprotective. But that's the beginning of the "every day" situation. Marlin and Nemo argue but the status quo is stable; it could continue indefinitely without resolution to their character conflict.
BUT THEN ONE DAY nemo tries to "touch the butt" and gets captured by
scuba divers. This works because it separates Marlin from everything he cares about; Marlin has to do something about it RIGHT NOW, he can't ignore it; he is
now acutely motivated to try to restore the status quo.
Film Crit Hulk defines an Act break as the moment when a character
makes a no-take-backs decision. The inciting incident is not the
decision, it's an external event, but it PROVOKES a decision, and that
decision is what takes us to Act 2.
Note that it's important that Marlin finds a clue (the dropped scuba
mask). That's what gives him a choice: he can follow this clue into the
unknown / adventure.
After the inciting incident, the audience should be highly invested in the main dramatic question of "Will the protagonist succeed or fail?"
But why don't we just start off the story with the Inciting Incident?
Because it doesn't have any impact if we don't care about the character yet. Everything before the Incident (most of act 1, then) exists to make us empathize with the character, show us who they are, show us what their life is like and thus create context for the Incident. By showing the barracuda backstory, we now know WHY marlin is overprotective AND it makes us root for Marlin and Nemo to be happy together.
Hope Examples:
character learns about some treasure/bank heist big enough to let them retire (opportunity: riches)
character meets an interesting/attractive person (opportunity: romance)
character sees an opportunity to follow their passion/get their dream job (opportunity: meaningful life)
character learns they have a chance for revenge!
In all of these cases, the inciting incident is that the character sees an opportunity, but pursuing it will take them outside their comfort zone.
And with these, you need to:
Fear examples:
fear of losing: family, home, life, job/livelihood (motivation: protect)
separate the character from everything they care about (motivation: get that back)
a bad guy is after you for some reason (motivation: survive)
In all of these the inciting incident is disrupting the status quo and the protagonist is trying to revert to the status quo. Character has something they value, the event threatens to take it away.
And with these, you need to:
After the inciting incident the character has a choice between following it and ignoring it. Of course 99% of stories the character decides to go for it, because if they don't there's no story. The more passive the character, the stronger the incident has to be, to make this choice believable.
But there might be some dithering around first ("refusing the call to adventure") It is a real choice, so some characters do choose to say "No thanks". So in the case of Frodo, Tolkien then had to threaten the shire AGAIN by having black riders show up looking for the ring -- a much more acute event demanding
immediate action.
Once the character makes this choice they are no longer a passive character!
Also...
Charlie JUST HAPPENS to find one of FIVE golden tickets in the world? Frodo's uncle just HAPPENED to ACCIDENTALLY find the One Ring of power? Wall-E is the only functioning robot on Earth and Eve just happens to land right in front of him? All massively unlikely.
You might have heard coincidences are bad storytelling and they certainly are bad for *resolving* a story (deus ex machina). But they're often the best way to set up a story. We'll actually accept amazingly unlikely coincidences if they're part of a story's premise.
In the Wizard of Oz, the audience has already kind of pre-bought-in to the inciting incident of RANDOM TORNADO THAT DEFIES ALL LAWS OF PHYSICS, because it sets up "what they came here to see". They bought a ticket to see Dorothy in Oz, so they accept whatever plot device gets her there. As long as the character’s actual choice following the Incident seems authentic, the incident itself can be something "random" / "artificial".
To summarize:
Passive characters need an extra push from an Inciting Incident, a thing that makes today different from all the other days.
Inciting Incidents often come from invoking HOPE (an opportunity to change the status quo), or FEAR (a motivation to protect the status quo).
You usually have to set up a backstory with some background conflict to make the audience invested in the passive character. It’s easy to mistake that for the Inciting Incident, but it’s not.
The Inciting Incident itself can be totally IMPROBABLE, as long as it pushes the character to make an IMMEDIATE decision.
Lighting is often underestimated in illustration – a lot of illustrators and beginning artists look at it as a decorative element, or as purely a tool used to showcase the form. A lot of beginning artists are afraid of shading and of using harsh lights. But even with the lighting mastered, even with perfect rendering and good understanding of form in space an integral element of the light remains missing in their pieces.
Look at the samples above: the same character’s head has been used in every thumbnail, and the only thing I have tweaked was the cropping and manner of light used on the features. Every single one of these frames tells a different story and gives off a different vibe simply by using light to focus on the features I want you to focus on.
Read how lighting can be used to enhance character, mood, and interaction within your pictures below the cut.
Continuing on from Motion pt 2, here’s a random action scene that came across my dash. I don’t actually know anything about said comics or creators, I’m sorry! orz
It’s a comic by annermation about Link confronting the Dead Hand in the Shadow Temple, I think? These are shitty screenshots -- please click on the original link to see the full comic.
Anyway, we start here with 3 panels of tension build-up followed by an explosion of action that uses all of these gorgeous motion lines. I love how the first three panels is a gradual close-up that portends the action to come, and then in the last open panel, the camera is pulled waaaay back, adding to the sense of whiplash. And what excellent composition in that panel! All of the arms moving in towards Link also serve the function of the camera zoom lines. Link's sword cuts a defensive swath but his blur lines shows that he’s on the run. The silhouetted arms in the extreme foreground and background add to the sense of depth while keeping the background simple.
Then in the next page:
Here we have another few close-up panels, but unlike the previous page, these are charged with motion lines. So same 3-panel layout, but this is showing the same snapshot in time. Whenever I try this sort of thing it always backfires on me, but it doesn’t here. I think for several reasons:
1) The core action of every panel is clear: the direction of the hands, the overall goal of the movement is about seizure and entrapment. If the panels were showing Link escaping the arms, there’d be a lot of empty space and a lot of motion lines.
2) The 3 panels are narratively consistent: each one is about the same thing and features the same subjects: “arms grabbing Link”. You’re not stuck wondering whose sword that is or who is winning.
3) The panels actually show a flow of action across them: in the first panel, the arms are reaching toward Link, in the second, they are grabbing, and in the third, they have him locked down and static.
4) There is a 4th zoomed out panel showing the state of affairs at the end of the action sequence, and you can place each of the first 3 panels into the 4th panel: you see the legs, the arms, and the shield.
The great thing about that 4th panel, is that it shows the next bit of action: the arm that swoops down to grab Link’s head, which then leads to the timeless hyper-emotive open panel of Link’s face. It’s action-action-action, check-in, then consequence.
Okay, next page:
Here time once again slows down. I love that the three panels on the bottom here have very minimal motion lines, even as the creature gets unbearably closer. The tension here is not in the speedy menace of the hands, but in the eerie inevitability of the creature.
Okay, last page of the action scene:
What I find interesting here is that the action on this page is actually not in any of the panels. We don’t see Link ripping his sword arm free, we don’t see his sword zooming toward the mouth, we don’t even see the stunned expression or slow collapse. Instead, we have a panel showing the extremity of the threat (the before), a panel showing the trigger for Link’s action (the emotional turn), and then a stark silhouetted panel showing the success of the action (the climax), and finally the aftermath/denouement. Would these 4 panels be equally effective without the 3 pages leading up to it? Probably not. But even by itself, you have a whole beginning-middle-end, in 4 panels.
I particularly love how abstracted the silhouetted panel is -- you don’t see the hands that are probably still grabbing onto most of Link. Or any motion lines or background. But none of that matters because we’re in silhouette mode. (Just like what karaii has said in previous posts about using color or rendering to bring out the drama of a singular moment.)
So pulling back to look at the 4 pages in toto, each page has either an escalation or a turn, or both. In Page 1, the first 3 panels is an escalation of tension, followed by the turn that happens between the jump from 3rd panel to the action panel, and the escalation into action. Page 2 starts with the turn (Link is losing) and then escalates to the head grab in the open panel. Page 3 is 4 panels of pure escalation, starting with the open panel: the true horror reveals itself. And Page 4 is the turn toward victory, which is once again marked with the open panel.
Something that I’ve found helpful when I try to lay out pages, is to figure out where the open panel is on the page: the emotional and action “anchor”. Then I figure out what the other panels are that leads up to or falls out from said open panel. I think you can definitely see this sort of thing at work here. The 4 open panels are respectively: 1) attack, 2) fear/capture, 3) monster reveal, 4) triumph. 1 and 3 are basically action, whereas 2 is primarily emotion and 4 is both.
So I guess if I were to give myself some advice after looking at these pages, it would be:
1) keep action shots narratively consistent
2) remember the emotional check-in and the bigger-picture check in
3) be aware of when motion lines and background details are helpful, and when a simple silhouette would do the trick
4) You don’t have to show all the action all the time: show what is plot-relevant. Sometimes a sense of decisiveness can come from omitting the action and jumping straight to the climax.
So a few months ago after figuring out some stuff in Motion pt 1 I promised a follow-up as I try to figure out the harder stuff like fancy motion lines and multiple panel action shots.
This is now my attempt to figure that stuff out. Examples are randomly taken from what comes across my tumblr dash. I don’t actually know anything about said comics or creators, I’m sorry! orz
I love how these (wip) panels from All Rounder Meguru show the different types of motion lines that can be done:
You have:
1) The background motion lines that show that the people are moving too fast to render the background. Note that the background lines still conform to perspective: the ground lines are at an angle.
2) The fuzzy motion lines across the legs that show that the feet are a blur. Similar to the background motion lines, these are the “ack! too fast!” type. And the lines stick out of the legs indicating where the leg previously was.
3) Also, the shading lines themselves (on the legs, on the bodies) are exclusively from one direction, again subtly showing the overall directionality of the motion.
4) Lastly, there’s the little impact marks where the knee and elbow hits the ground, indicating an abrupt stop of motion. (Interestingly, there’s no impact marks for the actual head-to-head collision).
And later in this panel, you have:
5) Camera zoom motion lines that come in from the edge of the panel. These lines aren’t indicating that the background is moving, but rather, it’s far more 4th-wall aware: it’s telling the viewer “hey, look at this in the middle!”
6) The “double vision” on the quivering fist: basically drawing the outline of the hand twice, slightly superimposed on each other, almost like an animated gif, flattened. I think this works best when there’s either a very small tremor, or very large whole-body movement. I’ve tried the “static body with head looking in two-directions,” and it just looks like the person had two heads. Probably the motion lines linking the two end points need to both seem very natural.
Anyway, a few panels later we have:
7) the “arc of the action” motion lines that follow the forearms of the punches. Unlike the fuzzy motion lines (which you can see on the upper arm of the top guy), these go with the flow of the action, instead of perpendicular to it. They completely alter the forearm and go into extreme contrast, to show how freakin’ powerful the impact is. (Manga seems really good at the “blazing white light” thing)
8) the “future action” motion lines at the helmet: that’s showing where the head *will* go. It’s like he’s literally punching the ink lines out of the guy.
I think one of the key things about doing motion lines (and why I suck at them), is that it involves taking information away. Instead of rendering the form as I know it, I need to obscure it with motion lines. But perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that I need to show the form *through* the motion lines. These motion lines, despite breaking out of the form, still show the artist’s innate understanding of what is being moved and how.
Hi Declan :) Absolutely loving Moon Knight, your artwork is gorgeous and it's been a really enjoyable run. I remember you posting your inspiration for some of the issues, like stills from Only God Forgives and Oldboy. I was wondering, do you use them for reference as well? I'm really struggling with drawing fight scenes and was hoping to know the source of the stills or any advice you have for an inexperienced penciller. Thank you! Looking forward to your next project!
Do I use films for reference? NEVER
Still from Drive (2011) v panel from Moon Knight #5
*COUGH* Okay, this week’s MOON KNIGHT #5 is an exception, as there’s deliberate homages to particular films.
To properly answer your question though, yes I do use films for reference, but only to inform; I don’t take stills from movies and use them in my pages. Generally, I find films great resources for immersive reference; I take advantage of the research teams and art crews for the background material they find. I used Terrence Malick’s ‘The New World’ for some detailed Native American reference in my AMERICAN VAMPIRE story, for example. I often see some screen compositions that give me ideas. Six Feet Under had a huge impact on my sense of storytelling, especially knowing when to pull back for certain emotional beats.
Six Feet Under, S4 E01; ‘Falling Into Place’
As regards action scenes, I’ve often looked at action movies and looked at how fights are stages, how they’re paced, etc. I remember John Woo’s 'Hard Boiled’ being a particular revelation to me, for example. But, it’s not like you can take a filmed sequence and just transfer it over to a comics page, or take stills and plant them into a scene. While they’re both visual mediums, they work totally differently; the storytelling of a page is dictated by the actions that happen on the page, and even the shape of the page. .
Take this DEADPOOL page, for example. The script asks for certain things and while I could try and essentially copy-and-paste shots from movies, that’s just not going to flow storytelling-wise. Collaging a fight scene just isn’t going to work. In this page I use the action to deliberately direct the reader around the page. If the page were a different format, the composition of the panels would be radically different.
That’s the type of thing you need to keep in mind when drawing comics. The storytelling. Consider the action and the space available to you, that’s what will make it a great comics page. Once you’ve figured that out, you can always find/make the reference to support your storytelling decisions. So by all means, study film, but as with any reference, the results are better when they inform the craft and not dictate it.
is it okay to use scripts from comic script archive to practice drawing pages? no publication, just sketchbook stuff?
I think it’s imperative. as long as you don’t try to make money off of stuff you don’t own everything is fair game.
I would have killed to have a website like comics script archive to work off of when I was trying to figure out my stuff. and I point my students to it every semester.
Basically one of the best exercises you can do as an aspiring comic writer/artist is to take a comic book (or series of strips or scene from a graphic novel if one of those is more your thing) and try to reverse engineer what you imagine the script would look like, and then draw the comic (or thumbnail it at least if you are not an artist) from the script you wrote. You can also do this with a friend and trade scripts.
Another good alternative for writing-only people is to photoshop out the words on finished pages, print them out, and write new ones from scratch. Again, trading with a friend so you don’t know what the original words were can help a lot.
So remember how much I suck at action sequences, and how much I want to improve?
Here’s an exercise that I plan to do this week, and I think it’d be RAD if some of you did it, too, and tagged us?: pick one of the above sequences, and draw it as a series of comic panels.
Anyways, if you do decide to do it, please @mention learningtocomic, and we can do this whole comparison analysis thing! :D
Hi! I really enjoy your blog and explanations a lot. Thanks for sharing so much information. Since I am just starting with a comic blog myself, I have a couple of questions I would like to ask like what is your workflow? What is a rough sketch? Do you use layers in a graphics app or do you draw on paper? What kind of tools (pen or graphics tablet?) do you use? it would be cool if you can give me some advice. Thanks a lot and all the best!
Oh gosh, the workflow and tablets question!! Firstly, let me start by saying that I ( potofsoup) am not the only one running this blog, and that karaii and jonomancer probably have very different workflows and toolsets from me. (I know for a fact that jonomancer does pencils and inks on paper, scans them in and then does coloring and text digitally. He’s also using Linux, which means he’s stuck with GIMP or Krita, poor guy.)
But for me — I used to do everything on paper (CGU, China Comics, Sixteen), scan it in and do touch-ups in Photoshop. But in 2012 I went full digital and never looked back.
So, let me take you through the options, starting with Hardware, and then moving onto Software. Then I’ll walk you through my 2 different comicking processes — fan comic vs. Tisquantum.
This is going to be LONG, but also Thorough. Ready? :D
============ HARDWARE ===============
Here are the options I’ve explored, from cheapest to most expensive:
Used Intuos 6x8 Graphics Tablet: $30-80
Okay, so you can go to wacom.com and get a 4x6″ Intuos Pen for $80, but why do that when you can get a used Intuos 2 or Intuos 3 that’s twice the surface area (6x8″) on Ebay for about half the price? Seriously, go to Ebay, type in “Intuos 6x8″, and browse the selection. When I need to draw stuff on my home computer, I *still* plug in the used Intuos 1 that I bought off eBay in 2004. And it still works! :D
Pros: cheap, plugs into any computer, you can use it with any drawing program, and WACOM is very good at keeping up-to-date with their drivers
Cons: I have very bad drawing posture, and my back starts hurting after about 2 hours. Also you have to lug the board around and plug it in.
———-
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Tablet: $150 - $200
I draw all of my fan-comics using this. It’s got a touch-sensitive pen that slots into its own special pen bay in the lower right hand corner. I love it because it’s super-portable, PLUS it’s a full-functional Android tablet, meaning that I can also play Candy Crush and read my Kindle books on it. It’s $150-200 on eBay, which is pretty rad. I use Sketchbook Pro for drawing, and I made a tutorial here.
Pros: portable, android tablet
Cons: The drawing apps available for Android aren’t as full-featured as Photoshop or other desktop software. They’re only $5 or so, but they’re limited in # of layers and image size.
———-
Intuos Creative Stylus for iPad 3/4/Mini: $80
So technically this is cheaper than the Note 8, but you need to already have an iPad 3, 4, or Mini, which costs you $300+, so… yeah. I don’t own any iPads, so I don’t have personal experience with it. I’ve seen other artists do cool stuff with it, though. Plus it’s WACOM, so you can’t really go wrong.
Pros: cheap if you already have the right iPad
Cons: Still limited by the iPad App Store. I hear Procreate is pretty good? I’ve also used Sketches and enjoyed it.
——-
Tablet PCs: Surface Pro or Lenovo Yoga: $900-$1200
So there used to be so many tablet laptops with pen sensitivity, but now it’s mostly touch-sensitivity. But I recently got a Surface Pro 3, which I’ve been enjoying, and my husband uses a customized Lenovo Yoga that he ordered off of their website. If you’re in the market for a laptop anyway, I think it’s worth adding the $300 to the sticker price to get a screen that’s pressure-sensitive, because drawing on it feels super natural.
Pros: full-functional laptop, nice screen size
Cons: much expense. The Surface Pro can still feel more like a tablet than a laptop, but that’s mostly because it’s top-heavy.
———
WACOM Cintiq or Yiynovas: $400-$3000
I don’t have one of these because, wow, expensive. But if you want to draw on a monitor/screen that is custom-designed for professional artists, AND be able to plug that monitor in to any computer or laptop, either the Cintiq or the Yiynova is the way to go. Yiynovas are basically the half-price alternatives to Cintiqs.
Pros: You feel like you’ve hit the big leagues, wow all the sensitivity feels so good!
Cons: expense? The smaller ones you can haul around, but the big ones are basically locked to your table.
Anyway, that pretty much concludes the HARDWARE section. Next:
================== SOFTWARE ================
There’s a lot of programs out there, but they mostly fall into 3 categories: painting-focused (stuff with minimalist interface and strong brush engines, but might not have the lasso tool), Photoshop-inspired (strong photo-manip tools, but might not have good drawing interface), and Japanese-origin (complex interfaces, but targeted towards illustration and comics).
I’ve tried to hit the big ones and the ones that I use, although I know people who swear by Krita or ArtRage or whatever.
PaintTool SAI: Free for PC
I haven’t used it, but so many fan artists and illustrators swear by it, plus it’s free for PC? It doesn’t seem to have many good comicking tools, though.
Pros: Free, full-featured
Cons: It’s Japanese, so the interface — good luck, man. Also: PC only.
———
Photoshop: $0-infinity????
Oh, Photoshop — there’s a reason it’s industry standard, but I also don’t feel comfortable with the monthly tithing system that is Photoshop CC. So I *ahem* use Photoshop CS4. You actually don’t need much of its functionality for comics, but it’s good for a lot of other stuff. Like… photo manips, rudimentary animation, etc.
Pros: It’s Photoshop.
Cons: Ugh giving money to Adobe. Also: it might be me not using the newer PS, but switching brushes on PS is a bitch.
————
Sketchbook Pro: $5 on Android/iOS, $60 on PC/Mac
I really like the clean, intuitive interface and the customizable Lagoon on the PC! I feel like the Lagoon and the Brush Pucks deserves its own post, so I’ll save it for that. It’s also nice that it’s cross-platform. It has rudimentary layer options, and basic text/ruler features.
Pros: nice interface, not too expensive.
Cons: Not as robust as Photoshop or MangaStudio in terms of layers, export options, etc. It’s decent at a lot of things, but not superb at anything. Also, Autodesk is also moving to a subscription model. :-/
————
MangaStudio Pro: $50 for PC/Mac
This is designed more doing comics, so there’s a TON of tools for word balloons, dialogue text, panel frames, etc. Plus it has most of the Photoshop functionality that I every use, such as advanced layer options (masking, Overlay layers, layer groups, etc), and color tweaking (Hue/Saturation, Curves, etc). The internet-download version is called ClipStudio for some reason.
Pros: full-featured, powerful comicking tools. Photoshop-level power at a pittance. Great brush engine.
Cons: translated from Japanese, so figuring out the interface is a bitch. But I think ultimately worth it — I’ve finally got the interface customized to mostly suit my needs. Also: there’s a really big difference between MangaStudio 4 and 5, and it’s hard to find tutorials for MS5. And personally, the brush engine is waaay to complicated for me — I actually prefer the simpler one of Sketchbook Pro.
Thus ends the software section. Next:
============= My Comicking Processes ===========
Oh gosh this is highly personalized and probably not helpful at all, but here they are:
Fan-comics:
I try not to spend too much time on fan comics, so I do them on my Galaxy Note 8, with Sketchbook Pro. There’s 2 peculiarities that come with that:
(A) I keep all the pages in the same file, but unfortunately each file maxes out at 18 layers, so often times there’s a lot of layer juggling and “draw something to ‘good enough’, merge down to clear out layer space, regret forever”
(B) I use an old version of SKP that doesn’t have the lasso tool, but has much nicer color interface. So there’s a lot of my workaround of “create duplicate layer, resize/move layer, erase the parts I don’t want, then merge back down”
So, my process:
(1) Do layouts for all the pages, in pink lines
(2) Lineart.
I often have to go back to the draft layer in a different color (green, usually, then blue) to tighten up some of the original sketches.
Sometimes I ink a panel on a new layer, move/resize to where it looks/feels good, then merge with the other inks of the page.
dialogue dialogue dialogue. Usually on a new layer.
Merge all the dialogue and ink layers for each page when I no longer feel regret.
Put in white behind the dialogue balloons and sometimes the panel gutters, then merge with lineart.
(3) Coloring
Loosely brush my way around a background layer.
Lay down flats for the characters/foreground on a new layer
Create Multiply layer, put in shading as appropriate. I generally try to remember to use reds for the skin, but the rest of it is lazy grays straight from the color palette.
Create another layer to pick out the highlights if necessary
Merge everything to save layer space. Cry because I see something in the bg that I can’t change anymore.
(4) Photoshop
I export as PSD and load it on my normal computer in Photoshop
Turn up the saturation a bit if necessary — depends on laziness
Export as jpg, upload to tumblr
Here’s what the layer nightmare looks like: (I had to delete all my pink draft lines to make space. There’s 6 pages in this comic, and each page has lineart + coloring + bg, so that’s 18 layers, which is the max.)
I’ve talked about my Tisquantum story process a bit here, but here’s the my current technology/production process:
(1) Do several pages of layout in Sketchbook Pro, usually with purple for some reason
(2) Load up the file in MangaStudio, draw panel borders. Rasterize panel borders and re-export as PSD
(3) In Sketchbook Pro, while watching roughly 3 episodes of Crime Procedural — Linework layer, background layer, layer of grayscale flats, then shade the flats
(4) Load up the file in Photoshop for postproduction:
ctrl-shift-G all the art layers to clip to the panel shapes. Add white to the clipping layer for open panels as necessary
type in lots of text. Tweak. Agonize.
Make speech balloons as a vector shape layer with an inside stroke of 6px, add balloon tails with the pen tool
Move text and balloons around until everything feels right
Add sepia layer (set to Soft Light)
(Eventually I hope to learn how to do all this in MangaStudio, but right now I have a more established PS workflow)
(5) Get beta feedback
Re-tweak lots of dialogue
Sometimes the beta points out a major art problem. But at this point I can’t open it in SBP without losing all of the text and speech bubble stuff, so that’s when I plug in my Intuos and try to fake the brush textures in PS.
Export as web-friendly size, upload to server. Type up historical notes.
