The Wizard The Witch & The Wild One OCs fancomic🧙♀️🧙♀️
Layout done by me, check out the finished pretty comic by @dogfennel!!
Managed to get this out before Aabrias season starts, phew!! Can't believe we've been working on it since March 2025 lololol
If you want to check out more about Roving, @dogfennel's witch OC, you can find stuff about her here
It was very cool to see my well witch Tilly rendered in her style 🥰🥰She's a bit undead after making an unwise deal with a spirit as a kid, don't worry about it.
Obviously, this doesn't get into Space Is Time, beats and pacing, or more general composition principles, but it's meant as a starting point to just get panels on a page.
Sometimes layouts are just setting down panels, which you then feel out re: readability and beats. Sometimes what you put down doesn't work, but that's okay! Just keep playing and puzzling.
You can find the half, quarter, and third marks by making lines from the corners of the whole page, then lines from the corners of the vertical half of the page.
This layout was a homework assignment for my comic class. The script comes from Sunset Boulevard! I don't think i'll ever take this to finish but I wanted to share.
Gonna share how I set up my comics. After writing a script--which is mostly dialogue, character actions and visuals, rarely 'properly' formatted or broken up with page length or lay out in mind--I do 'thumbnails' which are really just doodles of whatever size that get the 'jist' of each beat of the script. I don't think about page layout at this stage, either, I'm just worried about capturing roughly what I had in my head when I was getting stuff written out.
Then I take the thumbnails and scale them down and start constructing pages out of them. There's a LOT of ways you can format a comic, but I stick to a rough 3x3 grid layout as, like, the most busy I'm willing to make a page. This is what I mean;
I can use UP TO 3 horizontal frames interrupted UP TO 3 times vertically for a total of 9 frames per page. For hanahaki, it was a 2x2 grid for simplicity. Really, cannot recommend enough, if comic layout intimidates you, throw it away. Limit yourself to a simple grid and don't deviate. Your story only needs complicated layouts if you decide it does. Anyway, with that template in mind, I start plugging in thumbnails and giving them frames.
here I stopped at 5 pages bc who knows, my brain might implode and this project may die, so we're starting small.
The next step is to copy over the thumbnails and resize them for a full page. The last step of layout is putting in my rough estimates of where the dialogue/narration will go;
bc if there's one thing that will fuck up a perfectly good frame composition, its realizing you have to put a fucking speech bubble in there. I try to be generous bc I prefer fairly large text for my comics--as I myself am Fucking Blind--and it can be a hell of a tightrope, esp when you intend to do a chatty, floaty head comics like me. This is another reason I prefer to keep that 9 frames limit on my layouts bc there's only so much space for those talky bits.
For hanahaki, I tended to cheat a lot so you'd get a lot of pages where the speech bubbles were way outside the bounds of the page, which has made formatting later a huge pain and I'm trying to be better.
Ultimately, you just don't want to cover ppls faces. Unless you do, for the storytelling of it all.
anywho, FAR from a perfect science, but if I can bullshit together a comic using this, so can you. And you should. Go make a comic. I believe in you
