Comics craft tip! It's a good rule of thumb to avoid this specific arrangement of panels!
It's a layout that will confuse your reader, because it's unclear which panel comes next. You rarely want someone's reading experience to be interrupted trying to figure out which panel they're supposed to be reading. The reverse layout, on the other hand, is no problem.
Is it possible to use composition and lettering to make it clear which panel comes next? Absolutely! Just make sure it's something you're doing on purpose, and remember that compositions are usually better when you're not actively fighting your layout.
Okay, thing I noticed about Part 4 that I found funny, but probably requires too much explanation to actually be funny to anyone else.
First, some background. When thinking about comics paneling there are three popular panel arrangements for grids:
You might recognize the nine panel grid from such comics as watchmen, and it's a great example of the concept I want to explain, which is the grid superstructure. All of these pages use a nine panel superstructure, despite having nine, six, and four panels respectively.
The grid helps conceptualize where gutters go, but unless you're being incredibly strict about using identical panel sizes, you can mess with them, while still maintaining the flow that grid affords.
Now here's Part 4 of Looking Glasses:
As you can see, when I do more traditional layouts, I tend to get stuck in an eight panel grid loop. Out of twelve pages, only 3 of them aren't eight panels grids. You can usually tell I'm thinking in eight panel grids when there are four rows of panels down the page.
Now where could I have gotten this style from...? 🤔
Hail, flatter! This one, who is a layperson of the arts and comixcraft, has a query for you:
So like, what is flatting?
I've seen your flats in Wifwulf, and I've read about the flats in Looking Glasses, and generally get that it results in an image with similarly coloured areas sharing the same false-colour.
But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this? Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones? How do you pick the colours and how many get used?
How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?
Thank you! I come in the spirit of humility wishing to relieve my ignorance of your noble craft!
OHOHOHO!!! You've activated my trap card and now I get to ramble about comics craft! And in my area of professional expertise, too! Be prepared for a long post
I'm going to start with the last part of your question:
How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?
So the thing about comics is that it is one of the most intensely time consuming mediums to create. One person can make comics on their own fairly easily, but it takes forever to produce. Consider that I've been working on Looking Glasses for 18-19 months and have drawn about 87 pages. Now, the western comics industry expects issues to be produced monthly, generally 24 pages in length. It's very difficult for a single person to work at this rate, so the labor of producing comics has been divided. Generally these jobs become:
Writer (writes the script)
Editor (edits the script)
Artist (draws the lineart)
Colorist (colors and renders the art)
Letterer (adds balloons, dialog, and sfx)
Flatter (sometimes 'color assistant' they take the art and prepare it for coloring)
This isn't comprehensive though, there are a bunch of other jobs, like designers and layout artists. Occasionally the artist job gets broken into Pencilers (who sketch the art) and Inkers (who ink the sketch). Basically, by splitting the work amongst a number of people you can produce comics much faster. Not all of these jobs are required, and creator-owed books might have artists do their own coloring and lettering, while big work-for-hire books might have twice as many people working so they can pump out a spider-man book every other week.
Okay, so why Flatters?
Flatting at it's most basic level is just coloring inside the lines. You take a black and white page of art, and you have to fill in every part of the page that will eventually be colored. It's a pretty time consuming task depending on how involved your lineart is.
Flatting a page of Looking Glasses doesn't take me all that long, usually less than a half hour, which is pretty quick. Looking Glasses pages tend to be... optimized for flatting though. There are only ever a few characters and there aren't a ton of background details.
You mentioned Wifwulf (created by my longtime friend and collaborator Dailen Ogden), here's one of it's pages:
Basically everything that's a different base color, (every tree, plant, bit of moss, character, etc.) needed to be picked out separately. Each page of Wifwulf took me a few hours to flat. If Dailen had been doing that themself, those hours would have really added up, but instead they could spend that time drawing and coloring. Now, that said, these pages have a lot of texture, so it's hard to see exactly what I did.
Here's an example from a comic I worked on early in my career. (Lineart by Patrick Custodio)
The writer for this comic loved to put in these incredibly complex crowd scenes, which is something the artist excelled at drawing. I was coloring and flatting at this point on the book, and before I could even start coloring properly, I would need to flat for like eight hours. (I have a much more efficient method these days) It was frustrating because I just wanted to work on the actually creative part, but the majority of my time was spent on something monotonous. As soon as I got the writer to hire a flatter for me, coloring a page would take me only one or two hours, not nine or ten.
So that's why flatters exist, mainly to ease the workload on colorists.
But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this?
Flatting serves a couple of purposes. It's main function, like I said above, is just coloring in the lines. After finishing your lineart it has to get colored in, so in a layer below the lines, you add colors.
The secondary function is preservation. I like to work in a way that is non-destructive, basically, at any point in the process I can restore an earlier version of the drawing if I make a mistake or don't like something. Flats are integral to this.
In digital art, there's this thing called anti-aliasing, where the edges of a line or shape have a drop off of pixel color or opacity. It makes the edges look smoother or blurrier. The three dots on the left are Anti-Aliased, while the one on the right is Aliased, there's no drop off, just hard pixels.
Anti-aliasing is fine until you need to change the color using the paint bucket, or select using the magic wand...
See how the anti-aliased art doesn't play well with these tools, but the aliased art does? So with something like Wifwulf, the final art is going to be full of texture that makes it impossible to select anything again once it's painted. By having a dedicated aliased flats layer under the rest of the artwork, you can always re-select any part of the image you want.
I always leave my flats layer alone, and do any detail work in layers above. For example when I was painting this, it really helped to be able to select just the titan so I could work on those paints without worrying about brushstrokes overlapping the rest of the characters.
One of the other things you can do with flats is quickly selecting certain elements. On most pages, I flat my panels, figures, and background elements separately. Later, with a single button press, I can select just the characters in the scene, or entire panels at a time, which makes things like shading a whole lot easier.
Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones?
If you're flatting for other people you often don't know what the final colors are going to be, so you just pick random ones. Garish colors can be helpful because it makes it obvious that they're not the final colors. Why don't I use the correct colors on my own pages when I'm flatting? Habit, mostly. It's also faster to grab random colors than to track down the correct ones. Sometimes two different things will have the same final color but I like to flat them with different colors so I can select them individually if I need to.
You can see the process a bit here. In my flats, Lancer's spade (eye? eyes? thing) is a different color from his tongue, even if they end up being the same white in the final image. This would help if I ever needed to select just his eyes for some reason. You can also see how I select his body fur color and then add details on top, like his colored fingers and the grey on his arm. Those elements have blurry anti-aliased edges, and it would be impossible to re-select them without flats.
How do you pick the colours and how many get used?
I use the default "additional color set" palette in clip studio and just work my way through it. I pick row and work my way down (for a change of pace I vary which row I start with). How many is mostly dependent on the artwork. You just keep going until you run out of individual objects to color. I have worked on pages where I've run out of colors on this palette and had to start making up more. Typically a page of Looking Glasses only needs around 20-30, though.
So! That's flatting! It's a little known job, and it's how I got started with my comics career, so I have a lot of thoughts on it. I was trying to be concise (lol), so I hope this all makes sense, but I'd be happy to clarify or answer any other questions about this process. I know I didn't really go into how I flat my work, so I can make that post if anyone is interested.
Lettering is an easy to overlook aspect of comics creation, partially because good lettering is designed to be invisible, but bad lettering can ruin an otherwise well crafted project.
Now, I'm not a letterer by trade, I'm a colorist who thinks too much about comics craft, but I've picked up on a few common mistakes I've seen new webcomic artists making, and I thought I'd share my tricks.
#1: Get a Dialog font
Sorry, despite Comic Sans having the word comic in the name, it's not actually good for lettering comics. Comic book letterers usually use specially designed fonts when they're lettering comics, and they often have websites where you can get these typefaces for a reasonable fee (or sometimes even free!)
What makes dialog typefaces special?
The barred-I! (and other contextual options)
This one is subtle, but generally, you want to only use the barred-I for the personal pronoun "I" or for roman numerals. It helps clarify that what you're looking at is an I and not an L, but it takes up more space in the word, and we're trying to reserve as much space as possible for the art on the page.
Specially made comic book fonts will also be custom designed to be legible at a distance, have multiple bold/italics options, and might even include special versions of individual letters for when you type multiple of the same character in a row! It'll give your lettering a personal touch that you won't get from typefaces designed for other things.
Blambot is a great resource for all your lettering needs. Here I'm using Backissues and Nightmark
#2: Dialog Stacking
Dialog should always be stacked such that your longest line of text is in the middle. The block of text itself should have a sort of diamond shape <>. Sometimes this is difficult to do, especially if you have any long words at the beginning or end of a sentence. You can't always get it to work (and if you're unwilling to rewrite your dialog so it fits), so sometimes it might not be perfect, but if your text block is more hourglass shaped >< that's a good indication that you should try putting your line breaks somewhere else. Basically try to make your text as round as possible if it's in a balloon.
#3: Balloon Shape
One of the more common mistakes I see webcomic artists making is using perfectly elliptical balloons. It's actually kind of difficult to fit text into balloons that are perfectly elliptical; there ends up being a lot of uneven space around the text, and it looks kind of cheap. Making your balloons slightly more rectangular is going to give you more bang for you buck, they'll fit the text block a little better. I like a hand drawn balloon, I tend to think they add variety.
One thing you definitely shouldn't do is this:
This might be a personal preference thing more than any kind of hard and fast rule, but these lettering styles give me the impression that the text is pasted on top of the art, and that no real thought was put into arranging it thoughtfully with the art. These are probably more appropriate for captions, not so much for dialog
Lettering is a part of the medium we're working with, the dialog should be approached as a part of the artwork, and treated as such.
#4: Balloon Placement
The number one, most important rule of lettering, is that the placement of your balloons should never confuse your reader. The goal of balloon placement is to guide your reader around the page, each one should naturally lead your reader towards the next thing they should read. Here's an example of something I see a lot:
While yes, it is true that on a comics page, people read left-to-right top-to-bottom, if two balloons are connected with a line, I am going to read them one after another. Readers are not going to intuitively assume they should jump to the other side of the page just because the #2 balloon is slightly above #3. In this situation the balloons should be interwoven.
It should not be possible to look from one balloon to another and skip over intermediate dialog. If your reader misses a part of the conversation and has to double back to figure out what they missed, you've broken the flow and immersion of the page.
Like I said, lettering is all about guiding your reader around the page, it should be a part of your composition from the beginning, don't forget to incorporate lettering into your work when you're first laying out your page. Put yourself in the place of your reader and see how your eyes track across the page.
Hope these help! Like I said, I'm no expert; it took me a while to learn a lot of this. I would have found these tips super useful when I was first starting out. If you're interested in the technical side of lettering, I highly recommend The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering by Nate Piekos. It's one of the most useful reference books I own, and I learned most of this from that book.
Here's some early logo experimentation. I've mentioned before that a big part of my process of starting a new project involves visual design. Frequently that means I spend hours downloading new fonts.* Here, I spent a lot of time looking at fancy fonts, and I briefly played around with making the Os into Ralsei's glasses, but I didn't like the way it looked. At the time I was pulling some inspiration from the visual styling of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers, which has a really cool sequence in issue 2 with stylized sans serif captioning. I wanted to emulate the vibes from that, and settled on Avenir Next as my title/interstital font. Sometimes simple is better.
*When you're doing a project that you plan to monetize, make sure you own the commercial rights to use the fonts you download! Looking Glasses can't be monetized, but I've paid for the font licenses all the same.
Writing scenes Marvel Method is so funny, like I sure did draw that character making an expression, I wonder what they're saying. They look upset, it's probably something important. Guess I'll find out later!
This was the first bit of concept art I did for Looking Glasses. The scene where Ralsei is first confronted by the titan was incredibly clear in my head from the beginning, so when I sat down to start working on the comic, it was the first scene I started messing with. This drawing was mostly about experimenting with fonts and effects, so the art itself is pretty rough. My development process tends to start with visual design stuff, so I often spend hours looking at fonts before I get into sketching actual art. I'm really glad that I went in a different direction with this page in the final product, this is pretty visually cluttered.
Going over my old artwork has me thinking about the craft behind that sequence a bit, so I'm going to throw some more thoughts under the cut. It's a two for one.
Let's start with the final pages for this sequence, just to remind you how it turned out
You can see how that initial sketch got divided up into the second and third pages here. This served some practical purposes. To start, I realized I wanted you to be able to see Ralsei's face on the second page, to show how the loud titan voice is hurting him. But I wanted to keep Ralsei silhouetted in front of the titan eye for scale, so I pushed that into the next page.
Let's look at my initial sketches for this sequence.
You might notice some pretty major differences between these sketches and the finished product. Most notably, panel 3 on page 1 and all of page 2 are flipped. That's because I realized I had broken the 180 rule on page one, and it made a scene without any visual landmarks kind of confusing. Of course, I didn't realize this until super late in the process on that page. You can see this in the difference between my flats and the final base colors.
(I also fixed some weirdness at this stage, like Ralsei's head in the first panel was kinda wonky). But flipping this one panel also meant I had to flip the entire next page to keep continuity.
A few more details I think are kinda fun.
On the left, I had added a bunch of eyes to the smoke, a design detail I later dropped because I couldn't quite get it to look good in the colors, and I figured the titan eye showing up on his top worked well enough. He's also crying in this panel, which I also must of dropped.
On the right I really had to work through a bunch of expressions for him before settling on squeezing his eyes closed. At one point he was really angry!
But that didn't fit the vibe. Ralsei isn't exactly angry here, even if he is shouting on this page. I really liked him closing his eyes tightly though, it let me do this across the page-turn:
Which I thought was a cool way to transition out of one scene (and visual style) and into another. Now, is he waking up here because he wills himself to wake up, or because Susie healed him? I'll leave that one up to interpretation.
I'm also kind of referencing Issue 17 of The Wicked and The Divine here, where the POV character closes her eyes at the end of every scene to mark scene transitions (and when she's dissociating).
Anyway, that's the really long winded development of this sequence, from initial concept art to final product.
