#superflat speaks

[superphatpsyche]

i was looking up hamtaro refs and the earliest version of the anime gives off smiling critters vibes

[superflatpsyche]

Hello, fellow art-enjoyers and art-makers. By now, you've probably seen that post about tumblr's new AI policies.

I won't lie, as a hobby artist not dependent on social media, my first thought was to pack up and stop posting online entirely.

Due to how tumblr reblogs work, I don't believe that deleting my blogs would accomplish anything, since my posts would still exist on other accounts. So, unless something crazy happens, I plan to keep my art up as an archive of everything I've made/posted since 2012.

However, I don't foresee myself posting anything new here at all, unless it's to announce finished projects available for download.

Out of all the art platforms, tumblr is the one I've used longest, and I'm not entirely sure where to go from here. Investing my time into local art communities seems like the logical first step, but after that...?

If I stay online, I want it to be on my own terms, which is why I'm looking into creating a personal site for my work. Neocities already has me intrigued, so I'll see where that takes me. Squarespace is another option.

As social media sites become increasingly hostile to creatives, we need to keep being our authentic selves and making weird-ass shit. Stay safe out there, and thank you for following my work <3

[superphatpsyche]

My partner and I watched Pom Poko last night, and he disliked the movie so much that he's taking a break from watching anything Ghibli-related :''')

[superflatpsyche]

How to Make Comics

Hello! I definitely meant to answer this question earlier, but I knew it’d end up being a really long post, so I wanted to be able to sit down and answer this properly.

First off, I’d decide what kind of comic I want to create. Will it be a huge epic? A gag-a-day comedy? Will it ever be printed?

With digital comics, you could give each page a different-sized layout or even animations if you wanted to! These are all things that are hard to translate into a physical book. You also wouldn’t need to worry about things like page bleed. Or color choices - in my experience, digital art prints way darker than you’d expect.

The stories I have planned and am currently working on are graphic novels, so I don’t have much advice when it comes to newspaper-styled weeklies. But, if this is the kind of stuff you want to make, then my tips might help!

My starting point for making comics was having some character designs lying around that I wanted to use for something. Some people come up with the story first, but for me, it was the characters. If that’s your style, then concept art is a good way to plan out the “feel” of your comic:

IMO it’s very easy to fall into the trap of drawing concept sketches forever, so at some point, you will need to move on to outlining the plot of your comic and writing your first draft. All first drafts suck, so once you’ve reached the end, you’ll immediately have to go back and edit things as needed.

Some resources I used to figure out how writing works are Wired For Story by Lisa Cron, as well as Jim Butcher’s Livejournal posts.

Comics invariably take a long time to make unless you choose a super-simple art style, so I included things like camera angles and other details in my script, to remind myself how to draw a particular scene when I finally reached it. Here’s the script version of a page I finished and posted a while back:

Scripting your entire comic this early on means that you won’t be investing huge amounts of time into making any changes to the story. Rewriting is much faster than redrawing.

The next big step is sketching thumbnails of how your comic pages will look. Ideally, you’ll want to have finalized sketches of every single page before going any further, but you could do one chapter at a time, depending on your workflow. Here’s what that looks like:

At this stage, I’m mostly focusing on page layout, panel shapes, and speech bubble placement. It’s also a helpful tool to see where your double-page spreads can go (this is when two pages of a physical book are used to create a single, double-wide comic page).

And now comes the fun stuff: deciding what size your comic should be. I didn’t want to think about this at all, so I just grabbed this template from online:

And also this template for double-page spreads:

And these are the sizes I draw Control Freak at, with a resolution of 350 DPI (the minimum recommended resolution for printing is 300 DPI).

Thanks to these templates and the groundwork laid down in the last steps, I can now actually start making the comic! Here’s how I use the template - note that all of the speech bubbles are placed in the “live area”, where they won’t be cut off during printing.

And here’s the finished page:

Now repeat for as long as it takes to finish your comic!

I personally recommend picking a very manageable art style, as comics take ridiculously large amounts of time to make (I have learned Many Things about this from working on Control Freak), but you do you!

Hope this helps you make whatever comics your heart desires ^^

[superphatpsyche]

tfw you buy your first mechanical keyboard and the keycaps are more expensive than the actual board itself lel

[superphatpsyche]

Probably my dumbest/biggest aro moment was offering to help a friend with something. And they had to remind me that they had a partner.

...I FORGOT THEY HAD A PARTNER. And then I had the galaxy brain realization that most people rely on their partners to help them out. I’m so used to doing everything myself 😂😂😂

[superflatpsyche]

Since Afton "always comes back" he would be the sole owner of Fazbear entertainment, since he's an original founder.

Good point, I wasn't even thinking of Henry. My brain was fixated on "sleazy corporate murder-rabbit". To ham up the AU even more, Henry could still be alive, making him the only living person trying to expose Will, while the ghosts contribute in their own way. Of course, since Will and Henry are still working together, this results in many cartoon hijinks where they're constantly trying to outplay each other, but Will is somehow always 15 steps ahead of everyone.

TL;DR it's a match made in hell!

[superphatpsyche]

Has the “just put yourself out there sweaty! :)” advice ever worked for people? I’ve found that it results in me not being taken seriously, talked about behind my back, etc. Whereas waiting for people to come to me has led to far more genuine relationships/interactions in my life. Like who really knows lmao.