What should my comic strip be about




















Sound effects SFX : Stylized lettering that represents noises within a scene. As with many other elements of comics, overuse of sound effects is distracting. They should be reserved for significant sounds, whether large explosions or small a door softly closing on a lonely room. Borders: The lines that enclose panels, balloons, and captions. Various styles and line weights can be used to evoke different effects or moods.

A more recent trend is to use borderless shapes for balloons, tails, and captions, as in Paper Girls. Gutter: The space, usually white, between and around panels. Colored or shaded gutters can help establish mood, denote flashbacks, or be used purely for aesthetic effect.

Gutters are an almost subliminal part of the comic book reading process, since they represent the events between panels and pages. No matter how you combine these elements, always keep in mind that each comics panel and page should read in the same order as a page of text: from left to right and top to bottom. For example, when two characters are speaking to each other in the same panel, whoever talks first should be on the left side.

In some cultures, comics are read from right to left. Traditional manga, for example, are read in what looks to most Westerners hard-core manga fans excepted like back-to-front order. Obviously, the main action in comics is portrayed within panels.

But gutters play a crucial role by connecting sequential panels into a coherent story. Whether two seconds or two years elapse between consecutive panels, the gutter is where that unseen action occurs. Abrupt or unclear shifts between panels can confuse readers and distance them from a story, so most comic book creators strive to create smooth transitions.

This is especially true for comics that have a potential bookstore, as opposed to comic book shop, audience. Believe it or not, reading comics is something of a learned skill.

People who rarely read comic strips or comic books may have a hard time perceiving sequential art as anything more than a series of disconnected images. Or they may simply ignore the images in favor of the words if the layout is confusing.

Showing every single action in continuous sequence is the least efficient and often dullest way of staging a scene and telling a story. One means by which both movies and comic books make fiction more dramatic than real life is the manipulation of time.

They show certain significant moments within their stories, while omitting others. Comics, unlike cinema, do so through still images, absorbed by different readers at their own speeds. Because of this interactivity, there are two interrelated types of pacing in comics: The pace at which time seems to move within the story, and the pace at which your audience reads the story. Wordy panels almost always slow down the reader, for example.

However, because these elements all work in combination, any one technique can have different effects depending on context. For example, a large, silent panel in a contemplative scene may slow the reader.

Your primary tool for controlling the pace of time within the story is panel arrangement. You can heighten the impact of certain moments either by telescoping them into a sequence that seems slower than realtime, or by compressing them into a quicker sequence with more time elapsing between panels. And in Chapter 3, he shows how a long story can be increasingly compressed by removing entire sequences and individual panels, even to the point of paring it down to two simple yet clearly sequential and interrelated panels:.

A longer version of the same tale might include the main character Carl buying beer, getting in his car, veering off the road, in an ambulance, and at the hospital.

Note the efficient use of subject-to-subject and action-to-action transitions to show only the moments most crucial to this brief narrative.

Time within individual panels is also malleable. One panel can depict a single moment in time, several moments, or a longer sequence of interdependent moments such as a back-and-forth conversation. This can sometimes be achieved by showing multiple or blurred images of a character or object in the same panel the Flash superspeeding from one action to the next , but such tricks should be used only when necessary to the story.

Have you ever gone to a movie, then later described the story to a friend? To work out your story structure, write an outline that at least covers your opening, turning points, climax, and resolution, focusing on characters as well as events.

Start by getting to know your main character s. Write brief personality profiles or bios of them. What must they do to make that journey — face their fears?

Forgive someone? Commit a crime? Make a sacrifice or compromise? Suffer a loss? Seek help? A young boy and his parents are walking home in the city one night.

But everything changes when a mugger accosts them, then panics and shoots the parents. The boy, devastated, watches his mother and father die in the street.

He vows vengeance. The boy grows into a driven young man. For years he trains in martial arts and hones his skills as a detective, all the while building his inherited fortune into a commercial empire. He adopts the public persona of a flighty playboy to mask his inner obsession with justice. At last, as an adult, he deems himself ready to exact his revenge on the criminal underworld. Inspired by a creature glimpsed flying past his window, he dons a dark costume and sets out to fight crime From the simple plot outlined above, you could spin your story in several different directions.

Condense his backstory and show his early crime-fighting career. For instance, what would happen if:. Under any of these what-if scenarios, would Bruce Wayne become more callous or more caring? Would he give up being Batman and seek other ways of pursuing justice, or is he fated to wear the cape and cowl? As you ask and answer questions such as these, write as much as you need to — then strip your story down to its essentials. Focus on turning points and on making every scene contribute to the progression of plot as well as characters.

Many narrative comics, like movies, follow a classic three-act structure that, at its most basic, is divided into beginning, middle, and end:. Act 1: Introduction and establishment of the central characters, setting, and problem or conflict. And for an excellent discussion and critique of narrative structures, see Alternative Scriptwriting by Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush listed on my page of resources for comic book creators. Creating your own sense of pacing and movement between panels will come to you as you work and develop your style.

Trying all of these different types of panels in your layouts can be a good way to test run a device before committing to a final page layout. I love helping people with their art so contact me through my site or Instagram for help!

Learn the basics of digital art, from the tools you need to the steps of creating digital artwork. Read art tutorials and interviews with concepts artists for films, games, and animation.

Learn techniques for creating expressive and fun character art with these tutorials. Whether you're creating manga, comics, or webtoons, here you'll find the best techniques to create your story! Panels, Gutters, and Page Flow. How to Layout Your Comic! Composition Comics Manga. Dynamic Frames in Comics! What needs to happen between those two points to tell the progress from beginning to end? How many steps will tell that progression best and what needs to be included in each step?

How do I expect the reader to move from one panel to the next? Finding good comic strip ideas might not be so obvious at first. It seems like all good ideas have already been done! So how do you find a subject that will be interesting and original? First, you need to be aware of what has already been done in the world of comic book!

Of course, you don't need to be an expert or know every series ever produced on earth! But at least, you should be able to know what are the recent trends and who are the well-known artists in comic book history.

This way, you won't find an idea thinking that it's the most original one in the world while it might be something very common for every comic book readers. By making some research, you might also find some old ideas and turn them into new, revolutionary concepts! Well you could simply add a new twist to an old concept fictional example: make a superhero for girls! You might also just take two old ideas and mixed them together to create a new one another fictional example: create a manga in a 3 panels comic strip format.

I have dipped my hands in many various art programs, my preference is still CSP. Photoshop and Painter just felt too bulky for my work. The Marvel team and the students communicated through e-mail and Creative Cloud filesharing. To create their illustrations, the students used both traditional drawing tools and mobile and desktop apps in the Creative Cloud, including Photoshop Sketch, Color, and Photoshop CC. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

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