How I Go About Making Comics

    Hey, I hope your all doing fantastic. I'm Ritatastic! And this is a bit of a new thing that I'm trying out. For some reason, I think you guys care about my creative processes (please let me know if you don't; writing these articles takes forever). Therefore, I am going to start doing these little tutorial... type.. actual... blog posts.

   

Back on track! What is this about, you may ask. Well, you saw the title. How I go about making comics! This will be divided into two parts: Strips and Full Pages. Because how I go about making those two types is totally different!

   

A bit of back ground before I get in, though. Even though the main types of comics I post are strips, I actually make full page comics a lot more. Despite this I have a more concrete method of making comic strips, so that section will be more informative. This method is subject to change, this is just how I do it now. Also, I won't be talking about my specific digital art process. Please let me know if you would like that, though!

Without further adieu, let's get into it!

Section 1 - Comic Strips

    The first thing you want to decide is you panel number. Even if you look at the first comic and my latest comic, I have consistently used three panels per strip. However, you can use as many or little panels as you want! Look at the Funnies page of the Sunday paper. Most of those comics have upwards to 10 panels. If you are a normal person and don't read the paper, look at TheOdd1sOut's comics! His comics have a lot of panels, too. But the are all still comic strips.

   

After you have decided your panel number, you need to brainstorm your characters. Characters are the most important thing in comic strips. And don't worry if your not good at character design or drawing. Look at the first few comics I posted. The art sucked. All you need are characters with compelling personallities. This is something that I, admittedly, still need to work on. It took a while for Quin and Audry's personalities to really come into their own. Quin used to be the silly one. But at their bases, Audry is the dumb blonde, Quin is the punchline. Putting it into words, it sounds mean, but once you have basic archetypes, you can start to easily come up with jokes based around those archetypes.

   

Next step is to brainstorm jokes. Come up with a bunch! And, unlike full page comics, you don't have to worry about messing up canon. If we were worrying about canon, Audry has canonically died three times, I'm pretty sure. But we don't have to worry about that, do we? So, if we can make jokes without worrying about that, let's think about what if a character died. I haven't killed Quin in a comic before. So let's go with that idea. How would Audry react to Quin's death? She'd probably say "F" or ask Alexa to play Despacito, honestly. We'd need to have a character to tell Audry her sister died, so we'll just use me.

So, after I come up with the idea, I thumbnail the comic and then I draw it digitally.

So that's my comic strip process! So, how do I go about full page comics?

Section 2 - Full Page Comics

I am calling this type of comic "Full Page Comics" because that's the most basic thing I can call it. You could also call them story driven comics, graphic novels, or web comics. Admittedly, I should have called it Web Comics. I am not currently working on a web comic, but this is how I did Delta Emerald back in the day.

The first thing I do is come up with the story pitch. Let's take Delta Emerald. The story is basically me in Pokémon. Stories are the biggest part of this type of comics. Fanfiction or not, stories are important and difficult to come up with. So what would be an interesting story? Maybe some magical girls who get their powers from lapel pins?

Then you need to make the setting. It's a magical girl series, so that's easy. A middle school in Tokyo. Then you need to make characters to go into this world. Um... Japanese-American girl who is moving to Japan for the first time. Yeah! We'll make her the fire type one. I fill up the rest of the world with other magical girls of different elements.

After I have characters, a setting, and a basic story pitch, I make a rough outline and make a few ideas for the first page.

Then I thumbnail the page, trying to make an interesting layout. I blow it up and then do a rougher sketch over it and then ink it.

Thank you for reading this post! I'm probably going to make the comic strip mentioned in this. As I said, this method is subject to change. If you have any questions or any more article suggestions, comment them down bellow! I've been having a lot of fun making stuff for this blog and the people who view my blog on a regular basis make this so much more fun! 

Stay Awesome! <3