2-3 hours.

I can only stress how helpful it is to have a well-developed set of background concepts and character descriptions before you start writing strips!

I didn't do it. So if my comic weren't as disarrayed and random as it's meant to be, it wouldn't have survived the mess I cooked up. So plan your stuff before you start writing and drawing.

You must have high expectations to your own comic. You have a great idea, so that goes without saying! Let me tell from experience how devastating this can be for you.

To plan a story and know what's going to happen next is great. Another thing is to overplan and overexpect every aspect of your comic to become something which still might be very good, but different from the picture you had in mind.

Overplanning causes disappointment, no matter what you made, and people are likely give up projects that disappointed them. What I'm trying to say, is: Be realistic about what you're going to create!

Other than Don't overplan!, my own strategy on planning is non-existant. I have a background, and there's the general idea of my major storylines, but on a strip-to-strip basis I don't plan. The strips come as I sit my butt down to draw them.

Here's an overwiev on the materials I use. Go back to the Extras page to see the list.



Choice of pens, paper and other material is up to you, the webcartoonist. Personally, I like lines with shifting weight. So I paint my comics to achieve that effect.

Inking with a paintbrush is a pain in the hassle at first. As soon as you get used to and master it, the result can be fabulous.

There exists a nice shortcut to the same effect, though: Get an ink brush-pen: This is essentially a fountain pen with a brush tip. I stick with my brushes because I like to have ink on bottles and trying out different types of ink, but don't worry, nobody expects you to be that geeky.

I always make a thumbnail of the strip before I draw it. The thumbnail is my sketch, which is half the width of an A4 copy paper sheet. On the other half of the A4 I write dialogue as it flows with the panels.

The cardboard plate as shown is my size template. If the comic is longer than one A4 sheet of paper (and it's usually about three sheets), I want to make sure the separate sketches are equal width. For order and simplicity.



At this point (ie. in this particular example) I have a two sheets of A4 with my thumbnail sketches and dialogue on it. Now I want to scan the sketches and edit them in Photoshop.

What I'm going to do is to assemble the strip digitally, upscale it to A4-width (double the original size), transform the gray sketchlines into copy-proof bluelines, and print it out on thick drawing paper.

I move over to the puter.



Next I want to scan my sketch and prepare it in Photoshop for printout on drawing paper.


Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V

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