Comics for Beginners

How to Write & Draw Comics

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Art tutorial: 5 ways to add some life to your drawings

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Do your comics panels lie flat on the page? Struggle to make your characters more dynamic and your backgrounds more authentic? Here are 5 quick tips to making your comics come alive!

1. Wind

Yes, wind! We often forget the weather when we are making comics, but this is just another case of a little going a long way. A puddle or a snowdrift can give off the same effect and help us determine where and when we are.

wind

2. Foreground

Put something in the foreground of your frame will make it look like there is an actual world around your characters.

foreground

3. Shadows

Same as with foreground, the shade of something that is NOT visible in the frame, will give off the illusion of a bigger environment.
shadow

4. Tilt

If all your lines run parallel with the borders, you run risk of confusing and/or boring your reader. Tilt the image, make it seem more dynamic.

tilt

5. Trash

Put some paper scraps, dead leaves or cigarette butts in your frames to make them seem more lived in. A cracked pavement, a grafitti or some peeled paint gives the same feeling: The world exists outside this one, static image!

trash

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ProFile: Jules Rivera

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ProFile-Jules-Rivera Jules Rivera is a Los Angeles-based sequential illustrator and animator.  She has worked in small press publishing and TV animation, and has self-published several graphic novels including Misfortune High and webcomic Valkyrie Squadron.

 What made you decide to work in the medium of comics?
I’ve always been a writer and a storyteller. I’ve also had an interest in animation and visuals.  Eventually, I discovered I could tell stories visually through the comics medium, and I’ve been doing that for the last ten years or so.

What part of the process is the most challenging or frustrating to you?
Always starting with a blank sheet of paper is rough.  Trying to figure out what the right layout is, or what the right camera angle is as you draw is tricky.  The key to overcoming it is to put something down.  Anything.  This is true of script or art.  A first draft’s only job is to exist.  

If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring comics creator, what would that be?
Never give up.  There are many external and internal forces that would stop a creator from working. Self-doubt, lack of family support, the difficulties of breaking into a saturated entertainment industry. There are many things that will make you want to quit, but don’t.  Ever.  Even if you have to put things on hiatus for a while, never give up on creating the things you love. Creation is the thing that sets us free.

ProFile: Kevin Colden

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ProFile-Kevin-ColdenKevin Colden has written, drawn, colored, and lettered all sorts of comics over the last decade including Fishtown, I Rule the Night, Yours Truly Jack the Ripper (with writers Joe R. Lansdale and John L. Lansdale), and helped IDW Publishing relaunch James O’Barr’s The Crow in 2012 with writer John Shirley. His most recent work includes a digital one-shot adaptation of Robert Bloch’s Pumpkin with writer Steve Niles and colors for Dynamite’s GRIMM digital series, as well as his own upcoming series Ἀντιόχεια (Antioch). He lives in New York with his wife and their three-year-old son/personal assistant.

What made you decide to work in the medium of comics?

Comics have been a part of my life since I can remember, and until I was about twelve or thirteen years old, the only thing I wanted to do for a living when I grew up was write and draw comics. When I was a teenager I got very serious about music and theater, but I came back to comics when I decided not to pursue acting. My reasoning was that if I went to school for visual art I could always find work as a graphic designer if nothing else, but if I went to school for acting I would end up working as waiter or a clown at children’s birthday parties or something like that. I also hate auditioning, so I picked the fallback career that I liked more. As it turns out, that was a good idea, because it took me about eight years after graduating to be able to make any kind of living wage from comics. The reason why I picked comics as opposed to illustration, animation or design work probably comes from the fact that I like writing and telling stories as much as I like drawing. What I love most is when I’m able able to craft a complete piece of work from beginning to end and have people engage with it directly from me to them, with as little as possible in between. You can’t really do that with film or animation because there are so many other people involved. You can’t even do that with most comics if you want to make a living. So I guess it’s a little bit of an ego thing after having tried a few other disciplines that were more collaborative.

What part of the process is the most challenging or frustrating to you?

From a creative standpoint, I find the amount of time involved in drawing to be very frustrating. For a long time I was known as a guy who could do good work really fast, but that was mainly because I’m a little impatient, possibly a little ADHD. Nowadays I take a lot more time with the work, but it can be excruciating to realize that it’s taken me a month to do ten pages – until I realize that I’m doing full grayscale hatching and coloring it as well. Still it’s hard to accept that the reader is only going to spend a minute with a page that took three days to create. From a business standpoint, I’m not a huge fan of the standard business model as a creator in American comics. I’ve never really been all that keen to follow instructions, because no one has ever done anything creatively interesting by following the rules. I like to know those rules, for sure, but – as an example – if I’m making my own comic and need to promote it, where is the money coming from to go to six or seven conventions a year? Breaking even at a con is nearly impossible even if you’re very popular or are able to charge a lot for sketches. That’s not sound business to my eyes. So I prefer to find fun ways to work outside the system and then let everyone else run to where lightning just struck.

If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring comics creator, what would that be?

Spend a lot of time trying different genres and styles, and when you find something you love and that you’re good at, focus on it. If you start hating it, start all over again.

Why you can’t learn from success

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mindsetWe all want to be succesful  in some way or another. But is success in comics a recipe you can follow? Secret ingredients? Or is it actually better to burn your fingers on the stove? At least you can learn from that experience!

My motto is: “You can’t learn from success”

This quote in a comment on my podcast episode The 3 biggest mistakes of my comics career, got me thinking about this topic.

Looking at people who succeed and copying their strategy would seem like a good idea. And there definitely is a a lot to be said for looking at peers and seeing what works for them. But can you really learn from the success of other artists or duplicate the success you had with a previous project?

Here’s why I think you can’t learn from success:

  • What works for another artist is not necessarily going to work for you. They have a different background, a different skill set, maybe a different home life or financial situation putting them in a better position than you.
  • Success is personal. You might perceive another creator as hugely successful while they see their career as less than perfect – most likely that’s how they feel!
  • You can’t measure success. We as artists have an embedded dissatisfaction with where we are. That’s what motivates us to get going! So the feeling of success we might have quickly fades and gives way to new dissatisfaction.
  • No one mulls over success. The more time you spend thinking about something, the bigger the chance of learning from that experience, right? But who lies awake thinking of their successes? Not comics artists, for sure! We’re much more prone to miring over what went wrong, how we’re not good enough. Let’s use that in a constructive way and at least learn something from those self-doubts.
  •  What worked for you once is not necessarily going to work again! The world is constantly changing and so are you. The circumstances that made a success could have shifted or the artistic side of you refuses to repeat the process.
  • The learning you could subtract from a previous success is usually hidden somewhere in the big picture. What you think made the success and what actually made it happen is probably not the same thing.
  • Success is 80% timing. Okay, I have no scientific evidence for this, but I do believe a lot of what makes a success is out of our control. It’s not just meeting the right peers or editors, being up for the task when opportunity arises. Any work of art needs to hit home with an audience and the market is constantly shifting. Serial killers or cute ponies might be in vogue this year, but next year we couldn’t be bothered.
  • To be really successful in art, you cannot just be replicating what you did last! You need to be constantly pushing yourself.
  • Success is outside of your comfort zone. If you are any good at what you do, you will constantly be introducing new methods, new tools and new influences on your work. See how the list of ingredients is constantly changing? You can’t repeat the recipe, it’s just impossible!
  • No one succeeds from day one! So if you want to learn from success you have to wait a loooong time. Failure happens all the time, especially in the beginning. Great learning possibilities!

So as you can see, learning from failure is a much better strategy than trying to copy your own success or the success of others. And luckily, failure is bound to happen on a regular basis. 

Agree with this perspective? Or think I missed an important point? Comment below!

ProFile: Joshua Dysart

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ProFile-Joshua-Dysart

Joshua Dysart is a multiple Eisner Award nominated, Glyph award-winning, New York Times Bestselling comic book writer and graphic novelist whose work has been reviewed and discussed by the BBC, CNBC Africa, The New York Times, the Huffington Post and elsewhere. He has collaborated with Mike Mignola, Richard Corben, John Totleben, Igor Kordey, Enrique Breccia, Rick Veitch, Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá and Eric Powell, among others. He wrote a two year stint of the legendary Swamp Thing and has also worked on Conan, Hellboy and the Hellboy spinoff, B.P.R.D. He’s currently writing the relaunch of Harbinger for Valiant Entertainment and has been called one of the key architects of their universe.

From 2008 to 2010 he wrote a revamp of The Unknown Soldier for Vertigo. The storyline took place in Acholiland, Uganda in 2002 during the war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan People’s Defence Force. Dysart spent a month in Northern Uganda conducting interviews with child soldiers and others affected by the war to research the book.

What made you decide to work in the medium of comics?

It started out as an accident, sort of. I mean, I’ve always loved and read comics. They have always spoken to me. But I never thought of a career in them save for a few attempts at a young age to con artist friends into doing books with me. If I’d been really driven to do it at a young age, I imagine I would’ve also been driven to learn how to draw as well. As it stands my lack of artistic skill is my greatest flaw as a comic book writer. So it was life that made this happen, not me.

I’d done some script supervising work for a very small, struggling movie production company in Los Angeles in my early twenties. The company was run by a friend of mine, Jan Utstien. A few years after I’d stepped down from that gig and gone back to writing for myself (unpublished short stories, poetry, essays, etc.) she phoned me and said that she had fallen in love with a comic book artist. They wanted to self-publish something together but they needed a writer. I wasn’t very enamored with the first pitch they sent my way, so I ended up going to Mexico for a little under a year. Just to knock around down there, check out the Chiapas revolution, go to Guatemala and Belize, that sort of thing. When I got back I was flat broke and really needed something to dig in to. I went back to waiting tables and working in book stores and in my spare time I worked on this comic for Jan and, by then, her husband Bill O’Neal. That book ended up being a black and white self-published book called Violent Messiahs.

This was 1997 and the comics industry was crashing fast. Thousands of stores were closing a year. It was a terrible time to self publish a black and white. But, inversely, the Hollywood gold rush on comics was really starting to escalate. For better or for worse, they saved the comics industry by subsidizing us through that era. Anyway, that very first issue (there was never an issue #2) got passed around LA and I kept flying out from Texas to go to meetings. In 1998 I just figured I should make a go of it. I didn’t really have anything else going on in my life. So I moved to LA and slept on Jan and Bill’s couch and we republish Violent Messiahs in color with a different artist, Tone Rodriguez, at Image. It was here in LA, creating comics everyday all day and being dead, dead broke as I approached thirty, that I started to fall in love with idea of becoming as good as I possibly could at making comics. I spent the next four years sleeping on couches, refusing day jobs (save for the very brief and rare exceptions) living hand-to-mouth and making, mostly shitty, comics every single day. I’ve spent the rest of my life since struggling to understand how to create a great comic. I’ve succeeded a few times, but not as much as I would like.

What part of the process is the most challenging or frustrating to you?

Believing in myself. Writing is a Sisyphean struggle, and Sisyphus knows that you’ve got to get some momentum, some traction on a project, before that stone starts to move. But when you’re at the base of the mountain, only personal faith in yourself will get the stone going. Belief that the ideas will come, that your voice matters, that there’s a reason why you do this awesome job and others don’t, that’s the only thing that’s going to get you started. And you have to find that belief at the start of every single new project. It’s gotten easier over the years for me, of course. Success breeds faith in yourself, but that doubt has never really gone away, and it makes the inception moment of any project extremely difficult. Hell, even just the inception of any single issue comic is pretty hard for me. I would also argue that a certain amount of doubt breeds a kind of perfectionism that has an energy all its own. But the trick is to not let the doubt cripple you. To manage it. To keep the stone rolling. Total faith in yourself will result in unexamined work and halt growth. But total lack of faith will resort in creative paralyses. As with all things, the middle path is the way.

Secondarily, I always have a problem picking my next project. I’m a person that can have a new idea every single day, and that breeds a kind of inactivity. That’s why you don’t see a lot of creator owned stuff from me. If I don’t have an editor to offer me a paycheck and tell me which project they want me to work on, I’ll do a million things at once and none will get done. I’m hoping to learn how to navigate that tendency soon though because I do feel like there’s something missing in my career, and that working on things that belong fully to me might be the missing piece. Of course “Violent Messiahs” was a creator-owned work, but I wrote that over seventeen years ago. I’m a much, much different writer and person now and I look back on that series and wince a little, despite how good it’s been to me all these years.

If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring comics creator, what would that be?

The best advice I can offer any new comer is that they understand that comics, more than any other medium, is a small community. And you have to become part of that community before you can achieve the goals you have in mind for yourself. You have to make comics and get them out in the world. You have to go to shows. You have to make friends with people in the industry and those at your professional level so that you all lift each other up. You have to invest in yourself. That’s easier than ever now that we have the internet, but it also increasing the amount of noise that’s out there. But that’s okay. Ask yourself, if I never got paid to make comics would I still make them? If the answer is yes, then blaze your trail and make your own work.

www.joshuadysart.com