It’s time to get started on (*choke*) the penultimate month of 2018.
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Webcartoonists Dave Kellett and Brad Guigar are talking comics with Ngozi Ukazu, creator of “Check, Please.” She talks sports comics, art school, self-publishing, and a wide range of creative challenges. BUT FIRST, Raina Telgemeier’s new book, “Guts,” receives a million-book print order, and we’re stoked!
Show notes
Cartoonists make a lot of unnecessary mistakes when they try to show a character using a quiet voice. They’ll use grey letters — or worse, they’ll shrink the lettering. These aren’t great choices because they decrease the legibility of the lettering — and that’s one of the very few cardinals sins in comics. If your reader can’t read your lettering easily, they’re not going to be a reader for long.
Here’s a simple way to denote a quiet voice or a whispering character without sacrificing readability.
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Drawing a person with black hair can be tricky. If you’re not careful, you can end up with someone who looks as if a stack of vinyl records melted on their head! This three-minute Clip Studio Paint tutorial shows my method for adding intricate looking (buy easy to do) highlights that will allow color to radiate through — giving you character a textured and nuanced appearance.
Twitter may be losing its heart.
Twitter is planning to remove the ability to “like” tweets in a radical move that aims to improve the quality of debate on the social network.
Founder Jack Dorsey last week admitted at a Twitter event that he was not a fan of the heart-shaped button and that it would be getting rid of it “soon”.
The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace “favourites”, a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later.
And the panicked responses have been, well…. panicked.
Twitter about to become a wasteland for artists who, like it or not, pun intended, rely on the tangible system of likes to get work circulating, track trends, and find each other 👍💀
So, let’s talk about that…
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Clip Studio Paint presents a tremendous working environment for a cartoonist. Most your work is done in panels that neatly crops your lines inside the panel borders. And, overall, that’s great. Except when you want to break that border. Then, you have to plan ahead. This three-minute video tutorial walks you through an excellent strategy for taking your composition game to the next level.
In the early days of webcomics, a preferred method of promotion was the ol’ link exchange. “I’ll link to your comic if you link to mine.” Today’s crowdfunded business model requires a little twist on that old axiom.
Exposing your patrons to someone else’s Patreon campaign isn’t only a good idea, it’s great content!
Here’s what I mean. I found one thing to be unquestionably true for me: The more content I post, the more pledges I get.
This is especially true for exclusive posts (as I discussed in my piece on scarcity).
So, every once in a while, I search Patreon for people who are doing something similar to what I’m doing.
Then I approach the person about a content trade. I’ll post something of theirs exclusively to my patrons. (Something they’ve already offered to their patrons.) And they can post something from my Patreon archive for their patrons.
It’s a win-win.
We both get content that we think our patrons will enjoy. We both get an opportunity to expose our work to the people pledging to the other person.
And, of course, when both of you promote the exchange on your own social-media networks, it’s twice the promotion.
I know the fear. “They’ll like the other person better, and ditch me in favor of them.”
I can tell you from experience, I get a lot of new pledges who are continuing their pledge to the other person. (I know, because I always click that button to see who else they’re supporting.) For me, it has been a “rising tide lifts all boats” situation.
During a recent livestreaming session, I broke into a quick anatomy lesson. This is an aspect about drawing arms that many comics artists miss, and adopting it into your process can vastly improve your ability to draw people.
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Webcomics weirdos Dave Kellett and Brad Guigar are talking comics! When a Patreon backer hits the viral jackpot, they wonder if it was actually fool’s gold. This turns into a discussion of smart online marketing, how publishing religious content is like posting NSFW comics, and one overarching theme — social media isn’t about generating Buzz so much as it’s about building Community. Then, the boys talk about getting a publisher excited about comics, and finally, those sentimental things we hold onto that we should probably let go.
BUT FIRST, “Muaauughhh, the French… champagne…”
Show notes
Along with the announcement of creator-side improvements in targeting posts to patrons, Patreon has also unveiled improvements to its smartphone app — which had been sadly lagging behind the desktop version of the crowdfunding tool. Here’s what you need to know…
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