This one took a lot outta me, so I’ll be making this post short and sweet: Eleven brushes for Clip Studio only! Free with instructions included! You can support me monthly if you enjoy these! Here are the past brush 2023 drops!
Do you know about my free web based sketch app that rotates random pose references? 🤔
It’s called AdorkaStock Sketch and you can access it on desktop or mobile. It will adjust to fit your screen! On mobile you can scroll down to see the options.
There are currently just over 2,000 poses in rotation with more coming. You can change the timer, skip poses, sort with filters, or try predefined class modes.
The site is completely free and thanks to my Patrons I was recently able to remove third-party ads! If you turn off your ad blockers while using the site you will only see my own ads.
You can also make a free account which will allow you to collect a favorites list and set sketching goals.
Please check it out and use it as often as you need to for pose browsing, gesture warm ups, or long drawing sessions (just hit pause on any pose!)
learning to cheerfully dislike other people is I think a critical component of getting along with people who don’t like you. Like as soon as I got a solid grasp on the fact that there is a wide swath of humanity that gets on my nerves and that it’s my problem, not theirs, it got easier to be around people I find annoying. Once that’s settled, it’s easy to flip the reasoning around and conclude that if someone doesn’t like me, that’s a quirk of their own strange and arbitrary tastes, not a judgment upon either of us as a person. You can’t like everyone. Not everyone will like you. It’s fine. It’s not a personal attack in either direction. We can exchange cordial nods across the room and then go on with our lives
Tips for Non-Artists on Writing Your First Comic, part 1.
Learning to write prose is tough, and it can take years of struggle to grasp the basics. You have to understand construction, character, theme, pacing, the effects of word choice, the specifics of your subject and so much more. Learning to write a collaborative form like comics just adds new troubles and traps as you run into the difficulties inherent in the medium, or specific to the people you’re working with.
I’ve been the first collaborator for a number of writers on their first comic, and it’s gone pretty well. (I’ll brag here: One project got an Eisner Award nomination, another got four Einser noms, and another made it into a Year’s Best anthology and helped the writer land a movie deal.) And I’ve also watched as artists I know worked with first-time writers on collaborations that didn’t turn out too well. So I thought I’d share some observations and suggestions that might be useful to writers new to the medium. I’ve got ten of these tips. Here are the first three:
1. Read a bunch of comics.
This is primary. You’re telling a story in a complicated medium with its own rules, rhythms, and quirks. You should have a sense for what other people have done with it. Read triumphs, near-successes and outright failures. Read well beyond the genre you intend to write. There are valuable lessons everywhere. (I’ve noted before that one of the biggest influences on an adult crime comic I drew was John Stanley's Little Lulu.)
You can find plenty of best-of and must-read lists online. Librarians and comic shop owners will have good suggestions, too.
Read analytically. Look at what works and what doesn’t and try to take the successes apart to see how they function. Like this.
2. Ask yourself: Why is this story a comic?
There are so many writers with an unsold screenplay who have decided that they could just “turn it into a comic.” They’re not aware of the contempt they’re communicating for both their own work and for the medium they expect to work in. It’s obvious when someone is treating a comic as a movie pitch, or trying to shoehorn filmic action and dialogue into panels. Respect for a medium means building your story around things the medium can do well.
3. If you aren’t working with an established publisher, finding an artist will be tough.
The most common question I hear from first time writers is “How do I find an artist?” One answer is money. If you can pay a competitive rate, you can always hire a skilled artist to be your collaborator. This isn’t cheap. If you’ve established yourself in some other medium, your clout from that can help you find someone who wants to work with you. If you don’t have money, or a rep from outside comics, you’ll need to network like crazy, in person and online, using every means available to make connections with artists, or people who could introduce you to artists. It will be slow and difficult.
Continued in Part 2, which I’ll post tomorrow!
Don’t let the lack of an artist stop you from writing scripts. You’ll learn a lot from writing one even if no one ever draws it. But all things being equal, it’s better to write a script with a specific artist in mind.
Many artists are good at some things and terrible at others. Look at their work and talk to them before you hand over a script. Let’s say an artist only has the chops to draw one consistent face, and relies on hair and clothing to differentiate his characters. He might not be a good pick for your bootcamp melodrama, where everyone is shaved bald and wearing the same uniform. Play to their strengths and interests, and avoid their weaknesses.
5. Write visually.
Always look for ways to make your point with pictures rather than words. Every panel in the story should have a reason for being there, and be more than just the pictorial equivalent of “he said” or “she said.” Ask yourself: What new information does this picture tell the reader? Does the visual information I’m asking the artist to draw advance the story or enrich the characters in a meaningful way? If not, why is that panel there?
Writing visually doesn’t necessarily mean telling the artist where to put the “camera” to show a scene. It’s rare for a new writer to know how to do that, and it’s impossible to anticipate the many choices that an artist will need to make when drawing a page. Most artists I know will cross out the parts of scripts that micromanage camera and staging. When in doubt, tell your artist what needs to happen in a panel and what it should feel like.
Speaking for myself, I want to know what the reader needs to learn from each panel, and if it’s unclear, why they need to know it. For instance, if you specify that a baby is reaching for a star-shaped toy, maybe let me know it’s because that star shape is a motif that will be evoked later in the story when she’s older and places a star atop the Christmas tree, (and not just because a star is the first shape you thought of.)
In cases like that, it’s helpful to emphasize the important details, like so:
Panel 1: Baby Josie, looking very serious, reaches past a pile of alphabet blocks and plastic bunnies to grasp a STAR-SHAPED TOY.
Avoid putting story points in dialogue or captions that are already communicated by the pictures, unless you don’t trust the pictures to communicate those points effectively. It’s better to use your words to say things that the pictures don’t, or can’t.
These are free and compatible with Clip Studio only. Follow the link and grab the attachment at the bottom of the post. Instructions for use & uploading are included, too. Good luck!
i hate that every time i look for color studies and tips to improve my art and make it more dynamic and interesting all that comes up are rudimentary explanations of the color wheel that explain it to me like im in 1st grade and just now discovering my primary colors
“red and green are opposites 🥰” cool now how do i paint a tree with pinks and blues without it looking like a child’s finger painting or incongruous blobs of rainbow vomit
ok i can’t explain it very well but im looking for tips and techniques for rendering art like
with specifically the highlights and colors being hues that compliment each other, don’t distract from the scene, and make it more interesting/visually appealing
is it too much to ask
gonna drop some sources I have saved on Pinterest! I don’t know if these all link back to the original sources so apologies for that
“Chromatic fringe” - I also see people using this with shading, they bring in a transition color that is a different hue than the base color or shadow, it makes it so that less vibrancy is lost and it doesn’t get muddy!
This one specifically has a lot of process behind the style of painting you’re looking for!
Also one of my favorite artists who makes bright and colorful art like this is Not Sorry Art on TikTok & YouTube, her website is here and it’s<3 my fav. She has some videos where you can see her process
With the oranges painting you put as an example, I noticed they painted the lighter values more toward yellow - they also exaggerated the hues of the undertones of the photo, so I’m guessing they either did it in their head or bumped the saturation up to get a closer look! I really love these paintings you shared and I definitely share your desire to paint/draw like that :)
thanks this is super helpful! /gen
If you’d like 2 Print books that I absolutely reccomend to every visual artist regardless of Media, Color and Light and Imaginative Realism by James Gurney are basically religious texts for artists, even the 3-D people because his understanding and explanation of how light and form work is that damn good.
If you’re wondering about Mr. Gurney’s chops:
James Gurney is the Dinotopia Guy (that link includes his Dinotopia books, prints and online classes too)
I couldn’t make individual gifs of this whole this so MADE A VIDJEW FOR YEW GOIS ! I didn’t know what else to make of my animation, so I decided to make it into a little quick tutorial. Hope it helps!
This is very helpful! Thank you for sharing this @chrompoised!
At this point, I’m only watching this just to study the animation…it almost looks like clay sometimes, or even like the characters are models of stretched rubber. Otherwise, this movie is just written for 11 year olds
The whole franchise is such a weird thing. It was made just to be an Adam Sandler animated IP, but it didn’t matter it was Adam Sandler anyway because he’s just doing the dracula voice a million people can do and nobody who liked these movies cared that it was him. Some never even realized. Most of the older “fandom” it has are just people who think Mavis is their waifu. The animation is only good because Genndy Tartakovsky got attached to it and had to teach a roomful of cg animators all the principles of cartooning from scratch.
It has been successful enough for four movies and a series, and Genndy’s influence on it has slowly but surely actually leaked out to improve the visuals of the whole industry, but I don’t think there’s hardly anyone who counts anything “Hotel Transylvania” as their actual favorite animated media and it’s extremely easy to forget it exists as soon as you’re not looking at it.
The animation genuinely is fun to see in motion. The willingness to not always be 100% on model all the time, but rather break the models to sell a pose or expression and to be more cartoony is refreshing.
Genndy basically found that cg animators had been trained to treat CG characters like live action actors, constrained by the same physics. They’d been taught as if their job was to imitate normal reality and it just hadn’t even crossed their minds to consider stretching, squashing, or smearing their animations and poses!
He’d do drawings like these in the storyboards, then the CG would come back without any exaggeration at all. Picture a real guy trying to do the pose on the left as best as he could for a selfie, and that’s what the animators were doing with the models.
So he’d have to take everyone aside and be like “these are not real people, these are cartoons, you can break them!!” He helped them learn from scratch the rules of stylization and exaggeration that 2-d animators had always relied on, and when they got hired onto new movies from there they took those principles with them and helped make this whole industry look a little better.
