Comic Panel help

[sashbandit]

Okay so lately I've really gotten a lot better at drawing (read: now at a tolerable level) so I wanted to take a stab at a comic. Coming up with a storyline and getting together characters is easy enough its just I can never get the hang of the comic panels. Everytime I go to draw a page I can never get the angles right for the characters or I can't seem to make it flow right with the next pane. So that is why I'm asking everyone for some tips or tutorials with those so I can get the hang of it. I can usually get the hang of something after hearing an explanation so that is why I'm asking.


(tl;dr: If you can give me some tips on making comic panels that would be great)

 

[DeadDog]

My advice is to just practice at it. Try making a couple comic strips with no words in them. That way instead of focusing on text, you can spend all your time focusing on the actions and possibly begin to get a nice flow with your work.

As for trying to make the panels themselves look pretty... there are several things you can try. One is to thumbnail each page before you begin working on the final. Make a nice composition with the shapes of the panels and with the characters and actions within the panels. I don't have any examples of my stuff personally because I never feel the need to scan my comic layout thumbnails, but I've found these examples of a comic layout thumbnails and they might prove useful to show you sort of what I'm talking about (If you want to see the rest of it, heres a link! http://pockybox.de/sketchblog/?p=62#more-62 )

Another thing you might try is working on each panel individually and separately from the comic page itself. Instead of working on each panel on the same page directly on the final, work on each scene individually then scan each image in and put it together in the thumb nailed format on the computer. I hope I'm explaining that to your understanding... XD;;; Just yell if you have questions.

Sequential art is not easy and it takes lots of practice (and a LOT of failures) to get it to really work well. Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better. And keep on that until you finally get to: Try. Succeed!

 

[DeadDog]

I forgot to mention one last thing!!

An easy fix to make your comics more interesting is to give the viewer lots and lots of different views. Comics get boring if you're staring at everything from the same angle in the same way. Zoom in, zoom out, play with persepctive, make some panels birds eyes view and some worms eye view. Just these sorts of little things can have a HUGE payoff.

 

[sashbandit]

Ah thanks this stuff is very useful and the explanation was easy to understand too ^^ thanks