blindsprings:

leppu:

verwho:

heysawbones:

mistahgrundy:

here’s a fun thing about making comics you might not know if you’ve never made comics:

You will be 25% less good at art per page than normal

Probably because there’s so much drawing and figures and scenery going on and you probably have a time limit to how long you can work, and sometimes you just don’t see things wrong with a drawing until you walk off for a few days or whatever, so there’s gonna be some weirdo faces, there’s gonna be a big hand, there’s gonna be a perspective fuckup. You WILL forget to color something.

you just have to be kind of ok with that

Thank you. It’s hard to drive this home to bros who still live in “can’t post anything that’s not a masterpiece, every piece must unequivocally assert the best qualities of my work” la-la land.

I used to feel that way! I get it! I still have problems with it. But it’s a real unhealthy mindset, and a GREAT way to never finish anything. Why? Because it’ll never be good enough.

Sometimes you just gotta take the hit and move on. Tell yourself you’ll fix it later if that’s what you gotta do. Shit.

this sort of thinking used to stop me, but now I approach every page with a ‘no redos’ policy. It’s ready to go on time, and it goes out as is - when I started working like that, WOW were pages rough. But pushing myself and making note of the errors over the last couple years means I can get stuff right from the first draft more often, and even when it’s not perfect, as it often is, it’s stronger.

And every time I move on to the next comics, I’m a bit better, a bit faster, but that would be impossible if I was still trying to make every page a masterpiece.

And the same thing goes for writing and storytelling.

THIS IS ME AS HELL

I used to be on that neverending circulating hell of redrawing pages, but at some point you just have to admit that this isn’t going to get finished EVER if you keep on redrawing or putting hours and hours of time for a single page. Still sometimes, when life gets on the way it annoys me so SO much to just draw mediocre, or even ugly pages but then again, I keep thinking that the next page will be better.

And now, after hundreds of pages of comics drawing has gotten so much easier, I don’t have to make that detailed sketches anymore, I don’t have to look for refs that much, I don’t need to fix stuff so often, and so on

The biggest problem I’ve faced is the lack of inspiration sometimes… For example, the lates pages of prague race are really low quality, even if the subject was so important to me and I wanted the pages to look good, but still I couldn’t find the spark, nor time to draw that well. I wasn’t having much fun drawing at all. But if you keep sitting on your ass waiting for that golden spark to fill your brain, you might as well sit there for weeks and months. Inspiration is a luxury many of us can’t afford, especially if you draw for a living.

Still I feel so proud of myself that I managed to draw those pages in that short amount of time, as a matter of fact it felt so rewarding I soon noticed that I couldn’t stop drawing,  and now I have a pile of pages here for the next week. The brain works in mysterious ways.

Look at me rambling this issue is clearly important to me lmao

This is really important!

It also helps to understand when looking at webcomics that have been around for at least a few years that they’ve PROBABLY drawn way way way more than  you have, and to not get discouraged that you can’t draw like them. Don’t stop yourself from starting! Because in starting, you begin your journey of having to draw probably all of the things that you don’t necessarily draw a lot– like backgrounds, dynamic poses, thinking about layouts and special effects.

There are a bunch of Blindsprings pages that I’m unhappy with, that were rushed or I was having a bad drawing day– and for a lot of them, unless i pointed out what I was unhappy with, no one really noticed (though if you make a mistake in grammar or if you flip the 180 rule on stuff people WILL notice and comment about 10 times, get used to it) but in doing Blindsprings, I was able to work as a background key designer and have a bunch of companies interested in my work. That wouldn’t have happened without the comic.

tl;dr making mistakes is okay and the only way to learn, IMO!

(and leppu is right– having a deadline really helps when it comes to art block because it forces you to just. MOVE ON. Personally? I find working on several projects at once is (oddly enough) the most satisfying/best work ethic. I have problems concentrating and I’m easily distracted, so setting small goals for each project to hit a day and you can move between things is honestly the best (for me) productivity wise. )

This is actually one of the more harder things I’ve had to accept with working on a comic. A good lesson, though.

(via usagi911)