How to Produce an Original Comic Book
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How to Produce an Original Comic Book
Introduction
Comics are a wonderful way to express your unique way of looking at the world. Even if you have no drawing talent, your pictures (no matter how awkward they might look to you) and your words, put together on a page to tell a story, are an incredibly powerful medium to get that unique viewpoint across. Your audience can be a single friend, a group of friends, or if you're really ambitious, a wider audience of people you don't know. Here's how to get underway.
Instructions
Difficulty: Moderately Challenging
Things You'll Need
- a story idea
- drawing materials (pencils, erasers, pens, drawing paper)
- White-Out / Liquid Paper
- a T-square or ruler
Steps
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Step One
The success of your comic depends largely on the quality of your story. It doesn't have to be a grand epic - it can be a little anecdote about what happened to you on the way to the doctor's office, or what you were daydreaming about during a boring meeting at work. The important thing is, it's a story that YOU think is interesting.
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Step Two
Now take your story and think about how it could be "chunked" into panels on a comics page. Each "chunk" will have a picture and some dialogue or descriptive text, and should advance the story somehow. For example, the first panel in your story about what happened on the way to the doctor's office might show you getting in to your car, and the words might describe why you were going.
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Step Three
At this point, you can make quick stick figure sketches representing the action on each panel and what's happening in the story. This allows you to make small adjustments before you commit yourself deeper in the drawing stage.
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Step Four
Now you've got your entire story blocked out in rough form. It's time to lay out some panels! Take a T-square or a ruler and lay the panels out on the page. Panel design is important - you're giving visual emphasis to points in your story that you devote to full-page or half-page panels. You don't have to do anything sophisticated, though - a simple grid, with all panels the same size, is just fine. Many of the world's best cartoonists have used a simple grid for all the years they published their work.
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Step Five
Now it's time to draw in the figures as you'd like them to appear in the finished work. Sketch lightly at first, and make sure you lightly letter in the copy as well. Text in your panel functions just like another visual element, so you need to account for it in the drawing.
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Step Six
You'll probably need to erase like crazy getting these light drawings down, but it'll be worth it. This is really the heart of the effort, where all the real work is.
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Step Seven
After all the drawings have been lightly sketched in, now go back through with a pen and make the lines more solid. It'll look like you whipped these drawings out with an ink pen on the first try!
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Step Eight
If you make a mistake in the inking stage, don't worry. Just paint over it with a bit of Liquid Paper, let it dry awhile, then come back over it. Another solution is to draw, cut out and paste over an entirely new panel if your original effort went seriously awry.
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Step Nine
Whew! That was quite a bit of work, but now that you're done with the inking stage, you're basically done. If you want to be a superstar, you can go back through these drawings with colored pencils or pens and add some color to your comic. But it's up to you. Black and white / pen and ink has been a mainstay of cartooning for over a century - it works!
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Step Ten
This technique can be applied to a number of comics formats: (1) the 24-hour comic, a format popularized by comics enthusiast and theorist Scott McCloud, in which the author produces an entire comic (length variable) - story and art - in a 24 hour period; (2) the mini-comic, in which copies are stapled and cut, and distributed either to friends or to strangers, for free or for a small price; (3) the professional, self-published, independent comic book, or "indy"; and (4) use a scanner and your internet connection to post your work as an original webcomic. If you're handy with graphics tools, you could even draw the whole thing on your computer!
Overall Tips & Warnings
- Don't get discouraged - producing an original comic book takes alot of dedicated hard work. You might think your drawings suck, and when you're starting out, they probably do. But even your first efforts will have a certain appeal to an audience - don't give up! Keep at it!
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