[Comic] Katarizo

[Ragesquid]

Katarizo is my experimental webcomic. It's just now finishing the prologue..so, hopefully, there won't be much more boring dialogue, and I can get on the the good stuff.

From the start, going on to the newest, there's a significant art drift..so go easy on the older ones. >_> Anyway..I'm still working on anatomy..but most of what I need critique on, is backgrounds and storytelling. Neither of which are my strongsuit.

On a final note..also in need of cameos. I don't really know if I should just pick somebody, or if I need permission..as it'll just be brief walk-ons. (I'm totally risking negative IQ for that..'cause I'm a sillyhead and don't know much about the webcomic world. )

[LionHeart]

Probably best to ask first. It's the safer option.

[Tapewolf]

Oh, I read through this comic.  I liked what I saw but promptly forgot all about it.  I'll have to bookmark it.

[WhiteFox]

From the start, going on to the newest, there's a significant art drift..so go easy on the older ones. >_> Anyway..I'm still working on anatomy..but most of what I need critique on, is backgrounds and storytelling. Neither of which are my strongsuit.

Celia's clothes and Uri's darker colors kind of drop into the background. I've found this happens when a character has a very contrasting color combination: on a light background the light parts of a character drop out, and on a dark background the dark parts of a character drop out. This has as much to do with the design of the character then the backgrounds, though.

If you're going to use backgrounds, you might want to establish the setting. Usually, a wide shot that shows the area is enough. A series of panels doesn't really accomplish the same thing. Even though it shows everything in a setting, it doesn't establish where these things are in relation to each other.

The story so far seems to have a strong focus on the characters. The plot moves because of the characters actions, which are a result of their personalities, rather then characters doing things for the sake of moving the overall plot forward. Awesome.

(You might want to settle on a typeface. I'd recommend a sans serif font, since they are easier to read. I use Anime Ace 2.0 from Blambot for my comic. It doesn't have lowercase letters, though.)

[Ragesquid]

Ach..yeah..the jungle was a pain in the ass, to work with, as far as that goes. I was going for a few natural colors, in this comic..as many of my characters tend to be freakishly bright/odd colored, I might have to adjust Uri a bit, though.

Ah, yes. Font. I had finally found one I liked, right before coming back from hiatus..then my computer decided to crash. I'll certainly look into Blambot, though. Thanks for that.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

If you find a font you like, it'd be worthwhile keeping a copy of the thing on your webhost, as well as your local machine. It doesn't have to be publicly visible, either.

[Tapewolf]

Two suggestions I have:

1. The navigation panel.  "<<" means 'fast rewind' and by convention means either 'Skip back a chapter' or 'back to beginning'.  "<" generally means 'back a page'... you've managed to swap them round which confused the heck out of me to begin with.

2. Speech bubbles would be nice.  There is a shareware application called "Comiclife" for Windows and the MacOS which is used to assemble comics.  The speech bubbles are a bit limited and sometimes inflexible, but it makes things a lot quicker and easier.  Project Future uses it for captioning - I recently upgraded to the pro version.

[WhiteFox]

Two suggestions I have:

1. The navigation panel.  "<<" means 'fast rewind' and by convention means either 'Skip back a chapter' or 'back to beginning'.  "<" generally means 'back a page'... you've managed to swap them round which confused the heck out of me to begin with.

I was going to mention that, actually. Musta forgot.

Also, there's a few broken links in your archive. Well, not broken really, but the sixth comic is labeled 7, and the link from 17 to 16 goes to 19. It's easy for that to happen when you're using an HTML archive (Also, that's why I got my brother to make a Q-D .php archive for me. I should see if he'd mind if I posted the script for that).

2. Speech bubbles would be nice.  There is a shareware application called "Comiclife" for Windows and the MacOS which is used to assemble comics.  The speech bubbles are a bit limited and sometimes inflexible, but it makes things a lot quicker and easier.  Project Future uses it for captioning - I recently upgraded to the pro version.

When I make speech bubbles:
1) Make a new layer.
2) Make a rectangular selection around every text block on the page. If I use an oval selection, I make the text center aligned. If I'm using a rectangle, left aligned. You could  justify the text in blocks too. I don't use ovals for speech bubbles, but that works too. In that case, center align the text.
3) Round the corners with Select>Modify>Smooth (actually, I skip this step these days. I shouldn't).
4) Use the Polygonal Lasoo to add "bridges" between bubbles and "pointers" to the speakers.
5) Expand the slection by a number of pixels equal to the width of the line I want to have (IE: if I want a black line around the bubble that's 5px, Select>Modify>Expand, by 5 px),
6) Fill with black. (Shift-F5, or Edit>Fill)
7) Contract the selection back down to it's original size (For the example above, that means Contracting by 5px)
8.) Fill with white.

(Note: I use Photoshop CS2. I'm pretty sure most graphic apps will do all this tho)

Might sound complicated, but it works pretty well. You can do every bubble on the page in one go. The only problem that comes up is when you have bubbles or bridges overlapping each other. I used to go up to step three and use the Edit>Stroke command, but that had a habit of messing things up: the bridges and bubbles would get horribly compressed, and the pointers didn't look pointy. That's also the reason I add the pointers and bridges after rounding the corners.

[Edit:] Another thing about speech bubbles: Make room for them as you draw the page. David Willis is probably one of the best comic artists I've seen for this.

[Tapewolf]

Another thing about speech bubbles: Make room for them as you draw the page. David Willis is probably one of the best comic artists I've seen for this.

Quoted for truth.  PF is a joint project, so this is more important for us, but late last year I took to modelling the dialogue in advance, so that Ren would know roughly how much space he was going to have.  That hasn't always worked, but it's a good idea nonetheless.

For instance:
http://www.project-future.org/P48-layout.png

http://www.project-future.org/strips/comic/strip048.png

[WhiteFox]

Quoted for truth.  PF is a joint project, so this is more important for us, but late last year I took to modelling the dialogue in advance, so that Ren would know roughly how much space he was going to have.  That hasn't always worked, but it's a good idea nonetheless.

I write the script out on the page as I draw it. Not only does this tell me how much space the text will take up, but how big to make the text when I add the dialog.

DSOF gets scanned at 300 DPI, and the final image is shrunk down to 25% of that. Since the size of the page changes so much, I had no way to tell how big the text was going to be by the end of it. I had to guess, and if the text was too small or too big, I'd have to not only go back and make the text larger, but redraw all the speech balloons and sometimes rearrange them.

Writing it out on paper, though, makes things easier. Since the final .jpg ends up roughly the same size as the paper version, the text is readable as long as I wrote it at a readable size. And all the layout is taken care of. It's easier to sort out the flow, too; what text gets it's own bubble, which bubbles get bridged, what panel the bubbles go in, how to lay out the pointers, all that.

[Ragesquid]

The navigation panel.  "<<" means 'fast rewind' and by convention means either 'Skip back a chapter' or 'back to beginning'.  "<" generally means 'back a page'... you've managed to swap them round which confused the heck out of me to begin with.

Ach..I'll go fix that, then. >.<

The broken links were noted by others, and I finally got around to fixing it. Rrgh..that's what I get for working on that, at 2am. >.>

As for the speech bubbles..I seriously need to practice on that. I don't often use layers, as they confuse the hell outta me..but I'll keep in mind the suggestions. I'm willing to do whatever it takes, to get it right..even if it means my brain exploding!

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I write the script out on the page as I draw it. Not only does this tell me how much space the text will take up, but how big to make the text when I add the dialog.

You shouldn't be adjusting the size of the text to make it fit, generally speaking. You should be adjusting the amount of text instead.

Making the font smaller will drive people away. Same goes for varying it. Keep to a decent size, and adjust the content. If that means you have to draw two strips instead of one, so be it.

[Tapewolf]

As for the speech bubbles..I seriously need to practice on that. I don't often use layers, as they confuse the hell outta me..but I'll keep in mind the suggestions. I'm willing to do whatever it takes, to get it right..even if it means my brain exploding!

Layers really are your friend.  I spent about 10 years using a piece of software that didn't support them and switching to GIMP after that gave me a bit of a headache for a year or so as I tried to come to terms with its way of working, but I'd never go back now.  PF uses about 15 layers each strip, though about a quarter of those are backups or for reference.

At the very least you'd want to stick the captioning on its own layer, and putting the background on a separate layer to the characters helps if you find you have to reposition them for any reason.

I collect multilayers - I try to get one each time I commission someone, so I can see how they did it.  Most people add the shading as a separate layer over the original flat colour.

It varies a lot, you have some people like Keaton, Shadrok etc who go completely nuts and have like 80 layers or more, one for every little piece of colour or shading they've added.  Amber's picture of Dorcan had just three layers, which either means that she collapsed it down or she really does do the shading on the same layer as the flat colour.
Turnsky is somewhere in between, his Mythical Creatures picture had about 36 layers and IIRC only about 4-5 were the character.

You shouldn't be adjusting the size of the text to make it fit, generally speaking. You should be adjusting the amount of text instead.

That is my constant irritation with Project Future.  I sometimes feel that it's a bit dumbed-down from the original story, and that's because the text has to be simplified a lot just to make it fit.  Occasionally I will shrink the font when it simply can't be reduced without raping the storyline, but that's not something I do unless I can't avoid it.

EDIT:

Dan: "I mean, seriously.  Why would I ever want to learn layers?"
Abel: "Oh, that's easy.  With layers..."



"...you can do THIS!"


http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/projectfuture/ss_layers.png

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

You shouldn't be adjusting the size of the text to make it fit, generally speaking. You should be adjusting the amount of text instead.

That is my constant irritation with Project Future.  I sometimes feel that it's a bit dumbed-down from the original story, and that's because the text has to be simplified a lot just to make it fit.  Occasionally I will shrink the font when it simply can't be reduced without raping the storyline, but that's not something I do unless I can't avoid it.

I was speaking from a reader's point of view, rather than an authors, but I like to think it was a reasonably balanced point.

As far as PF goes, I feel your pain, but that's one of the compromises inherent in a webcomic. There's not much you can do, other than balance it as well as you can. :-/

[WhiteFox]

You shouldn't be adjusting the size of the text to make it fit, generally speaking. You should be adjusting the amount of text instead.

Making the font smaller will drive people away. Same goes for varying it. Keep to a decent size, and adjust the content. If that means you have to draw two strips instead of one, so be it.

I've never adjusted the size of the text to make it fit. When I first started out, the art would get crowded by the text if it took up more then I expected.

Then I decided to cut down, dramatically, on the amount of text I used (According to something I read by Neil Gaiman, <100 words per page is ideal). That helped, but sometimes even the small pieces of dialog ended up being problematic if I didn't make a place for it on the page. Other times, I'd leave a big space and only use half of it, like in page #25.

I would have problems trying to figure out how big the text should be on the page. That problem came down to the fact that until I scaled the page down to publish it, I couldn't really know how big the text would end up.

The biggest problem would be whenever I decided to change fonts (since "12 point" is a different size for different typefaces) or change the size of the published page, I'd have to start guessing how big to make the text to make it readable. All.  Over. Again.

These days, If I have more script then will fit on a page, I usually break it up into two pages. That's what happened with DSOF #32-33.

(Subject switch)

Layers aren't that hard to get used to. Pretty much the only thing to worry about is that you're on the right layer when you do something (I don't know how much time I've wasted time by coloring my ink layer)
When I do DSOF, I usually keep the layers down to a minimum:

7) Header. I have a blank header template that I use; All I have to do is fill in the comic page number, the title, and place the file in the comic.
6) Panel borders. I make this layer immediately, since it makes magic-wanding areas for coloring  is so much easier when the borders are in.
5) Text and speech balloons. Every block of text in Photoshop is it's own layer, effectively, so I make stick them all in a folder to keep them out of my hair.
4) Ink, which is a BW scan of the page with the pencils erased
3) Foreground Color (Characters, props, sometimes furniture.) this goes underneath the Ink layer so I don't have to care about painting over the lines. Also, shade goes on this layer. I've been playing with making a separate layer for shadows, tho.
2) Background Color (Scenery, architecture, set elements) Shading is on this layer too.
1) A grayscale scan of the page, after it's been inked but before erasing the pencils. This is mostly used for reference when touching up the ink layer, coloring, and shading.

[Tapewolf]

Cool, Abel cameo.  What's the approximate update schedule for this comic again?

[GabrielsThoughts]

I like that the comic has a 2-d  relief look to it. it looks like it pops off the page/screen but only just a little bit,  so that it's like those punched out cardboard dvd covers. I don't know how to explain it it's like a wood carving's  depth of illusion instead of the full depth of illusion.

[WhiteFox]

I like that the comic has a 2-d  relief look to it.

I'm... not so hot on that. Things that should be round, like her boobs, look more circular then spherical. The faces get a little flattened too.

The font is much more readable, btw, and the backgrounds look great. I love the water. The anatomy and proportions seem to be improving, too.

All your characters are very expressive. I should have mentioned that before.

[Ragesquid]

It updates on Saturdays. (usually late Friday night..but I never really know, for sure) Though, now that I'm doing full-page comics, and in the process of moving, I'm not entirely sure of the schedule.

I do have trouble with the overall look of it..3D is something I seem to be incapable of. I never took a single art class, in my life..so I'm just kinda having to learn the basics, like lighting, scaling, and 3D effects, from how-to books. >.>

As far as layers go..I'm still not entirely keen of them, but I do realize they're something I'll have to get used to, eventually. I will likely have to use different one, for panels, and bubbles, at the very least. Start small, eh?

[WhiteFox]

I could put together a quick tutorial on light basics, if you'd like.

[Ragesquid]

I'd certainly appreciate it. My books have..maybe half a page, on lighting..so it's not really much, to go by.

[GabrielsThoughts]

If you're going to make a tutorial on lighting, could you include the appearance of shadow under multiple light sources? (I mean someone exposed to more than one light source in one instance  not just sunlight, interior, or twilight or the lighting/color differential in a dark room vs under a street lamp.

[WhiteFox]

Hm. I think I will.