Comic Fury Webcomic Hosting - General Webcomic Banter

Here's what you do: the train goes through a really long, really dark tunnel.

And then it's night-time.

In the morning, a thick fog descends.

For the watercoloring, I suppose you could try something like masking the edge you want with another piece of paper. But yeah doing a lot of masks would get pretty tedious.

Mask with Post-it notes.

I'm having a really hard time on deciding whether or not to keep the color in my comic. While I like the way it looks, it's certainly putting some strain on me to do two pages a week and it significantly slows the plot down. And i started drawing a comic to improve my drawing skills, and i feel that gets a little overshadowed when I'm rushing the process to get to coloring. On the other hand, if I stop, I'm afraid people will stop reading or it'll be harder to draw in a crowd. If I do go back to B&W, I still want to color pages with new major characters being introduced and cover pages for chapters, just not every page.

What's everyone's opinions on color vs. B&W?

I used to update twice a week, so I completely understand where you're coming from. It's fairly standard for a full-color comic to update only once a week (unless you're a crazy fast artist like Sarah Ellerton or Tom Siddell), so I don't think people would stop reading it if you wanted to slow down for the sake of improving your drawing skills. You might find things a bit slower in both reader growth and participation, but as long as you keep updating, people will keep reading.

I personally like color for your comic. c: Unless you know a fast way to make value differences (grayscale, tones, ink techniques), I think your current coloring style suits it well.

There's a rather old thread about color in webcomics with lots of good advice/insight/opinions... Let me dig it up. 8I

Here it is!: Colour in Webcomics

I think some people see it as a lessening of effort which has occasionally heralded an ending to the comic... And some people just don't like black and white as a style...

That being said, look at your personal goals for creating a comic, and let that guide your choice.

Color is used way too often to distract people from writing and story deficiencies. I've seen a lot of beautifully colored comics that I couldn't follow for 3 strips because I couldn't tell who the characters were, what was going on, or thought the underlying art was terrible. There is a strong tendency to want to do mediocre art and then jazz it up and disguise it with a lot of color. Comics, first and foremost IMO, are about story and characters. Have a good story, have relatable characters that are fun to follow, and then work on perfecting your line art. Basically, to me, it's about building strong foundations for what's on top - You can add in color later if you want, and you'll get more readers and all, but without a very solid foundation of good story/characters/line art, you're focusing on the wrong things. IMO, anyway.

Think of it this way - If you go B&W or greyscale and lose a lot of readers, that's telling you that they were not following you for your characters and were not really invested in your writing... They were just looking at the pretty colors. If, OTOH, you go B&W, every subscriber that you gain will mean that someone is genuinely drawn in by your drawing style or your writing. Writing is prime. Look at Calvin & Hobbes - A simple B&W ink strip that would "fail" the art expectations of tons of web comic people, with no color except the Sunday strips and not even greyscale, and yet when you read a few strips, you're drawn in immediately and want to read more.

Even in B&W there are some things that work with people and some things that turn them off. I think it comes down to consostency, like taste testing does the artwork and its techniques on paper and in computer mesh together well for a full page? Does the texture pop out at you, or are you reminded of the flat surface you are looking at?

Color changes this somewhat as we have accustomed the white as also the color of empty space in a B&W comic, but it is only part. It doesn't change the fundamentals' impact.

I like at least a dash of color on my webcomics, honestly, and it may have to do more with the web-medium more than anything. B&W inks look good on printed material, but on the web where we are exposed to millions and millions of colors daily, just B&W looks plain.

I do agree that a lot of webcomics use color as an excuse to cover up shoddy storytelling and bad artwork, but if executed well, it can make a webcomic stand out that much more. People are drawn to color. So if you get color theory and you don't mind spending more time coloring each page or strip, why not put it in color?

LOOK AT ME I HAVE AN OPINION okay so

I tend to sacrifice a lot of things in order to get a comic finished at an acceptable rate, because I'm not a super-being and I'm neither at a level where I can do more nor at a place in my life where I have the time to do more even if I had the ability. I sacrificed scale (I drew much smaller than I originally intended), and I took some short cuts here and there that I would be the first to admit to. I'm mostly hoping my composition sense makes those short cuts more forgivable.

But! I don't consider my choice to work in black and white to be one of those short cuts. I love black and white, and I believe there's more to creating a satisfying black and white comic than just creating a coloring-book style layout in preparation for making it complete with color. My hope is to make black and white pages that look "colorful" without using any color. I think working in pure black and white does allow you to focus more on the basics, too, because there's less to hide behind. There's just you and the shadows.

Maybe that makes me an old fogey, and Kupo does have a good point about the web medium. And I don't mean this to diss color comics at all. Clearly, with artists like Kupo, the use of color is not a compensation for anything but just another tool that she uses very well.

The amount of detail you put in your inks shows, actually, and I agree that your work feels "colorful" without the color. Kind of on the lines of Robert Crumb where he puts texture in the inks themselves. So really, I don't mind your stuff is in B&W, it works for your comic because you put more time in the inks. It doesn't feel "incomplete," it feels like a solid page in itself.

I personally put color in my work because I wanted an animated film aesthetic. Cans of Beans would not work in B&W, because it's supposed to look like something out of a feature-length animated film. B&W would give off a feeling of old timey cartoons, and if I wanted it to look like an old Popeye 'toon or Steamboat Willie, I'd change the art style altogether.

So I guess ultimately, aesthetics should dictate whether you should put color in your work or not, not as an excuse to cover up your art's problems or because it means you put "more effort" into it.

getting a colorist might work, like make your friends do it. (for at least the flat colors. One does not need too much artistic skill to get a paint bucket and pour in colors by your direction. Then you can make it better from there according to your taste.)\

And i do agree with KFP that writing is important. But looking at your comic, I think your style and plot is at a level where you can afford to put a little more icing to make it look nicer, and not worry about dropping its quality at other sectors too much. :)

And what do you color with and how do you do it? I make 3~4 pages a week, all of them colored. each page takes 3~4 hours to color. (4 hours if I have a lot of detail, background)
Perhaps there is way to cut down on your coloring time by trying out different methods.

I got complimented by Kupo and compared to R. Crumb all in the same comment. Oh joyous day, I am in my happy place.

The animated film aesthetic is definitely achieved, and it makes me a little nostalgic for my days in animation undergrad classes (nostalgic for something that happened only a couple years ago, whoops).

As for the original question of B&W versus color, I'm not sure there's anything else I can add to that conclusion. Oh no, I only responded because I got a compliment. But that's polite, right?

Ah..Hahaha... For some reason I feel a bit guilty of this crime :'D
I just cringed. I need to try harder.



But on a different subject...


But wait "she"..? Kupo, are you a girl o_o

Ah, shit, this hit me hard. See, I really want to develop my inking style and push myself to add more details and textures. Not necessarily eliminate color, but making my inked pages interesting on their own is definitely my primary goal. Color is beneath that, at least for me. And while I may not sacrifice anything ink wise for color, I don't feel like my inking has been pushed or accelerated in awhile.

Thanks, you guys, I think I figured out what's important to me. I'll probably keep color up, but just drop my page count to one per week so I can focus on inking.

I HAVE AN OPI--

Oh we're done

curse you Australia and your time zones!

Anyway I was basically just going to agree with all the people going: "Colour is nice, but sometimes used to cover up weak stories, weak underlying inking/linework, etc." Cutting your update schedule to once a week will suit, it'll give you much more time to focus on one page and make that page great, insteady of producing two pages that you feel are sub-par C:

Speaking of inking, I really need to finish inking this story arc page so i can colour it today or tomorrow and have it up monday. :U

Australian not welcome!! >:D

Even your seasons are different!!

I need to get finishing the page that goes up Monday, though I had plenty of time, then I realize it is a three day weekend, which means three days of visiting family/having them over.

Don't even ask about the one that should go up next Thursday, there is no way I will have that done in time.

That was actually my quote above that you mis-attributed to Snarkington. Not a big deal except that I wouldn't want Snark to be mad over my rants being put in his mouth. :D My outlook on the color issue is drawn a lot from the comics I used to read, along with the B&W mags like Epic, Eerie, etc. Bernie Wrightson is the guy I always look at as the maestro of B&W - Yes, his work looked very nice when colored in Swamp Thing and such, but his pen & ink underpinnings were so perfect that they stood just fine on their own without additional color. My own criteria of importance, from most to least, is:
Do the characters grab me?
Does the story interest me?
Is the drawing good?
Does it have nice frosting (color, FX, etc)?

Ultimately comics are a storytelling medium, not just a, "Look at my Photoshop lens flare FX" medium. Sometimes I find myself looking at comics and thinking that the writers should really be doing book covers and other standalone-type illos, because they will have stunning painted panels but no ability to connect panel to panel in a story flow sense, not very good writing, and so forth. It's funny because I really do see more comics that are well drawn than that are well written - I guess it's a factor of the comic medium drawing in more visual types than writerly types. Pictures will make people go "Ooo!", story and characters will keep them following your work a year later.

Anyway, I think your decision to cut back your output is a good one - Better to take the time to get one strip really looking good than try to rush and end up turning out material you're not satisfied with. And I also think it's really smart to focus on your inking first, because that's really the foundation that all the rest of the visuals are built on.

Ah, sorry about the mis-quote! I've been on my phone all day and it makes it a little difficult to manage posting.

Anyways, yeah, I feel way more confident in my story and characters than I do my artwork. I'm mostly in it to tell a story and not to show off elaborate artwork, though I do want to push my artwork towards improvement so that it will convey the story better. Although, wanting to tell a story makes me more eager to produce more than to work on my artwork. At least, that was my philosophy starting out... I think I'm calming down a little now.

It's an internal battle that I struggle with every day. :S

I was confident about my story until I started to show it to people. Gah. I'm too easily influenced. I need to get used to some people just not liking it. I always try and fail at pleasing everyone D: