Niche or not. What have you gotten better at since starting your webcomic? Drawing backgrounds, facial expressions, writing, posing, or something specific?

I feel like I've gotten better at drawing hats since starting Dead or Alive. :)

One thing for sure, the background perspectives looks more realistic comparing my chapter 1 to current.

All of the above >:3

Speech balloon placement, composition, lighting, perspective, and rendering. I’m a lot better at establishing mood than I was starting out.

Editing my writing. I have become much better at pulling out things that don't need to be included, at a whole-comic, story arc, and even page and panel level

Coloring. I used to have this odd allegiance to photo realism but wasn't even pulling it off well. I had set color palettes for each character that I never diverged from, but the rest of the page I might use 30 or 40 different markers because "each book on the shelf is a different color! :)" or "each person in the crowd has their own unique color palette! :)". Coloring took forever and was tedious and hateful. I got better at blending and at narrow8ng down to color groups, and got to the point where I actually purposefully curate colors for a scene and now might only use as many as 16 or as little as 4 markers in one scene.

Utilizing vertical space, to the degree where my splash page-equivalent panels look worse when taken out of the vertical context. They really come to life when you scroll down (or even up). This is a bit inconvenient when I want to share those big Extra Fancy panels on social media, but overall, I think it strengthens my comic as a story. Yes, I make a vertical scroll comic.

Related to the above but slightly different: using composition & enviro to capture vibes and emotions.

My recent chapters are also much better than my first ones in terms of writing, but this is a bit difficult for me to explain. I think part of the difficulty is that I don't want to talk about the weak parts of those early chapters... X'D

Camera angles and terrain:

Page One:



Page Eighty-Four:



Or did you mean drawing?

uh... literally everything

A lot.

Making my characters emote better, as my old art has a bad case of doll face syndrome.

Better, clearer dialogue that you can actually read. As well as getting rid of abusive block text and chopping it up. Speech bubble placement as well.

My art overall has gotten better.

Remastering my comics from 2016 has shown me how far I've come.

So technical skills- yes - coloring being the one I’m most proud of, but less concretely:

Experimentation and letting things go. I like telling stories and I think making a comic has forced me to think about stories in a lot of ways. I like trying new ideas and seeing if they work. Editing makes me more creative. If I hate a page, I throw it out. I try ideas several times because I’m trying to work out what’s effective and I think that’s made me a better artist and writer.

When I worked exclusively traditionally and tried only illustrating, I’d suffer from decision paralysis and hesitation and pages would often take longer because I was afraid of making mistakes. But comics just require too much drawing to agonize over every line. I’m trying to figure out the right lines to agonize over. I’m looser with my other drawing too.

as of Chapter 2, I've gotten a little better at perspective! still made mistakes, but the fact that i'm able to notice them now (I could not before) is a testament to my improvement! ;v;)9

also i wrote a script for Chapter 3 and it's been so helpful to find where my writing seems wonky/unnatural. working on a long-running comic is helping me improve in a lot of arting ways!!!

Oh, lots of things! My artistic ability in general has gone up which is nice to see. After I was a little bit into the comic I started going into the pages with the idea of experimenting and challenging myself on certain things, so I'd say being more adventurous in what I do is one of them. I got a lot better at having variation between panels when it comes to focus, posing, angles, perspective, etc. And I'm sure there's other stuff as well, but yeah, working on my comic has helped me improve in lots of areas.

dropping out of college

Backgrounds mostly, especially buildings and doors. Making myself think of it as a character on its own certianly helped too!
There's also just how I was finding my feet mostly for upload schedules and I've been pretty good on that for the second chapter, so being organized can go on the list!

Everything, but I think the thing that I wouldn't have expected is my handwriting improving.

I improved on a lot of things, but one skill that's undergone a huge improvement is inking.

Example of an mid-early page (late 2018-early 2019).


Example of a page from 2022.

I'm going to have to say my digital game for sure. Considering I came into comics drawing them all traditionally and only using digital for editing and adding text, I think my ability to draw it all on the computer has grown since that time. Yeah we're talking I used to use the burn and blur abilities in Photoshop to an abusive state to now kind of getting an idea of how to make things sort of look ok.

I've still got a LONG way to go in terms of digital know how and I only have so much time to really get how it works but I've made quite a few major jumps and I now feel comfortable drawing completely digitally rather than scanning in an inked page and going from there.

I have no examples I wish to share. I am a wimp. Just take my word for it.

Page composition and clarity I think? I'm less afraid of simplicity and letting black solids sit untextured.

I experimented a lot with comics last year and did a few shorts so just less fretting in general.

I specifically started working on being more fluid for action sequences which I think has worked.

Oh and I care even less about lineart now. Yay! I consider that a win. Less fretting is always good

Human anatomy, specifically body proportions..

Also, pre-planning page composition, so that I don't have to squeeze word balloons into a corner because I noticed too late that I didn't leave enough space for them.

Perspective!