Planning a comic

[Stonestrike]

I'm planning a comic. It will be called Nervo (which, of course, is named after the main character.) The art style that I'm planning will have hand-drawn backgrounds and Sprites like these below.

But I have one little eensy-weensy problem...

I can't draw to save my life!

I really need help on any scrap of info I can get my hands on. Basicly I need to know how to draw buildings and such. Thanks in advance!

[Amelius]

aw that's a cute character there!
Hmm, what can I say about drawing backgrounds?
I'd say, if you are drawing a lot of buildings, a good thing to do is look at buildings when you out among them and examine their stucture, window placement and such, where they put the doors and whatnot, whether they have steps or the door is grounf d level etc but that stuff is pretty much a given. For buildings I'd suggest using a ruler for the straight lines (I know that is a pain in the butt and I'm a hypocrite because I don't use one myself, but then I still end up with crooked lines!) Study the perspective, based on where the characters are going to be.
make note also of other things that will be there like the occasional tree by the road, signs, telephone booths/poles and maybe cars if you're up to it (I hate drawing cars!)
Just adding windows or doors will let the viewer know we are looking at a building and not giant boxes or blocks, feel free to add any interesting things like overhangs and windowsigns.
Also, planning what the style for the background is will probably be relative to the foreground characters. I'd suggest a slightly free-form cartoony style for them, seeing the style of character you have may call for that. I sometimes make mistakes by making a backgound too "realistic" or textured compared to the characters in the foreground, and that makes them seem out of place at times. I'd say keeping in style with the figures in the foreground is your best bet.
Are you going to color the backgrounds as well? I can offer help on that if you would like as well,
just remember a color scheme really helps keep things in pace. Of course you don't want it to clash with your character, so background colors shouldn't be too loud or complicated but rather you should have the kind that compliment your character and their color scheme. For a building background I usually use greys and browns, the occassional brick red helps too.
If there is anything I missed or something else you would like to know feel free to ask!

[Stonestrike]

Great advice! The comic should be up soon. Thanks for the help! Now for those who can't wait, I will below list the three main characters and their profiles.

Nervo
Age: 21
Ocupation: courier
Nervo was once a mad scientest named Servo. He thought he could get things done faster by fusing with a nerve. But he didn't realize that it would change his personality as well as his phisical body. (funfact: Nervo is italian for nerve, go figure!) Nervo is a genius yet he is extremley naive. He forgets all but a few subjects untill someone mentions the subject/topic, then he remembers everything about it. He never has an evil thought since his only intentions are good.
He is a friend of Gavin and Lan.

Lan
Age: 23
Occupation: Tech support
Probably the only Normal one. Friend of Nervo and Gavin. He is a heavy drinker but hardly ever gets drunk. He has a thing for technology and is almost as smart as Nervo .

Gavin
Age: 22
Occupation: runs a magazine
Gavin is crazy and is always happy. Friend of Lan and Nervo.
He flirts on almost every girl he sees. (they all know the only way to get rid of him is to hit him and strangley enough he dosen't mind) In other words, hes crazy and proud.

There are other characters but these are the main ones.
BTW: My avatar is a Nervoized me.

[Shippo_no_Neko]

Oi, I wouldn't mind Gavin... If his hair were a normal color XP

I have alot of trouble with backgrounds, too... Umm.... If you wouldn't mind, Amelius-sama, could you offer a few tips on drawing school-type backgrounds?

[Amelius]

Interesting concept Stonestike, be sure to post the link here so we can check it out!
They seem like an interesting bunch, I kinda like Gavin's jester-hair ^_^


School Bg? Well cetainly! Indoors I take it? When it's in hallways, a good thing to keep the background happy is lockers. or course not an entire hallway will be lockers, so think bulletin boards, posters (motivational or otherwise, a fun place to put random humor) and doors. Lotsa doors. Also keep in mind these doors lead to whole rooms so the most common setup I've seen is 2 doors close together, enough hallspace for a room, then 2 doors again, repeat.
Also think school colors or make a color scheme for the interior of the building. The most common thing I've seen in schools is the off-white cinderblock wall, and the brick wall. Mostly these are between sets of lockers, ot between doors. Hallspace with no lockers or doors usually have this for the walls combined with the school colors panted in some sort of racing stripe along the top of bottom. I guess the reason for brick and cinderblock in th halls is because kids like to punch through the drywall (I knew kids like that at my school at least)
Ceilings typically have the weird square office-building ceiling with the holes in it (I cannot recall what it is called for the life of me now) but I know that pencils stick right into it if you throw them right. The lights are square too, the same length to match the tiles.
Floor covering will range from marble tiles to short carpet. Of course there is sometimes the tiled floors, usually in cafeterias. Carpet will always be in classrooms, hardwood floors and carpetless tiled floors are generally in art rooms and labs, shop class tends to have a cement floor.
Of course I'm just taking into consideration what things the students will be working with, cleaning experiments or wood shavings off a carpet would be a chore.

And don't forget, you can fill the background with props too! Stacks of books, bookshelves, desks, chairs ( I hate drawing chairs almost as much as cars!) rulers, staplers, paper galore, pencils, organizing trays, and dry-erase and/or chalk boards can cover a bit of wallspace too. ^_^
Anything else I didn't cover, alert me and I'll get to it!

[Shippo_no_Neko]

Thank you so much! *is drawing next comic* Thank you!!!!

[Stonestrike]

Its almost ready, but I'm still not satified on any of the introduction comics I've experimented with. But I'm still making progress so I'm going to reveal a little more info.
You can obviously tell they're not humans. They are Visapiens. (short for viscous sapien, which means gelatinous man.) They're bodys are like a thick goop. (otherwise they couldn't pick up things with they're hands now could they?) Further proving that I'm a big nerd, Here are they're dnd forms. (I made these sprites a while ago and I'm thinking about making a series of dnd comics with em.)

Nervo as a human monk

Lan as a half-orc barbarian

Gavin as a halfling bard

If I do use em' I'll try to use realistic backgrounds. So...
Enjoy!

[Zolah]

- shouldnt orcs be green .. os sorry *sweatdrops*

[Shippo_no_Neko]

Monks... MIROKU-SAMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 *obsesses*

[deltaT]

I think those look really great stonestrike! There are a lot of sprite comics out there but these are pretty unique. I take it you are making your own sprites? It makes a nice change from all those comics that are just ripped out of games. Not that those can't be good....but it's nice to see some originality.

[deltaT]

Just a thought...you don't have to start with an "introduction" comic....didn't Amy just publish a random Charby comic for her first on DD? If people like it, they'll keep reading. And you have a built in (if small) audience here.

[Zolah]

Hmm, you should maybe try flash? I think it woulc be kinda cool *nods*

[Shippo_no_Neko]

I would read it!

[Stonestrike]

If anyone was wondering why I haven't posted in a while its because my compy up and broke. She's all patched and improved now. now as for the comic...


Thank you for the support everyone. This is harder than I first thought so It might not be up as soon as I planned. Half-orcs are orange/black due to the colour of the mix of human and orc skin. I've got some good ideas and (thanks to deltaT I'm not gonna make an intro. I might upgrade some of the sprites I haven't shown you guys yet.

[Shippo_no_Neko]

Coolness! keep us posted!

[deltaT]

Yes, do! Glad your computer is better now....I went through something similar recently, although I still had one working while one was in the shop. (I have to share with my 2 teens)

[silverwolf]

I'd love to read it! the only 5thing I have against sprite comics is the autors of some. There's guy who uses the same two sprites in every panel of every comic then goes out and knocks the people who hand-draw their comics.

[Stonestrike]

I made the firststrip and gave up on hand-drawn backgrounds. I can't upload it to drunk duck! I can't even show it to youse guys because its to big for imageshack to upload! What do I do?

[DarkfireTaimatsu]

Maybe you could make an account with DeviantArt (www.deviantart.com) and upload it there. They allow for big images--I would know; some of my hand-drawn stuff is huge when full-viewed. It's not an ideal solution, I think, but it's a good temporary one.

[Shippo_no_Neko]

Yeah! I'd like to see it!

[silverwolf]

I have a program that's called 'Photoimpression', which I use to resize things.

[Stonestrike]

Thanks I'll try that (My comics are too big for even deviant art T_T)
I've got quite a few comics planned! I am a main character for some reason ;D. So I didn't bother making any fourth walls! ;D

[Stonestrike]

On a side note; I shortened visapien into viscan. (since homo sapien shortens to human)

[Stonestrike]

Oh man, This looks like crap on drunk duck. No matter what I do its either crappy looking or unable to upload! Maybe I should give up...

www.drunkduck.com/Nervo/

[lysinias]

Never give up! eventually it'll go right. If you give up you'll always regret it.

[Stonestrike]

Yeah your right lysinias, Eventually I'll get this working. I really want to make this comic. Thanks for the support everyone!

[Rehiro]

Hey, im not sure I have actually spoken directly to you Stonestrike.

Well, I managed to read the comic. Good luck on future success!

[Amelius]

Don't be so hard on yourself, I enjoyed it! Don't give up on it!

[Stonestrike]

Oh man. I'm really annoyed. Not only did I have to shrink the beanbag chair that originally was supposed to be bigger than a freakin' couch to fit the panels, but the size you see on drunkduck, for some reason is the maximum size they allow me to upload! The only soulution I've come up with is to make each page a panel. What is making my file sizes so big? I need at LEAST 2 @#$%in' kb to have a decent format! Plus even when I'm allowed bigger file sizes, my computer fails to upload them! BTW, I'm using ms paint and converting the pages into jpeg format. Help me please!

[Amelius]

alright I'll see what I can do. so, what browser do you have? I have trouble uploading lately because of AOL, if you don't have that I'm not sure what I can say (the way I fix that is using internet Explorer pages instead)
Does it give you options when you save as a jpeg? Because sometimes you have to compromise a bit to get the things to save under 500k. I save most of my comics around 8-9 in the image options, with baseline optimized (dunno the diff, it just brings down the size a bit) and basically just everything lowered like that. A page of ctv is 690 pixels wide.
Do you have a Mac or PC? I have a pc, but I found while using a friend of mine's Mac, everything wanted to save huge. I could ask about that too.
Basically all you want to do is be sure that the file size is just under 500kb, and the filename should only be numbers and letters with no spaces or symbols(they took down the faq for this with the site being down, I dunno if any new members like yourself were made aware of this).