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Empty-Brooke In reply to CrusadingFantasy [2018-09-03 01:39:06 +0000 UTC]

Plan it out first.
When I started doing webcomics--and no, it wasn't Idle Tentacles or Mecha and Stem, it was WAY long ago--I didn't have a single clue what I was doing and I just went by a page by page basis. I would change what would happen in the story based on whether or not I could draw what I had been planning on drawing originally. There's even a page in one of my old comics where I couldn't draw a crowd of people so I just wrote "insert terrified crowd feeling THIS-a-way" and then drew an arrow pointing out the doorway.
At least if you plan it out, if there's something in the comic that you recognize you're not very good at drawing, you can practice before you get to that point. 

Don't worry about vigorously keeping a schedule.
Honestly, people always get on this about how important it is, but if you have a couple instances where you miss an update, it's not the end of the world. I'd still say that it's best to have a specific day of the week when you upload the pages of the comic, and you should try to keep that as consistent as you can, but life happens and we can't always keep on top of that AND webcomics. As long as you get back into the swing of things once you're back on your feet, I don't think it's an issue. 
I feel like this matters even less if it's a comic you plan on publishing. On one hand, it might help you keep up with working on the book consistently, but you also might get to the point where you're rushing pages. So don't feel pressured to rush the work to keep a weekly schedule. Just skip the week, finish the page and update it the next upload day. You might even get a little ahead of your own schedule in doing that. In that sense, publishing online is also just a means of letting people know the comic exists and showing them that it's something they might like to keep reading. I read a comic called Shadoweyes online, but two Shadoweyes books have already been published and the webcomic is WAY behind the published books. It's just a way of reading it for free  and you really should be focusing on the published work because that's what helps keep the comic going.  

Try to keep consistent in each chapter/issue.
It's good to try and keep each chapter or issue consistent in art style. Even if you're stretching the comic out for a long period of time and you've since progressed in your art, keep drawing the way you've been drawing until the chapter/issue you're on is complete. Then you can update the art in the next one. 

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Spark-Flower In reply to Empty-Brooke [2018-09-06 15:45:53 +0000 UTC]

Do you also have tips for paneling a comic? Like, how do you divide the panels on a page and how big they should be or how many there should be? I also thought about making a comic but I'm unsure about it. And the way you do this looks really nice.

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Empty-Brooke In reply to Spark-Flower [2018-09-06 23:45:13 +0000 UTC]

I don't know if that's something I can describe enough in depth with text alone, lacking visual examples. 
What I CAN say is that the action and speech bubbles on your pages should guide the reader's eye across the page seamlessly. If the reader is having to jump from place to place to read everything in order, you've done something wrong, which is why it's so important to read over and analyze your own work.
Something that might help is drawing a curved line on the comic. Use the line to flow from each speech bubble to the next and use it as an indication of how you should guide the reader's eye. This page is a great example of that and actually has the leading lines marked out on the page so you can see exactly how it works: twitter.com/Sean_G_Murphy/stat…

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Spark-Flower In reply to Empty-Brooke [2018-09-07 15:20:50 +0000 UTC]

Oh, thank you either way.

And that's a great tip, thank you, I will keep that in mind.

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CrusadingFantasy In reply to Empty-Brooke [2018-09-03 01:56:02 +0000 UTC]

Thanks

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