How to Make a Comic

A versatile medium, comics can express anything from the dark and intense to the satirical and meaningless. Today, nearly any person with Internet access can publish her own comic for world consumption. Web comic artists have become a fast growing community, welcoming everyone who's willing to express themselves via frames and speech bubble.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Choose your approach. Like newspaper comics, some web comics are a collection of nonsequiturs with no particular thread tying them together, while others have an established cast and one or more ongoing storylines. Decide which fits your vision best and go with it.
2. Outline your comic. If you're writing an ongoing storyline, create a cast of characters and determine their personalities. You may also want to outline a few story arcs to help guide your ideas later. Even if you don't plan to have any sort of connection from one comic to the next, inventory concepts to work on in the future.
3. Create a template. Most comics keep to the same general look, either a single frame or several frames of the same size to give the reader some consistency. This also helps you to have a launching pad for creating your ideas, creating a sort of scaffolding for your story or punchline. If you're drawing by hand, make ample copies of this template for future use. If you're drawing it digitally, save the template file separately from your final work.
4. Sketch the comic. Plan the general action and layout and sketch the basic shapes and backgrounds. If you're hand drawing, plan your speech bubbles. If you're using a graphics editing program, you can add them as a layer on top of your finished work. If you're sketching on your computer from scratch, use a digital tablet to make your work look smoother and more professional.
5. Ink the comic. Outline the drawings with a bold color, usually black. If you don't have a digital tablet, but want to make your comic digitally, you can ink the comic by hand, scan it into a software program, and then clean it up and color it digitally.
6. Color and shade the comic. If you're hand drawing your comic, use bold markers and plan your shading ahead of time to avoid smudging. If you're using a software program, the fill tool will save time, but it may flatten the drawing. If you want to use the fill tool, plan on shading on top of it to give it some depth.
7. Clean it up and add finishing touches. If you're working digitally, you can erase any errant marks and add speech bubbles at this point.
8. Upload it to your hosting site to share it with the world. If you created it digitally, simply upload your saved file, usually in .gif or .png file format. If you created it by hand, scan your comic. Crop the excess if needed and save it as a .gif, .jpg, or .png file.

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