Video: Guide to Making Panels for Comic Strip

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How to arrange the flow of your comic strip action across the panels; learn this and more in this free online art lessons about creating comic strips taught by experienced cartoonist and graphic artist Matt Cail.

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Video Transcript

After you've gotten all your panels in, it's important to understand the overall flow of your comic strip from panel to panel. In this case, we have 4. Your first panel is going to introduce the setting, the character, and the basic situation he's in. In this case, our character is standing here waving at a video camera. The next panel is going to be basically further the introduction into a situation where you're going to start building up humor potential, because you want to get your audience to laugh, at least most of the time you do in comic strips. You're going to have some basic action going on in your comic strip, which is going to largely build off of the last panel. In the third panel, I usually like to have a little more action. In this case, some papers are flying up in the air. They're going all around. There's some motion going on. There's an element of triumph. Even without words in here, you're kind of already getting that idea that this character's very happy. Maybe he's over optimistic even. Then in the final panel, you usually have your punch line, your humus situation. Everything kind of comes to a conclusion. In this case, our character is disappointed that his conceptions were very wrong, which is of course funny because he came off as so cocky in the previous frames. This is the basic way and kind of the basic flow of your comic strips. You should plan these all out in advance. There should not be a situation where we're just taking it on the fly and drawing panel by panel. Keep all of your panels in line and have an over arching motion and fluent feel to your comic strips.

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Guide to Making Panels for Comic Strip

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