Break – Shading Process 04

These "shading process" pages are basically what I do for the annotations in the AneekaChannel except with more focus on the story creation part.

Story pages return Tuesday!

11 Comments

Yeah, mistakes in staging like that is how you learn. At least the frustration ensures that you won’t make this particular staging mistake ever again.

The b/w version looks really good! Better then the final version actually. Again, its just those “flat shadows” people have commented on before that undermined your work. Easy enough to fix if you break the habit of using darker and lighter shades of the exact same color to contour.

Just like staging, different color pallet choices will look “better” then others. And you’ll derp it up quite a few times as you figure it out. ^_^ Means you’re training a better eye for it.

This is why I like it when comic authors post the pages in their progress stages, rough,, ink, flat, shaded, details are the steps most post. A lot of your issues if you took in feedback from readers could have been better improved or pointed out, corrections, maybe even redlines that could help you further improve your skill. Or suggestions to help illustrate whats going on..

I had no idea that they fell to the floor… not a clue. That said, the 2nd pannel could have been changed to one showing them on the ground after the fall instead of a close up on their faces. That would have been all you’d have needed, or maybe the 3rd showing them sitting on the floor talking again instead of just face shots.

I hope you at least give it a try for a few pages to see how it works for you. You already have an amazing style and to see that improve would be wonders, and getting feedback to help with that could save you a lot of headaches and less pages could be ‘disasters’.

Just to give an example:
Goblins posted pages like this:
http://kmz.co.za/images/20140209-rough.jpg (or full rough then ink)
that in turn got updated with this:
http://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1392/25/1392259478687.jpg
That in turn got updated with the final:
http://www.goblinscomic.org/02122014/

We got to see the pages in their steps, we got to offer feedback, corrections, pointing out oddities that the author over looked/didn’t notice. In the end it makes for better pages.

Please consider it, you may be surprised, or if you don’t care for it, go back to how you’re doing it now. Never hurts to try at least right?

It’s very tempting. However, the main problem with this idea is that it doesn’t like/allow buffers. It worked for Goblins since he had no buffer; he released the page as he worked on it. But I can’t do that. My IRL schedule is sporadic. Sometimes I’ll have a large chunk of time to get pages done and other weeks, I’ll barely have any, so buffers help me to survive or you’d be seeing delays all over the place. For instance, I already have the next 4 pages finished, so there’s not really a point to release them in steps since I’m already done with them. Neither do I have the time (with Reality pages, at least) to go back and fix those pages as tips are given. I can only incorporate them into the latter pages as I continue getting pages done. When I’m back into easier pages (like the L.i.F.e ones) I can go back and uniform/fix all the Reality pages for the book version, but doing it now would just overwhelm me.

Thus, while it would be nice to improve faster and get tips, I can’t sacrifice my buffer for it. Sorry 🙁

“so buffers help me to survive or you’d be seeing delays all over the place.”
Kinda like we’re seeing now?

I’ll probably get flamed for this, but I don’t care. Personally, I don’t see the shading as that much of an improvement for the time being spent on it. Since Goblins was mentioned, I’ll start with that. Look at his little rant below the image on the main website, it starts like this: “I Quit”, (he goes on to state that he’s going to continue working on Goblins, but not care about what people think). He spent so much time worrying about shading and lighting, and little things like that, that he pretty much hospitalized himself.

Personally, I’ve NEVER looked at a comic and thought: “Man, if only this comic had some better looking shadows and lighting, it would be sooooo much better.” The page on 4plebs.org looks better than the final image if you ask me. The extra lighting and shading in the last version make certain details vanish almost, like the H symbol when it is in front of Forgath’s beard, (the less armored dwarf).

If you want to do shading and all that, I’m fine with that, but take a look at some other comics and learn from them. Take one of my favorites: Order Of The Stick. They look very different back when they started than they do today. Start out slow and work your way up to the massively awesome shading and lighting.

Start: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html
Today: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0956.html

I wanted to show how all of the team was back when it first started almost eleven years ago and what they look like today. What you’ll probably notice most is this: they are all STICK FIGURES for the most part. Normally, they don’t have any shadows at all, they’re all stick figures and yet, it’s a wildly popular webcomic.

As of 8/15/14 NAV’s rank is 1,505,452 compared to OOTS at: 14,303
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/giantitp.com
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/navcomic.com

I don’t read OOTS because it looks absolutely amazing, I read it because I love the writing. I like NAV’s story so far, it’s a bit different and I have enjoyed it, not because it’s the best looking. Personally, I think you should throttle back the amount of lighting and shading you do on the reality pages. A lot of what I’ve said will probably be ignored, but perhaps you can give the people a choice on what happens and let us vote on the direction things go, or if they agree with me.

I believe in giving recommendations with criticism, so here are a few to help out. If you decide to take my recommendation, add a little box stating when we go into and out of a mode, kinda like the old: Meanwhile or Later… boxes, so that we know if we’re in Reality, L.i.F.e or The Game, color each box differently as well. Only spend a set amount of time when doing shading, this can help your skills get better and faster so that you can make things look the way you want and still have time left over for other things. Speed things up by using a computer. Yes I know that sounds dumb, but hear me out. There are programs out there called Ray-Tracers, and one of the best ones I’ve ever used can do lights, shadows AND radiosity (coloring dark areas with reflected and refracted lighting). It’s available at: http://povray.org/ and it comes with a bunch of examples, though there is a steep learning curve. This website: http://www.simnet.is/hildurka/content/tut1page.htm has some good images showing its radiosity abilities.

Another program that is good and free is Blender at: http://www.blender.org Create a 2D box, add your character as a texture, position the characters, add lighting and render. Boom, lighting and shadows. Both of these are admittedly very complex, but they can speed up your Reality pages. How good are they? Depends on how much time and effort you want to put into them: http://hof.povray.org/ http://www.blenderguru.com/winners-hall-of-fame/

With these two programs, you might even be able to find one of your readers that can do the work for you as well. Or at least start you off with a good base so that you can do them yourself. I have too many project myself to be of any use to you right now since I just started a new job.

I’m fine with shading and all that. I’m fine with delays, heck, OOTS updates once a week to once a month, yet I still faithfully check it once a day. I really just don’t want to see another person get sucked into an anxiety hole due to something that could be avoided. Been down that road a few too many times.

TL;DR
Awesome comic.

This is indeed wonderful advice.
Just as said
“so buffers help me to survive or you’d be seeing delays all over the place.”
But isn’t that what we have right now?

You took a LONG break giving us the Dudes story to fill a buffer.. but in the end what are we seeing? You are splitting pages, and now showing us your steps to fill in even more time.

Truth be told, I don’t care for your reality pages, to me it looks like you are just trying way to hard. Your earlier versions looked fine, but then you kept adding and adding and adding and it just deluded so much.

I’m an artist as well, been drawing sense I was 4, and even in a recent journal I posted on DA shows a downfal when I started getting into realism.
http://kurisutaru.deviantart.com/journal/My-deviantART-Story-473959063
Go a head and read it.

In the end, I was so over focused on the details, making it all look perfect that it just ruined the works in the end, I stopped being happy with my art, started to hate it even. I have scraped so many works because they just didn’t come out at all how I hoped. ‘Disasters’, as you called this page. Only a few works ever made it to being fished. 2% about of all the drawings I did. It got so bad I stopped drawing for over a YEAR I hated my work so much.

So I took a step back, I didn’t want to stop working on realism but I wasn’t getting better as I was. When a work started making a few MONTHS to finish… something isn’t being done right.

So I stopped fretting so much on details, stopped over working the shading and effects. What I ended up with is something that still has a realism touch, but don’t take nearly as long and makes similar results. What took me a month can now take me two hours. That’s handy as I am planing on doing my own comic as well.

I’d be more then happy to show you how I do it, and it’s not too far off from how you do it.. just.. not as out right over board.

I also work in 3d, and often I use 3d models to help with shading and lighting. If I cant sort out the light, I’ll throw open 3ds max, or Zbrush and make a quick basic form and use it for reference, or a free model of a man or an object to help get the idea.
Or shoot, just make what I need as a full model
http://sta.sh/01wkwlfpaw9p

But right now, you are over rendering your work, and that’s hurting it more then helping it. If it is taking you so long to do a page that you have to give us a month long stick figure comic, then split the pages into halfs, and then give us the wip to help give you time.. then maybe like I had to, you may need to take a step back, and change your methoods of coloring to something you can put together. If you continue to hate your own work, it’s going to be something you’ll no longer want to do. Just like with my own works, becoming something you just don’t feel like going through the hassle with.

Trust me, I know about time. I work two part time jobs that eat up most of my time. I have days where I need to be up by 6am to make it to work, only to make it home by 7pm or later just due to travel time. That affords me just a few hours, two maybe to relax, wash, before back to bed to be up again.

You need to be able to pace yourself with your work, reality don’t have to be a crazy intense detailed realism world that you have to start rushing with to make a deadline.

With the methood I showed you, you don’t HAVE to make a buffer, you don’t HAVE to rush to get things done on time. You can work at your own pase, your own time, because you are still giving us readers something to look at and enjoy, with the bonus of seeing the pages come alive before our eyes as well as take on the helpful advice from others.

I couldn’t draw a half-way believable human if I tried (and I’ve tried all too many times), so I’m just amazed at your skills.

Anndd THANK YOU, Aneeka, for this lovely and educational side-trip! 🙂

If you feel yourself hitting a wall, you should just step back and do another part. I had that myself on thursday. It was such a simple task, yet for some reason it was giving me such grief. Finally just said screw it and moved on to other parts of the task. Then I came back, calmer and feeling more accomplished and just got it done like it was nothing at all. Sometimes the best way around the things that trip you up is just to go around them until your ready to deal with them XD

I do understand your frustration. Nothing gets to you like the feeling of wanting to be way better than you feel you are at the moment. Even if you know for a fact you are improving.

How to fix the “fell to the floor” problem: insert a skinny, solid-color panel between panel 1 and panels 2 and 3, with ~*THUD*~ in it.

I think the anonymous comment above about setting a time limit for yourself on shading is a good one. You will still get better and faster over time, and it will help keep you from over-rendering. Most importantly, it will help prevent over-work and stress.

*wants to write a web comic*
How do you deal with that? And I want to draw mine by hand! I don’t think I could ever get into such intense detail without boosting my computer art skills first. And my skills are just good enough to draw a VERY simple wolf head with no shading and basic colors.
You ma’am, have my respect for the time, effort, and love you put into this comic just to bring joy to other people! Permission for an online high-five?

Aneeka, I love your work. You know I love your comic. But I have to agree with what two of the people said above. I honestly think you’re spending way too much time on these reality pages.

I’m saying this from the heart, because I’ve done exactly what I think you’re doing with these reality pages — and it killed my writing. For six or seven years. When I was a high school, I wrote probably two or three books a year. By the time I finished college, I was doing nothing but rewriting old books. Over and over and over again. This was BAD.

By that point, I could write much better in a first draft than I could in my tenth draft in high school. Yet I was writing *fewer first drafts,* and spending *more time* on each story, because I could see more clearly how far from perfection my writing was.

My improvement did not speed up. It slowed down. A lot. And my love of writing slowed down with it.

Instead of enjoying the process, I enjoyed only the finished product — and then, only if it fit my current standards of “perfect.” (Those standards would change next year, and so I would rewrite it again.)

What you did a year or so ago was brilliant. You took time off to go learn how to do learn to do something specific *more quickly.* Ultimately, your speed is far more important to your readers — and your own health — than any ephemeral “quality.”

I suggest putting a time limit on each reality page — 10 hours might be a good starting place, maybe 15 — and then refusing to let yourself go past it, no matter how bad you think it looks. (That’s what I did when I started To Prevent World Peace. It was the only way to get through drawing pages that were far above the current skill level I had been working with.) Allocate an entire hour for each page to work on *one specific thing* — one hour, per page, *one specific thing* — you don’t currently think you’re very good with.

And then, when that hour is over, you’re finished. Period.

This might help you get better a lot faster, plus it will be a lot more fun and a lot less “gah, I just don’t care anymore” (and boy, do I know that feeling).

Take this with a grain of salt if you wish. You know my art style is not nearly as well drawn as yours is, nor do I color or shade my comic. On the other hand, I have managed to keep a buffer for TWELVE YEARS, and have never once skipped an update, updated with filler, or gone on hiatus (including the six months in which I barely got anything done because of medical reasons). And my art has improved steadily. Gradually (not quickly), but steadily. So I’m speaking both as the person who has made exactly the same mistake and the person who has somehow managed to avoid it.

I’m really, really concerned about what I see happening with Not a Villain. You’ve fallen into the same trap I’ve seen happen with every single one of my friends who has started a webcomic. And that scares me, because I love this webcomic so much, and I don’t want to see it fall down that way.

All of those friends — ALL of them — were better artists than me, had awesome writing, and gained loads of readers out of the gate because of it. (They deserved it!) Then all of them let their updates schedules slip for one reason or another. Eventually, they all stopped updating altogether. (In some cases, it was completely understandable medical reasons.)

Better art from the beginning with net you more readers. And it should! But better art from the middle will not get you more readers. Worse art might lose some (which I don’t think you need to worry about), but worse update schedule will hemhorrage popularity.

Anyone who is reading your comic now wants *updates,* not higher art quality. The quality is already just fine with them; that’s why they care about the story in the first place.

I appreciate that you want a different art style for the reality pages. I’m extremely impressed with the effort you’ve put in. And I love how distinct you’ve managed to make the different settings. But I would trade all of that in a millisecond for rock-hard-steady updates. Your story’s wonderful. Your writing is great. Your art is plenty good. And that’s all we need.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

Break – Shading Process 04