The following is another re-post from the old SMDC blog, this one from November 5, 2008. It’s interesting for me to look back at these and be reminded of some lessons I’ve learned along the way. How soon we forget… Anyway, I hope if you’re an aspiring artist — or a language learner for that matter — that this topic will be relevant and interesting to you.

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No, this isn’t about manga, though I do think western artists could learn a few tricks from our Japanese fellow-cartoonists (and I’m not talking about just aping their style, which is what most non-Japanese “manga” artists do — but that’s a topic for another post). Today I want to talk about a realization I made recently: a lot of the principles I’m learning while studying Japanese can be applied to becoming a better cartoonist as well.

If nothing else, the Japanese writing system is a beautiful art form in itself. And learning any art form, I think, will help you develop as an artist in your chosen craft as well. But more specifically, here are some principles I am discovering from my language studies that can be put to work in learning the art of cartooning.

1. Repetition: My biggest struggle in learning Japanese is the HUGE amount of rote memorization there is to do. There’s just no way around it. One of the answers is, of course, repetition. This is especially useful in learning to write. There are literally thousands of kanji (those really complicated characters swiped from China) and it’s easy to get them confused. It’s also easy to get to a point where you can read some of them, but if called on to write them, totally drawing (no pun intended) a blank. But by repetition, you can get to the point where you can write them without even thinking about it.

Of course the same thing can happen in cartooning. Maybe drawing a hand or a foot or a car comes with great struggle for you, takes a ton of extra work, and some visual reference is needed every time. But with repetition, in time, it’s possible to get to a point where you can draw it without thinking. Then you’re free to be expressive instead of worrying about getting it right. So if there’s something you’re not too good at drawing, why not take some time and focus on learning to draw that one thing really, really well? Then you can move on to other things and enjoy yourself instead of agonizing over it whenever that thing comes up (or avoiding it, as we’re all tempted to do sometimes).

2. Context: I find that Japanese words and sentence structures stick in my head better when I practice them in context. Like, putting a word into a familiar sentence structure can help in vocabulary memorization. Or, instead of just trying to remember what a certain piece of grammar means, if I could come up with a sentence that means something to me (like, that I might use in real life) I’m more likely to remember it and actually use it.

In the same way, as a cartoonist, why not get in the habit of drawing characters actually, you know, doing stuff? Draw them interacting with each other, sitting or standing or walking in different settings, and so on — instead of just working on drawing the characters themselves, just posing. If you want to draw good comics, you need to learn to draw stuff in context, like you will in the actual comics. So practice that in your sketches too, and it’ll come more naturally when you hit the panel or page.

3. Learning and Re-Learning: I find myself, in my language studies, learning words and grammar, moving on to other stuff, and then forgetting the older stuff and having to go back and re-learn it. And if I don’t draw a certain character or thing in a while, I get a little rusty with that too. Sometimes you have to go back and re-learn to draw something, but just like in language, once you’ve learned, forgotten, and re-learned, you’re less likely to forget again. With each re-learning, it gets a little more natural.

4. Multiple Methods: In Japanese, as in other languages, there are multiple ways to say the same thing. In fact, in Japanese, because of cultural subtleties, it can get really complicated. But what this reminds me about in terms of cartooning is that there’s lots of room for variation, experimentation, and multiple styles. We don’t all have to draw the same way. We don’t all have to know how to draw “realistically”. But we do have to be good story tellers.

So experiment, find your style, try new angles, tools, techniques and perspectives, and most of all have fun with it. There’s no one right way to draw a comic.

I’m learning to create comics digitally, so it was nice to re-discover this video while going through the old posts from the former skitzoman.com. It’s a little behind-the-scenes action from the makers of Nemu-Nemu, found via YouTube. Some of the terminology may not mean much to you if you’re not familiar with Photoshop, but you may find it interesting nonetheless. I love learning about other people’s creative processes, even if it’s in a different style — or even a different artform — than I work in.

The following was originally posted on September 24, 2008 on my former comics-related blog at skitzoman.com. I’m re-posting it here unedited because I still think it still applies. And maybe I’m the one who needs to be reminded of these lessons as I try to incorporate a new comics project into my job as a missionary… I hope if you’re a creative type you’ll gain something from this too, though I think the principles apply to all fields of work and study.

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Regular readers may have noticed I didn’t post anything till Wednesday this week. This might lead you to believe that I’ve been busy, but the truth is that I’ve actually been less busy than usual this week. Does anyone else find that the more time they have the less they get done? Seems like a contradiction, but I think it has something to do with the lack of routine and structure. At any rate, us creative types aren’t always the most organized, are we?

Which leads to the topic of this post. I’m by no means an expert on productivity, but I’m learning to be productive in spite of my inclinations towards disorganization. Hopefully that means my next webcomic project will be not only better, but more consistent. Anyway, here are some things I’ve learned. Maybe they’ll help you too.

1. Stick to a schedule. When it comes to your webcomic, that means giving yourself a deadline and sticking to it, just like you would if it was your “real job” (if it is your real job, you’ve probably already learned this).

2. Try batch processing. Pro blogger Darren Rowse wrote a good article on this idea HERE, but the basic idea is that you set aside a chunk of time to do a bunch of stuff ahead of time. The linked article is about blogging, but a lot of the principles carry over to webcomic creating. For example, if you had a day off and wanted to work ahead on several tasks, you could set aside an hour to do some online promotion, a couple hours for writing, a couple hours for drawing… You get the idea. This leads to the next suggestion I have…

3. Work ahead. Give yourself a good-sized “buffer” of strips so that if you have a busy week you don’t fall behind. This prepares you for the unexpected or for planned absences like vacation time. Brad Guiger of Evil Inc is apparently over a month ahead on his daily strip. You may not be able to — or even want to — get that far ahead, but a week or two, I would think, would be the minimum, depending on your update schedule, of course.

4. Give yourself a system for keeping your stuff organized — not just your webcomics stuff, but everything. If all your life tasks, goals, responsibilities and so on are properly organized, fitting in time to put into your webcomic will be a lot easier and natural. Check out sites like Zen Habits, Lifehacker, and 43Folders for ideas on creating such a system.

5. Eliminate Distractions. When you sit down at your computer to write, go offline. Almost nothing is more distracting than the internet. When you’re getting ready to draw or ink, make sure you’re in a comfortable place where you can get work done. If you’ve been doing this stuff for any amount of time, you can probably figure this out on your own; you know what distracts you and what helps you get stuff done.

That’s some of what I’ve learned. In future posts I may go more into my own productivity system, and talk about some helpful tools for staying organized. But feel free to add your own tips to this list by using the comment form below. What works for you?

Before I decided to launch Doodze, I was actually working on a completely different concept that ended up being put on the back burner when I got inspired to do Doodze instead. I one I had been working on was love story, told through a kind of surrealistic fantasy narrative. I had a lot of trouble getting beyond concept to execution, so I ended up not doing it (for now).

I did lots of sketching for that project, especially trying to figure out the character designs. The two characters in the drawing below, which you’ll see in three phases of development, were to be the main characters. If I ever get around to resurrecting this concept, the characters may turn out very different. But this is the latest version anyway. At the bottom of this post, I explain the process.

Original Sketch:

Penciled, Inked & Toned:

Full-Color Version:

The process: First the rough sketch. The girl has a hat on because I couldn’t get her hair to look right. But it was just a quick sketch, so I didn’t care. But I liked how the characters looked. So, I took the sketch and blew it up using my scanner/copier/printer, then taped that larger version to the light board. From there I penciled it in blue line; doing it in light blue, of course, saves the step of having to erase it after inking. After penciling, I inked it using a Japanese brush-pen. Then I scanned it and did a little bit of cleanup and stuff in Photoshop. I added the large black and gray areas, and finished with some shading. I’m not a huge fan of my own inking, but once I did the Photoshopping to it, I think it turned out okay. I went back a little while later and did a color version, as you can see. Not entirely satisfied with my color choices, looking back, but there you have it.

The following was originally posted last September over at SkitZo MaN dot CoM, when I went through a brief comics-process-blogging phase over there. I want to blog more about my creative process on this blog in the future, so as a start I’m going to re-post some of those old posts here. This was actually two posts originally, but I’m combining and editing them. In the future I’ll try to talk about how what I learned back then is affecting what I’m doing now with Doodze.

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Part 1: I’m one of those guys who usually likes his thumbnail sketches and doodles more than the finished product. I find there’s always an energy there that’s hard to carry over to the final piece. Also, it can be hard to get the proportions right when you draw larger, especially if you’re not used to it. I think that sometime it’s okay to “cheat” a little.

A while back I bought my first light board, and, though I haven’t been cartooning much since I got it, I think it’ll become a valuable tool in my future comics work. Below you’ll see some pictures illustrating how I’ve been using it, in this case working on some character visualizations for a potential project I’ve been dreaming up. Below the pics I’ll explain some more about what I’m doing.

Basically, I took some small sketches, blew them up, taped them to the light board, and started tracing. The result is that my final drawing looks a lot more like the original sketch and thus a lot more like what I actually had in mind.

I think it’ll come in even more handy when I’m doing full pages or strips, because there will be a lot more going on, and this may help speed up the process of getting things laid out and proportioned properly. And sometimes one panel may be very similar to another, and you can trace the same sketch to make sure you get the similar parts right.

It’s also useful when you mess up, or just aren’t completely satisfied with the final product. In a future post I plan to show you how I re-did the above ninja-elf-chick drawing, starting with the same sketch but ending with some key differences.

Part 2: A while back, I wrote about how I’m learning to use a light board to improve my cartooning skills. At the end of that post, I mentioned how I wasn’t completely satisfied with the way this ninja-elf-chick drawing turned out. Actually, I liked pretty much everything but the folds on her sleeves (what the heck is going on there, anyway?). Now, I could have just erased that area and re-drawn it (it’s still in pencil, after all). But I decided to try re-creating it again on the light board, tracing the original sketch again. Here’s what I got:

As you can see, it’s a pretty close likeness to the older version, and the sleeves look much much better. I think the shading is a little better too, which is partly because I switched to a darker, non-mechanical pencil. And I changed the position of her sword, just for fun.

On the negative side, I don’t really like how her hair turned out; too many shorter strands sticking out there. It’s like she got a bad haircut in between sessions or something. Her jaw-line and lips are a little different too. I suppose these are minor things I could go back and change, and also things that would vary less if I got in the habit of drawing the character more frequently (as one would do when drawing a comic on an ongoing basis).

Anyway, all that to point out that another advantage of the light board is that you can go back and fix stuff if the original piece gets wrecked too bad to fix. It would also be helpful if you wanted a non-electronic way to draw several panels with basically the same stuff in them.

I’ve finally officially launched my new webcomic. Those of you wondering what I do in my free time can check it out at Doodze.com and read the first several pages of Doodze: A Tiny Epic. Feel free to tell your friends, too.

I recently started previewing my new webcomic project, Doodze, over on Facebook. It’s been a while since I’ve had an ongoing comic or cartoon on the web, and this is my most ambitious attempt to date. As I’ve thought and learned about the artistic process, I’ve developed an artistic philosophy, which has influenced which project I’ve chosen to pursue and my decision to launch it now rather than later, when I’ve got more time or feel more ready. I’m still learning, but here’s my artistic philosophy as I understand my chosen art form and my own strengths and weaknesses as an artist…

1. Perfectionism kills inspiration. It’s better to create imperfect art than to not create at all.

2. Don’t wait until you’re “good enough” to launch into an artistic endeavor. If you wait, you never will be.

3. Creating comics should be fun. I need to want to draw this thing to keep on doing it.

4. Planning ahead is good, but I need the freedom to improvise, change my mind… or even make it up as I go.

5. Inspiration is not enough. Discipline is needed in order to take an idea and see it through. People who only create when they feel like it usually never improve or reach their artistic goals. This is the difference between an artistic person and an artist — not just talent, but also time and effort.

6. Specific goals and deadlines are necessary. Especially if you’re a disorganized procrastinator like me. Stuff you learn about being a better organized student or employee or whatever can help you be a more productive and fulfilled artist.

7. Artists are notoriously disorganized and tend to be good at creating clutter. I definitely fit in that category. But being organized doesn’t stunt creativity, contrary to some people’s thinking. In fact, it aids creativity because it allows you to focus on the thing you’re creating, not your piles of junk.

8. Good ideas need time to brew in private before you go public with them. But don’t sit on a good idea forever. Face the fear, get it done, and put it out there for the world to enjoy.

If you’re on Facebook, you can see my new webcomic now and for the next few weeks by checking out THIS PAGE. I’ll be posting a page or two a week until I’m ready to launch the official site a month or so from now.

Doodze is a fantasy / adventure / humour comic that I can only describe as somewhere between Smurfs and Lord of the Rings. Hope you enjoy it.

Here’s the video (Found via this post at webcomics.com) I promised earlier in the week. It’s well worth the 15 minutes if you love comics or you want to understand why I (and others) actually think that (gasp!) comics are a valid art form.

This is a re-post from the old SkitZo blog, but I’m sharing it here because I think it’s one of my better ones, and also because I plan to post another McCloud video later this week, and this will be a good warm-up.

If you’re serious about creating comics, or just a passionate enough fan to not only read comics but also read about comics, then you’re probably no stranger to Scott McCloud. Sometimes controversial, McCloud is probably one of the greatest thinkers involved in the industry, as well as one of the biggest evangelists (promoters) of comics as art form. He’s a cartoonist, writer and experimenter, and is the guy who came up with 24-Hour Comic Day (a great idea, though I’ve yet to try it).

Scott McCloud has written three non-fiction comic-books-about-comics: Understanding Comics, Making Comics, and Reinventing Comics. I’ve read the first two, but not the third, so I’ll restrict my opinions to things I actually know about (always a good idea, I think — which is an opinion in itself).

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, looks at comics from a reader’s perspective, dissecting the art form and looking at it piece by piece, taking a look at what makes them work (and what makes them not work, as is sometimes the case).

McCloud’s second comic-book-book, Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, takes a look at, well, making comics. He covers some of the same territory as in Understanding Comics, but takes it a step further, helping would-be creators understand that there’s more to making good comics that being able to draw nice pictures. He goes into great detail about character creation, storytelling, flow, different storytelling styles, and a lot of little but important details one might not think about but which can make a big difference.

One example of those little details in character creation is the idea of giving each character not only a unique face and style of clothing, but also a unique body language and style of speech — things that are obvious when you think about it (after all, there’s a lot more to real people’s uniqueness than just their face) but that it might be easy to miss.

One of the nice things about all three of Scott McCloud’s books-about-comics is that they’re presented as comics. This is another idea that makes perfect sense when you think about it; if you’re going to talk about comics, why not do in the form of a comic book? But I don’t know of any other examples of writers who have done this.

As an added bonus, and as a preview of what you’ll get in the book, there’s an online supliment on McCloud’s site (which was really hard to find, so here a quick LINK). Making Comics is in black-and-white, and since he wanted to discuss color in color (another obvious but good idea), he presented it online as “chapter 5 1/2″.

I would highly recommend both of these books, especially to anyone who’s interesting in writing and/or drawing comics. As for the third one, you’ll just have to wait until I’ve actually read it. Of course, if anyone who’s reading this has already read Reinventing Comics (or the other two volumes for that matter), I’d love to hear what you think. Anybody…?

In the meantime, here are some video clips of Scott McCloud, so you can get a better picture of who he is. You may or may not agree with everything he says (few do), but you do have to admire his passion for the art form and how articulately he unpacks it.

So what do you think? Is Scott McCloud a Guru, Mad Scientist, or a Genius?