Hello everyone!

 

My name is Inma R. and I’m a BL comic artist (Wild Beast Forest House, The Violinist and the Nerd).

Since I post weekly on Webtoon, for me speed is essential. Today I’m going to share some tips with you to work more efficiently on your comics. I hope you find any of them useful!

Tip 1: Write your dialogues in a text document.

For me it is important to write the dialogues in a text document first because the pace as I write them is closer to the pace of someone reading them. If you write dialogues as you draw, the pace in your mind will be a lot slower and the reading experience might be a lot different from what you intended.

Tip 2: Use gradients to set the mood for each scene.

You can create your own gradient sets or download tons of them from Assets. Playing with the different blending modes and opacity will give you different moods and steady color schemes for each scene even if you use the same base colors all the time!

Let’s see some samples.

 

This is my panel without any gradient:

And here are different types of gradients and blending modes you can use to get very different results:

Get creative!

Tip 3: Character sheets.

Create character sheets with all the colors you need and put them in the Sub View palette to access the colors quickly as you’re working.

When you have the “switch to eyedropper automatically” button enabled, you’ll be able to pick up colors from the Sub View palette just by hovering over it without needing to switch tools.

Tip 4: Use shortcuts.

We all know shortcuts are super handy, but my tip is to use the same shortcut for two tools you normally switch between.

 

For example, I use the same shortcut for mapping pen and the bucket, so when I’m working on base colors, I can switch between them quickly by pressing the same key.

Tip 5: Autoactions for shading.

I created an autoaction to help me with the shading so I don’t need to pick up different colors for each shadow to fit what’s underneath, the autoaction will pick up the colors for me and all I have to do is paint with any color over my image.

With this autoaction, even if I use gray to paint the shadows over the whole illustration, it will look like this:

Something like this helps me work on shadows faster because I don’t need to go around picking colors for each part.

Tip 6: Text in different languages.

Rather than having each speech bubble layer inside each panel, have them all within a folder on top of all the panels. This will help you translate to other languages and switch between them easily (all you have to do is to hide or enable the language folder you want to use at each time).

 

For example, I have one folder for English and another one for Spanish.

When you want the speech bubble to be cut by the edge of the panel, follow these steps:

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Right-click on a specific panel → Selection from layer → Create selection.

The idea now is to create a layer mask on the speech bubble we want to use on that panel:

But first we need to decide whether we want the speech bubble to go a bit beyond the edge of the panel or be framed within.

 

To go beyond the edge of the panel, go to Select → Expand selected area → input 2 before applying the layer mask.

 

You’ll get this result:

To get the speech bubble framed by the edge of the panel, go to Select → Shrink selected area → input 1 or 2 depending on panel border thickness.

 

You’ll get this result:

Tip 7: Webtoon preview.

On the View menu, use the “On-screen area (Webtoon)” option to see a preview of what people will see as they scroll down on their phone. This will help you decide the distance between panels to build the pace you want.

 

You can edit the size of the preview using the “On-screen area settings (webtoon)” option.

Tip 8: Comic setting.

If your comic (webtoon or traditional) has a special color for the page paper, it’s best to choose it when creating the comic file using the paper color option. This way even if you need to enlarge a page, the paper color will automatically be as selected.

It will be white by default because it’s the most common option.

That would be all! I wish you tons of luck working on your comics and I hope you find a working method that allows you to create your pages fast and comfortably ♥