Gunwallace's recent guest post on writing dialogue made me think that maybe it's time to reinvigorate parts of this site.

The tutorials that exist have been there for years. let's make an effort to make fresh tutorials with up to date software, advice and links.

Many of the news posts have some useful bits in them but we could use the tutorials section to either flesh them out or give them a home were they are easier to find after a week has gone by.

I was thinking the same thing, I was perusing the tutorials and I think the last one was 2013. The Duckcasts have great tips in itself that could be used as tutorial material!

That would be great! I think most of us who do the newsposts and stuff are too busy at this point to start adding to the tutorials as well, but I'm sure we would all be happy for people to base tutorials on newsposts or quackcasts. Maybe I'll put out a call for tutorials in my newspost this week.

I agree, and personally I think that the tutorials would benefit from having imagery with it. The way the page is now, its hard to focus on any one tutorial because the background takes over.

I'd love to help, but I think I'm more on the learning end of the spectrum than the teaching end.

Are there any tutorials you would like to see?

The how to's on different ideas of how web comics is made. Like how to use ACTIONS in Photoshop to help prep your page(s) in seconds. How I the ACTIONS set up all my characters special FX? Maybe ins and outs of some Comipo knowledge? Using the pen tool to create really quick animation cell hi lights and shading. Is that what you are looking for or is it something just totally related to the podcast?

cdmalcolm1 wrote:
The how to's on different ideas of how web comics is made. Like how to use ACTIONS in Photoshop to help prep your page(s) in seconds. How I the ACTIONS set up all my characters special FX? Maybe ins and outs of some Comipo knowledge? Using the pen tool to create really quick animation cell hi lights and shading. Is that what you are looking for or is it something just totally related to the podcast?

Using tips from the Quackcast as a basis was just a suggestion! Your ideas there sound great.

Genejoke wrote:
Are there any tutorials you would like to see?

Personally I would love to see some different peoples' approaches to colouring. I remember oz having a drawing/colouring tutorial that was helpful to me a few years back.

Edit: Also inking, because inking is the worst.

It'd be good to see the tutorials section get some love.

It would be very cool to get new tutorials. There are a couple of other things that need to be looked at as a priority, IMO.

1. Most (all?) of the tutorials on there seem to have lost their associated graphics in one of The Duck's past crashes. The tutorials probably need to be reviewed and any which talk to the graphical information (which again I suspect is all of them) need to either have the graphics replaced so they're useful again, or the tutorial archived. Sadly I suspect the former is probably prohibitively time-consuming. :( It would be useful to retain them somewhere accessible though for use as reference in creating new versions.

2. At the moment the tutorials section is a thirteen page long, chronologically-ordered list of tutorials. There's no way anyone's able to find what they're looking for in there. Ordering by most recent tutorials is useful (especially if we're looking at regularly topping it up with new ones), but not as the only way to look through them. If we have to archive all the existing templates and start from scratch it'll be small and manageable for a little while, but if we don't come up with a better way to organise the content it'll become unwieldy again in fairly short order.

Let's not reinvent the wheel here. We should avoid repetition and only update what needs updating. The stuff on the first page is all still relevant and still works. I should have looked at the word balloons thing ages ago.

And then there are Banes 's great four part bit on screenwriting. It will resonate through the ages.

bravo1102 wrote:
Let's not reinvent the wheel here. We should avoid repetition and only update what needs updating. The stuff on the first page is all still relevant and still works. I should have looked at the word balloons thing ages ago.

And then there are Banes 's great four part bit on screenwriting. It will resonate through the ages.

Banes has a screenwriting tutorial, excuse me while I go read that!

bravo1102 wrote:
Let's not reinvent the wheel here. We should avoid repetition and only update what needs updating. The stuff on the first page is all still relevant and still works. I should have looked at the word balloons thing ages ago.

Looks like the breakage is less comprehensive than I thought it was. Some of the tutorials are text-only (like the scriptwriting ones) and they're okay. A couple are actually links to externally hosted tutes (eg on Deviantart) and those are fine too. Even a couple of the ones with inline art still work (like the speech bubbles one).

Hmm. When I'm on my computer, I'll put together a list of which ones still work and which don't so we know the scope of the problem.

irrevenant wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:
Let's not reinvent the wheel here. We should avoid repetition and only update what needs updating. The stuff on the first page is all still relevant and still works. I should have looked at the word balloons thing ages ago.

Looks like the breakage is less comprehensive than I thought it was. Some of the tutorials are text-only (like the scriptwriting ones) and they're okay. A couple are actually links to externally hosted tutes (eg on Deviantart) and those are fine too. Even a couple of the ones with inline art still work (like the speech bubbles one).

Hmm. When I'm on my computer, I'll put together a list of which ones still work and which don't so we know the scope of the problem.

You are super awesome, irrevenant. Thanks for doing that!

It's actually not as bad as I thought.

There 127 tutorials, of which 59 are Text-only anyway, 35 have working images and only 33 have broken images.

I did not check all the hyperlinks in the documents though, and can't vouch for them all working.

I've uploaded the complete spreadsheet to Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KwjoWjz_4eAMxpanewm9Qee6VAKIXrArqs1jfZPgYbI

(I assume it's at least possible to copy-paste from this spreadsheet. Let me know if there are any issues, though).

You have tutorial edit powers now Irreverent.

I should probably look through all the tutorials before asking this, but I didn't. Is there anything about page size? I think it's a question many people have right off the bat when making webcomics. And I know there's no one size fits all answer, but there are things to consider;

Sizing for print
sizing for multimedia sites
sizing for mobile friendly use
What size/dpi are people working in vs how they save it when they're finished.

Also, I was wrong: the tutorials aren't in chronological order, they're in alphabetic order. I'm not sure how useful that is. Is there any chance of supporting categories or even tags for this?

Would it be too crazy to maybe make it a wiki page?

Could we organize it alphabetical by subject as opposed to having all those that begin with “the” under “t” ?


Like all drawing ones under “d” and writing under “w” etc?

Maybe get rid of the dates, or at least have them inside the article instead of under the title? Even if the content is relevant, people might get turned off if they see the tutorial was made in 2007 or whatever date. They shouldn't, but some people might automatically think the tutorial is out of date despite the content. Just a thought

Good point, old dates are generally a turn off even if the content is still relevant. I'm tempted to go through every section of the forum and post something new for that reason. Some people scan through here and think the site is dead, which considering the regular quackcasts and awards that other sites can't manage to pull off, is slightly ridiculous.