You’ve got your story, your drawn your buffers and you are ready to set your child free and loose in the world. But wait? What name do you put on it’s tag so people know who it ultimately belongs to? Naming a work can be incredibly frustrating and ...

A narrative theme is, in essence, the meaning behind your story. It also serves to tell your audience what your story is about. Establishing it’s core early on enables you to keep it grounded and focused as you begin to unfold your characters and plots.

Despite a longer piece ...

Did you know as an comic creator you are more than allowed to take a shortcut here and there? It’s true! You want to know something else? Everyone does it! So this week I want to share some shortcuts I have found immensely helpful when trying to speed up ...

Balancing detail and speed is one hell of a trick for a webcomic creator. It is common pitfall for many of us starting our webcomic. Unfortunately one cannot always have both of these qualities in the work. We go ham on all the intricacies early on and then wonder why ...

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ALL the tropes!!!!
Based on Emma Clare's newspost, tropes are damn useful but they can also be your undoing if you handle them badly. Tropes are shortcuts to meanings, scenes, procedures or jokes that take too long to set up in their own right. You can use them ...

When you look at a developed artist you can recognise their work straight away. Maybe it is in the way that they do their lineart, or it could be the facial expressions that characters have, (think the Dreamworks Smirk), or maybe it is the tropes that they use in their ...

Tropes aren’t bad. In fact, they are a useful and, at times, necessary shorthand that creators, particularly in the webcomic field, can wield to enhance their work. J Hillis Miller posited a trope as, “… the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect.”

Every ...

Inspiration is quite the rush. The mind is set alight with seemingly limitless possibilities and, in that moment, you want to experience them all. For a creator, inspiration is the high that we pursue. But eventually our creative significant other packs up their stuff and quietly disappears into the night ...

As creators, we believe that we are the gods of our stories. The tales we weave are of our construct and the characters are subject to our petty whims…at first. When we begin to craft our worlds and populate them with, what we hope, are well rounded characters, we ...

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In this Quackcast we chat about the categorisation of work by specific genres and how it makes it easier to promote your work to people, while for fans it makes it easier to find what you're into, but it can also be a bad thing when people categorise ...