Episode 625 - Designing Women
Mar 6, 2023
Character design is a fun process but not without its challenges. Do you design the character or their story first? I've followed both of those approaches, they have pluses and minuses. On one hand when you create the character first that can make it a real passion project, you make a cool character and then create a story for them to live in and be themselves. But that can also lead to Mary Sues, wish fulfillment and self inserts, which makes for a weak story. Creating characters to fit a story can sometimes lead to using a lot of stereotypes and ending up with fairly generic and bland characters, which can make for a dull story. So it's best to use a bit of balance and judgment.
Topics and Show Notes
In this Quackcast we all talk about how we developed some of our own characters, particularly how Banes and I came up with the characters for Bottomless Waitress. Nicky was an interesting example. Banes' outline for her was a rugged, queer woman truck driver, short haired, average height, average build etc, but when it came for me to draw her I had my own vision for an extremely tall muscular, person; she wore bootleg jeans, a tight white tank-top and cowboy boots, a tattoo on one shoulder, pretty eyes with a strong Italian nose, hair dark shaved short at the back of her head with a long blond fringe at the front. I was thinking of Gina Gershon in Bound and Lori Petty in Tank Girl. It was a fun comic to design for!
Lucky Patrons at the $5+ level get to see us talk about character boob design for the Patreon video XD
How do you go about designing your characters?
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Sunday Punch! Gunwallace says: I know I've done a theme for Tag Forester before, but since it got featured I made one for the current story (Originally Tag got a theme in Quackcast 464). There’s a mystery to be solved… There is always a mystery to be solved when you’re Tag Forester, detective. He’s out there on the mean streets, alone, looking for trouble to prevent trouble, taking his life in his hands and taking the world by the balls.
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Sunday Punch - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/feb/28/featured-comic-sunday-punch/
Featured music:
Sunday Punch - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Sunday_Punch/ - by Rickrudge, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/banes
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
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Episode 624 - Comic panel creation
Feb 27, 2023
HPKomic is a great guy, he's been on DD since almost the beginning. He alternates the Friday newsposts with me, he focusses on the intricacies of comic panels. This time he asked people to talk about their own processes though and I thought this would be a good topic for a Quackcast! So on this comic podcast we're finally talking directly about making comic pages, who would've thought?
Episode 610 - Beauty!
Nov 21, 2022
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so the saying goes but it's absolutely true. There is a layered subjectivity to it based on personal preference, the cultural standards of your community, the ethnic traits of you and your peers, prevailing global fashions in appearance, the dominant archetypes in the media and so on. All these things combine to form our personal subjective ideas of beauty. You can see this yourself if you look at paintings, statues, masks, frescoes and other artifacts that have been produced by all the diverse cultures on earth over thousands of years: there IS no standard, eternal, objective of beauty.
Episode 606 - Scary writing!
Oct 24, 2022
How do you write scary scenes for comics? Banes loves horror so he come up with this subject, plus we're coming up to Halloween! Listen to find out what we come up with. How do YOU write scary scenes though, what are your tips and tricks?
Episode 586 - Working with disability
Jun 6, 2022
How do you keep on with your creative output when something happens to you? When you lose function or are impaired in some way, how do you adapt or relearn so you can keep on as you were before? Maybe you can't and have to change to another medium that's a better fit for your abilities? Comic creator Bravo1102 once talked about how he moved from drawing to using action figures to make his comics partially because of his eyesight. My own eyesight has suddenly started to go bad and I'm having to adapt to that, and Tantz tells us how her deteriorating eyesight forced her to work digitally.
Episode 584 - Drawing gender
May 23, 2022
We start off with the idea of talking about art techniques, tips and tricks we've mastered and could help people with but the cast turned into a discussion about drawing male and female characters- also trans, androgynous, etc. There's an art to representing gender in imagery! It's super important to remember that the way we see gender in art is mainly culture based rather than an innate biological reaction and the perception of gender in art is different according to your cultural background. It's basically a visual language that everyone learns, but as an artist you have to learn to actually “speak” it, and that's not as straight forward as you think.
Episode 582 - Time travel
May 9, 2022
Let's go forward in time to the past so we can get back to the future and kill our grandfather and be our own ancestor while we step on a bug and change the course of evolution 200 million years in the future and doom the Morlocks to a date with Doctor Who, while Bill and Ted drive a Delorean in the Old West and save Fry's dog as it waits out the front of the Pizza place… Time travel is fun to talk about, but it's easy to mess up because paradoxes in plots pop up all over the place as timelines intersect and cross over and over, getting tangled and logically prevent events that have already happened from happening!
Episode 579 - 2022DD Awards begins!
Apr 18, 2022
The DD Awards have come around again and now it's time for you to join in! To start with there's the red carpet event! Simply draw your characters showing up to the awards ceremony, submit it to Tantz and get on board with the awards! There's a link bellow… The DD Awards are a fantastic community even that we've been running on the site for years and years. It's a great way to get more eyes on your comic and increase your community presence. All you have to do is join in, create comic pages on the awards theme featuring your characters in the various events and things and you're part of it. Like most awards ceremonies it's not really about who's best or most popular or whatever, it's about participation, making your work visible to people, raising your profile, and getting eyes on you! To that end the red carpet event is up first, get in on that and make a start with the awards!
