Webcomics are deceptively hard things to make. I'll say that right out loud. Unless you're a decent artist with plenty of practise, they won't come out that well. You need to have a good knowledge of your program, a good drawing hand and some very good equipment. You may think I'm being a little melodramatic, but believe me, it is harder than it looks. Take a look at our comics page. The one on the very bottom - that's right, the astoundingly crude one. That was my very first webcomic. I went into that blind. No layout done, badly drawn, no idea of how to use the program. Looks pretty awful, right?
The second comic was done after spending a lot of time getting advice on the Penny Arcade forum (click the link with the hard drinking divx drive). Even still it isn't close to perfect. Half of that is my mediocre skill in art (which is getting better with practise), and the other half is my growing knowledge of the program.
I'm really not the person to emulate, but here's what I use:
Some pretty weak-ass equipment, huh?
I start by dividing up the space I want to draw in. I usually go with an 11 inch by 4 inch block divided equally with 1/8 inch partitions/borders on each side. Then I carefully (using the ruler) black the outline of my frames. This is so that I don't accidentally erase them.
Then I do a small layout sketch in the unused space. This just gives me an idea of where I want my words/characters/objects.
Finally I carefully sketch my characers and ink them in. After everything is to my satisfaction (and all the lines are connected. It's really hard to have to paint by hand all the little bits that end up filling the whole bloody screen when you drop in the colour).
Once that is done, it's time to carefully cut out the comic and scan it. I scan it in at 300 dpi, then put it at a reduction of 1:6 to keep it manageable. Then I put up the brightness nice and high to get a bright white background (nothing gets whites their whitest!), and raise the contrast to get nice sharp lines. It looks like shit at first, but remember you're going to reduce it. I put in the text using the text tool, put it where I want it and then draw a line from the character to the text. I haven't quite figured text bubbles out yet, so bear with me.
That having done, I lower the RGB tolerance on the filler tool, then drop in the colours I want. I rarely have any consistency in my colours, but it still looks alright, I think.
Then it's time to reduce the image to make it nice and sharp and manageable. I like to put it at about 700 pixels across, using the button to keep it all in proportion. Then I save it as a .jpg or... there's another format that keeps file sizes down, but I can't remember it at the moment, but it's very useful.
Anyway, it's just a simple matter of uploading the file and putting it in the coding.
And that's the birth of an RoW comic.
