video

This is presentation/set of talks I’d given several times over the years in different forms. As a series of classes, shortened for talks at comics festivals, and this playlist was created for student patrons on Patreon when I still had one active. It’s designed to encapsulate all the fundamentals of […]

Snakes Ladders & Closure: The Mechanics of Comics Art

Lets start at the beginning! I detailed doing thumbs here, penciling here, layout and flow here. But there are so many ways to make comics, you can make your own process as you go if you like, or customize those of your roll models to suit you. Never feel obligated […]

My Comics Processes!

This post features a short film and some bonus material by Redglass Pictures, staring the writer George Saunders, known for his short stories, essays, novellas and children’s books. In the documentary he reveals the pitfalls of bad storytelling and explains the openness and generosity he thinks is required to breath life into […]

George Saunders On Story

On the site here I’m exploiting the surplus of material out there about writing for film and books because at their core, stories are stories! Studying how writers tell them in other mediums is one of the key ways I learned about how to write my own. And being a related […]

Write A Short Anything…

Ok, so I think the last two posts on story cover Genre. Genre is like the style of house your want your story to live in. So what goes in the first room of your story? In your story, there are more than just things happening. There are the people they are happening […]

Words of advice on Character

This episode of my podcast where I take a question from Andrew J. Hawthorn, who asked about “Narrative techniques or figurative tricks you can only do in comics” This episode of my podcast where I take a question from Andrew J. Hawthorn, who asked about “Narrative techniques or figurative tricks […]

Like moving pictures, but not

In my post “Like moving pictures, but not” I specifically talk about some of the ways Sequential Art and Cinema are different; How there are things comics can do that are completely unique to it. That said there are many ways in which they are similar and certainly a lot […]

Visual Storytelling in Cinema

Laying down the master lines! I will have a more formal content to post here including notes and tips on Penciling later, but for now I wanted to post at least this, a playlist of YouTube posts of my penciling, in both pencil and with pens as well. The main […]

Penciling!

The Pocket Brush is one of my favorite tools, I highly recommend it to any student. It’s a true brush, made with synthetic hairs that keep a good point for a long time. I’ve embedded a playlist of clips, including an intro and some basic instructions. More to come, and […]

Inking with a Brush

A short tool tip for prossesing scanned art! It’s actually a good thing I think, to not try to get too much contrast with the presets when you scan, I tweak mine a bit but I use colour, and scan the art for the widest range of information. That leaves […]

Balancing with histograms

Blue lines are reproductions of our pencils or even thumbnails, printed, usually with a bubble jet printer, onto fresh sheets of Bristol. Using them can replace using a light table or vellum to transfer the art as was done in back in the day, and it also allows a few […]

Making your own ‘Blue Lines’

For some of my own work, most of it really, I don’t use digital lettering. Not the way demonstrated in my last post on this topic. I DO often shape my balloons the same way, using the expand selection trick after scanning hand-lettered text. But despite a fondness for the LOOK of […]

Analog lettering & Photoshop?

Pixelled words to go with your pictures! Lettering can be a deceptively big topic. I’ll cover it in a few posts, rather than try to do it all in one. This post is going to focus on the way I use computers to letter, and the industry standard more or […]

Digital aided Lettering!

The Ames guide is a classic comic’s tool. Also used for other forms  of calligraphy, from drafting to decorative, it’s a simple variable ruling guide to render lines for lettering. I’ve made a simple short video to watch here, and you can read the printed instructions most of them come with at the bottom […]

How to use an Ames Guide

This is a short little clip, covering something that many young cartoonists are amazed to hear you can do – if you mess up or want to change a panel or even a detail of a panel on paper, it’s possible to simply cut it out and paste in a […]

Old school page patching