Papercrafting your characters

This post was kindly submitted by Diana Stoneman.

Design a Papercraft Model

Interested in making an inexpensive and distinctive toy for your comic? In this tutorial, I'll show you how to make a 3D model into a downloadable papercraft toy for your readers to construct at home. We'll use Google Sketchup and Flattery, a plugin my talented husband made.

First some tips for model designing:

• Watch the video tutorials for Sketchup so you'll know your way around the program.
• Set Sketchup's template preferences to work in centimeters or inches, whichever you prefer. You'll need to pay attention to the actual size of your model as you build it.
• Convex shapes are easier to flatten. You will probably need separate cutouts for concave areas.
• Work with components to stay organized and also for easier start overs.

Got a model split into components and ready to go? Let's flatten it!

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Five Editing Tips

Here are five suggestions to help you to better proof-read your comics before they go live on your site.

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Friday Archive Dive: Ad Chains

This post was kindly submitted by Kel McDonald.

Most people in webcomics stick to Project Wonderful, which is good starting point. But there are so many ad companies out there, which can have a bigger pay out. This can be especially effective when you set up a chain of ad companies. Setting up a “chain” means when the first ad server can’t give you an ad for every page loaded, they offer to pull an ad from another ad company that you’re affiliated with. This is also called a “default.” – as in, “when we can’t serve an ad to your site, who would you like us to default to?” And, provided the second ad server you do business with offers a default option, you can chain to a third, and so on.

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Is incorporating right for you?

Dave Kellett passes the following along a little information on incorporating your webcomic.

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April To-Do List

Get ready for Spring with this handy list of things to accomplish for the month.

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