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Monday, July 15, 2013 at 9:30AM Today's the last of the Hitch It or Ditch It Hot Seats. Same rules as always. I'll lool at your webcomic and point out one thing I think is strong and another I think could use work. Then the members discuss.
Saturday, July 13, 2013 at 5:00AM Today's dive into the deeper archive of Webcomics.com takes us to July 2010, when I posted a tutorial on body proportions.
Drawing a human body in the right proportions is an incredibly challenging pursuit. Even is your style is more cartoon that comic book, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with proper proportions. The more you understand about how the body is built, the better you'll be able to break the rules and design characters that distort these proportions for all the right reasons.
I think the best guide for figure drawing is Andrew Loomis' "Figure Drawing for All It's Worth." They're pretty difficult to find these days, but most of what I'm going to talk about is taken from that guide.
Please keep in mind that the following can be applied to "standard" figure drawing. If you're drawing superheroes, for example, many of these measurements will be exaggerated.
Friday, July 12, 2013 at 9:07AM Today's Archive Dive comes from July 2012, when we discussed thinking about buyers in terms of tiers.
There are a ton of ways to mentally split up your audience. The most common method I have heard is to split in "demographics". How many of your audience is how old? What is their marital status? What do they spend their money on? This is a great way to keep track of your audience and how well you are doing one year to the next. Unfortunately I think it is most helpful to people who sell a large volume of material and have a large audience.
For small timers and minor leaguers (like me), it's not all that helpful. My customer base isn't large enough to notice a whole lot in terms of demographics. Instead I have come up with a system to measure if my success is growing or if my business has a chance. I split my customers into 3 tiers and I split their spending habits into 5 categories...
Thursday, July 11, 2013 at 12:24PM This post was generously submitted by member JJ Sandee.
This guide is not meant to 'sell' anyone on using Comic Easel. This is meant a guide to easily installing it within any theme thus allowing more freedom in the look of your site.
For this reason I'm going to install Cokmic Easel and use the WordPress default theme to display comics. I'll attempt to be as verbose as possible in installing it and what code goes where. For this guide I do assume you have some basic working knowledge of WordPress in using the backend and installing plugins.
To begin with I have a working copy of WordPress with the Comic Easel plugin installed. That's all I'll be working with in this guide.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013 at 12:11PM A little backstory. My experience with finding a Web host started with GeoCities (now Yahoo), and progressed to Keenspace, Keenspot, Blank Label Comics (which was hosted by a wonderful guy we met through Howard Taylor), and finally, Dumbrella Hosting. And the Content Management System (CMS) had always come as part of the package. (Kris Straub coded the BLC CMS, which I'm still quite fond of.) So when Dumbrella announced they were closing down, I was faced with solving both of these issues independently for the first time in 13 years.
I have more grey hair than I did thirty days ago.
On the bright side... holy moley, do I ever have some new source material for this site that an be filed under "I make mistakes so you don't have to!"
So... here's what I'm learning. WordPress is an overwlemingly popular CMS for webcomics. And this is good because you can access an astounding number of helpful plug-ins for your site through WordPress. But -- beyond the "famous five-minute install" (mine took about eight hours, but that had waaaay more to do with my choice od Amazon Web Services for hosting), things get hairy fast.
With that in mind, here are TEN TIPS FOR THE WORDPRESS NEWB...
