Friday Archive Dive: Typography and word balloons

Today's Archive Dive is a favorite guest post of mine. It's from May 30, when Josh Shaffer shared some of hisexpertise on typography.

Today's topic has been generously submitted by Josh Shaffer. who also shared his technique for creating word balloons using Photoshop with us a while back.

A lot of people make webcomics because they have a background and a love of drawing, but very few have any actual design background or experience. Normally this really wouldn’t matter, but it tends to make the most pronounced and noticeable impact when it comes to computer lettering.

Some cartoonist do letter by hand, and it’s a wonderful look that I wish I had the patience and capability to pull off.

But I don’t.

And by the looks of things, neither do most online cartoonists. When I look around I see that a vast vast majority of cartoonists choose to letter their comics digitally. And why not? It’s faster, cleaner and infinitely easier to edit.

Read the entire post and comment there.

Character Design Reference

Have you ever thought about building a clipbook of source material -- sketches, photos, other people's art -- that you would go back and study when it was time to develop a new character? It would be great to have one for characters -- and also one for nuances such as different ways to draw eyes and noses and body types and animals.

But, of course, you never did, did you? Me neither.

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Don't Look into the Camera

A while back, I posted about a pet peeve of mine -- drawing a character with a raised index finger when delivering the punchline (or an important plot point). For me, it represents a lazy approach to illustrating because there are so many other more creative gestures that could be used to make that panel work more effectively.

This is another one of those visual tropes.

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Banner Ad Hot Seat: Aquapunk and Thor's Thundershack

This is the second of a series of Hot Seat critiques of banner ads. These will take the same format of all of the Hot Seat critiques. I will kick off the discussion with some of my thoughts and then open the conversation up to the members.

Please check out this post about banner advertising to get an idea of my personal philosophy on banner advertising.

As always, links are in the headers.

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Holiday Archive Dive: The Walk Cycle

Happy Memorial Day, everyone. In case you're in front of the computer instead of grilling brats, here's a great tip from April 2011, to help you draw motion more believably. It's a discussion of the walk cycle.

So, we're standing at our booth at Emerald City Comic Con, and my boothmate, Dave Kellett, starts chuckling, having remembered a recent Evil Inc comic that made him laugh. Eager to find out what I'd done right, I pressed him, and he told me that it was this one.

"Huh?!" I said, "That one got ya, eh?"

"Not the gag," chortled Kellett. "I mean... who WALKS like that?!"

And when I looked at it again, I could see that I really had screwed up that character's walk cycle. I have him pushing up on a leg in equilibrium and his back leg is kicking backwards instead of forwards.

Of course, it was all in good fun, but I made myself a note to go back and spend a little time studying walk cycles.

Read the entire post and comment there.