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Copyrighted characters

2009-06-10T07:55:52Z

I see that some people posted some copyrighted characters, the Flintstones and Winnie the Pooh. I’d keep to the characters in the comic strip and leave already copyrighted characters out of it.

warnings related to comics

2010-08-06T03:39:51Z

* Take frequent breaks. Hunching over a table or drawing board for hours at a time can hurt your neck and back.
* Make sure that your light source is good. If you want to see what you are doing, you need to have your light coming from a convenient angle: If you are right-handed, you need to have your light on your left side. If your are left-handed, you need your light on your right side. This is because if you have you light source on the wrong side, your hand will block the light and cast shadows over your paper.
* Careful not to make smudges when drawing. One technique is to use another paper under your hand to keep skin’s natural oily residue off your work.
* Eat. But afterward, wash your hands prior to sitting down to your work again. Be sure your hands are spotless and dry.
* Some people look down on the use of Comic Sans as it is a common font. You might try to pick out another font just for your comic that fits it well, especially if you are targeting a large audience.
* To avoid smudging any of your pictures drawn in pencil or ink, turn the paper as you draw and check your hands for graphite or ink so you don’t leave fingerprints on the paper
* Make sure your desk is clear of glue or anything sticky before you draw to avoid damage to your paper.
* Do not use sharpie or any permanent marker to avoid the ink bleeding through.
* DO NOT keep paper out to avoid little brother or sister ruining your comic.
* Do not copy from other works of other cartoonists.
* DO NOT PRESS HARD WHILE SKETCHING.
* Do not copy people’s stories, be original

Tips related to comics

2010-08-06T03:39:14Z

#Make sure your comic is easy to read. The readers should know what is happening in each panel and what panel comes next without you having to explain it to them. Try giving your comic to a friend to read. Don’t tell them what the story is. When they finish reading, ask them about it. See if they had any problems following the story and if there are places you can improve it.
# Think about how using different kinds of panels in different places affects your story. Do you want to show a man driving to work in ten panels or one? Do you want the big surprise in your story to come at the start of a page, at the end of one, or after the reader turns a page? Do you want to start your story with a close-up of your main character, a scene of her room, or a big panel showing the city she lives in? There are no right or wrong answers, only what works best for your story.
# Not every panel needs words. Sometimes you can say more by using just pictures. If you draw a man falling down the stairs, you don’t need to have him saying “Oh, I’m falling down the stairs!” for your reader to know what’s going on.
# Try to set up a dynamic flow by planning your action and the direction characters are moving, looking, etc. to help direct your reader to the next place you want them to read. In other words, the last panel of the left-hand page might show your character looking up toward the first panel of the right-hand page, cuing your reader to go there next.
# Some people leave their comics in pencil form. Others go over the lines with inks, color them, or finish them in different ways.
# Lined or ruled paper is good for making your thumbnails, and white printer paper is good for final drafts of comic books.
# color final draft with colored pencils because markers will bleed through and crayons will make your papers stick together
# Different colors can also add to the mood.(i.e. bold black could add emphasis, and that same black used lightly could add mystery to a panel). Reds through greens are considered “warm” colors and blues through indigo are considered “cool” colors. These colors usually seem to “pop” off the page when put together.
# When drawing a comic, you could try to draw from your imagination.
# Using references for things you’re not sure of.
# Be creative.
# Use characters from all over—male, female, animal etc.
# When drawing your comic book you don’t need to make the art look like something from Superman or Sandman. Feel free to come up with your own style of drawing, your characters can be complex or simply drawn, as long as you like the way your art looks when you finished.

How to Make a Comic Book

2010-08-06T03:34:33Z

Choose a concept. Comics don’t have to be funny or about superheroes. It can be anything you want. Just about any story - long or short, happy or sad, silly or kind of serious - can be told in comic form.

Write your stories and make thumbnails for it. This doesn’t need to be a full script based on what you’ve written. Thumbnails are small, sketchy versions of each page. Use the thumbnails for your “plot breakdown” - decide how much of the story you will tell on each page and in each panel. Think about how to compose each panel and how to make your point to the reader. Don’t be afraid to try lots of different thumbnails, organizing your story in different ways. Since they’re small and sketchy, you won’t have to spend as much time on them as you would a fully drawn page.

# Practice drawing the characters, locations, and objects that will be in your story. The pros call these “model sheets.” The more you practice, the more consistent the drawings will be, making it easier for your reader to “read” your artwork. Making sure you know how each character looks from all angles will help your readers identify them, even if there’s a lot of action around them on your pages.
# 4
Look at the flow of the story in your final thumbnails and place the text in each panel. This includes dialogue, thoughts, narration, and sound effects. You may want to write this out in a script.
# 5
Draw the panel borders for your final pages. Use your final thumbnails as a guide. This can be loose at this stage, as you begin to place your final artwork in the space of the page. You may decide something from the thumbnail needs to be slightly larger, or smaller, or be emphasized more or less. This is the time to make those last second decisions.

Lightly write in the lettering. You may be tempted to start drawing first, but you need to make sure there’s room for your text boxes and word or thought balloons. Planning the placement of your copy now will save you many headaches later.

Sketch in the drawings. Make sure that everything in each panel is clear and works the way you want it to. Are drawings crowding the lettering so it’s smushed into one corner and hard to read? Is a word balloon covering an important detail in your artwork? Is everything clear and easy to understand? This is called “penciling.” Try to use a sharpened pencil so people can read your comic. Maybe a mechanical pencil would be good. Some artists use non-repro blue pencils to rough in their characters and panel designs. The reason is that this very light blue pencil is invisible to photocopiers and black and white printing processes, so there’s no need to erase them later. Then you can refine the artwork with your pencil. Work light - any lines that overlap your ink work will show in the final comic pages.

Finish up your pencils. Add details to the characters, objects, and backgrounds.

Ink your finished pages if desired. Some artists just leave the work in pencils (“Herobear and the Kid” is one example). Most comics, however, are inked over the finished pencils. Use whatever you feel most comfortable with - or consider handing the pages off to someone else to be inked (like the big companies do). Using Penstix, Rapidograph, or quills, brushes and India ink will bring life to the work. Pay close attention to line weight - generally, outside or defining lines are thicker, while details like facial lines and fabric wrinkles are lighter and more delicate. Ink in the lines of the borders.

Set your type or ink your letters in. Lettering is extremely important - it tells half of your story, while the pictures tell the other half. Hand lettering can be time consuming and difficult, but it looks superb when done by a talented calligrapher. Use pencil to rough in your letters - nothing looks worse than running out of room in a word balloon. Or consider using Word or something similar, and a font like Comic Sans to make your letters perfect and legible. Don’t forget to spell check!!

Continue doing this with every page until the comic is finished.

Using Comic Life to Facilitate Student Participation

2010-08-06T03:28:04Z

Comic Life to facilitate student participation in assignments that traditionally would have been written assignments with little to no imagery included. The book report is a classic example of how Comic Life can breath new life into an old assignment. Often dreaded by students (including myself), the book report is a staple of the classroom for several reasons. First, it provides a way to evaluate whether or not a student has read the assigned material. It also allows a student to show how they synthesize and analyze information contained in written material. Depending on the course requiring the report, this may include character and plot analysis, thematic content, purpose, story development, historical reference, and personal evaluation or judgment.

The book reports we often see in classes are, well, boring. Comic Life can help students create reports that are interesting to themselves and the class - reports that are fun to create and share. The paneled interface of a comic lends itself to breaking larger concepts into smaller, easily digested ideas that can be strung together in a coherent and entertaining way. Creating the imagery used in the comic can draw a student into the story or character in a way that a written report simply can’t.

Use Comic Life to help break down complex ideas and to create entertaining content for material that can sometimes be dull. Here are some assignment ideas that lend themselves to the use of Comic Life:

* Timelines (history, events, sequences)
* Historical figures (history of, life of)
* Instructions (step by step, details, illustrations, easy to follow)
* Dialogue punctuation
* Character analysis
* Plot analysis
* Storytelling
* Pre-Writing Tool
* Post-Reading Tool
* Teaching Onomatopoeias

Why Comics in the Classroom?

2010-08-06T03:26:59Z

For the pre-reader, a comic can be purely graphical in nature and help provide practice with sequencing as well as concrete to abstract transitions using illustrations instead of written words. The written component of a comic can be introduced when the early readers are ready to connect words with images. Comics can help early readers or readers with language acquisition problems by providing visual clues to the context of the narrative.

For more advanced readers, comics can contain all the complexity of ‘normal’ written material which the student must decode and comprehend, such as puns, alliteration, metaphors, symbolism, point of view, context, inference, and narrative structures. A comic can also be a stepping-stone to more complex and traditional written work. A single pane in a comic can represent paragraphs worth of written material in a manner that is enjoyable and effective for the early or challenged reader.

How to Make a Comic Strip

2010-08-06T03:21:18Z

Get a piece of paper and think about who or what your cartoon is going to be about (it could be you). When you have figured that out, you may want to write that as the title of your cartoon. Perhaps your main character is going to be an animal.

Draw a box with the props, setting, characters etc. of the story. If you want your characters to talk, draw a circle with a curved triangle pointing out of the circle, directed to the character that is talking. If you want them to be thinking, draw two or three little clouds coming from them with the last (top) cloud being large enough for what you are writing. An even better method is to write the text that will be in the thought bubble or speech box before drawing the box or bubble itself. This way, there is no way you can make the bubble too small.

You may need to use more boxes called panels to tell your story/cartoon. Cartoons are usually funny, so try to make your cartoon have at least one joke.

Do adult TV cartoons, like the Simpsons, undermine cultural values?

2010-08-06T03:19:46Z

Adult TV cartoons like the Simpsons undermine cultural values because they perpetuate stereotypes. The series portrays a typical macho man who thinks he can get away with all sorts of dishonesty and then successfully cons his female partner into believing it’s all right. While this may reflect life surely it is not something to boast about.

There is a certain attraction in the vulgarity of the characters in the stories and they are funny, however, constant repetition helps viewers to learn that this sort of behavior is acceptable. Surely the fact that it has got through censors and is aired on public TV is proof of acceptance that ‘authority’ has approved the material.

The episodes are not viewed only by adults but by children also and it raises the question, how do children differentiate between the fantasy of the program and what they are being taught about good manners and consideration. In fact, it is worth wondering if adults can separate the two and series such as this give permission for certain types of behavior.

Cartoons are a clever way of making a point. They are unrealistic at one level, as in Tom and Jerry cartoons, but the visual images are powerful and as so much of understanding, recognition and meaning is transmitted by body language and gestures, they have impact.

Because they make us laugh it eases the feeling and knowledge that they are not enlightening.

While there are times when we are tired and we need some mindless entertainment, cartoons like this offer relaxation. Here there is a danger because it is easy to become focused on something which is blandly attractive and a constant diet of nothing rewarding undermines us.

It’s easy to sound negative and critical and holier than thou about programs like this and while there is space and need for light material, a coarse, vulgar little cartoon character is not a good role model for anyone.

But then, it is worth considering what cultural values are we trying to protect? Each of us has to work out for ourselves where we fit into our society and our society dictates what is the correct way to behave and live. At one level there are some unwritten, but strict, acceptable modes of being and is it that the cartoon character has the opportunity to challenge these mores? Is the very fact that they point up the ridiculousness of some devoutly held beliefs about behavior which makes them attractive or something else?

How can a cartoon be made on a computer for free?

2010-08-06T03:17:38Z

First, you’ll need a program to draw. For this, since you ask it for free, I suggest Gimp. It is free and works fine. Since you also want something animated, I can also suggest Adobe Flash (but it isn’t free and actually very expensive if you are using for hobby). If you want animations, you might also try 3-D desinging programs like Blender (they can be used to record movies with desings). Other than that, search around the web to find a program that can create animations( and you might check out animated gif makers)

How Can I Become a Cartoonist?

2010-08-06T03:16:15Z

The first thing you want to think about is you want to, you want to know who was there before you. And you want to know who the greats were, and whether you choose to emulate their style or not, you need to know what their style was. And, and some of the ones that come into mind, some of the better ones were way back and Tex Avery who was like the predecessor to both Disney and Warner Brothers. And then some of the Warner Brothers greats like Chuck Jones, all the Hanna Barbera guys were pretty good. Disney, Walt Disney got his stable together and they, they did some amazing things. But the Warner Brothers style is kind of the classic beginning place. Where everybody seems to expand out from. There’s one prime example of a guy that has taken the style and really done some amazing things with it is John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame. And he’s gone on to do some other projects with other people. You get on cartoon network and you will find a million different styles. The main thing is to just to educate yourself on the history before you create your style. You could study other cartoonist’s approach to exaggeration. Anthropomorphization, which is a big word basically to give human traits to animals. A lot of these characters that they came up with were animals. But they gave them a human personality. But to do that they would exaggerate the features and morph these animals into people-like figures that had emotions and feelings like the people. Other thing is to remember a cartoonist is an actor. So, when you start drawing that image that you’re putting on the paper will actually act out a script that you either create or that you have to follow. So, that image that you’re drawing or that character has to be able to portray emotions, which the only way to get that is to draw, draw and draw some more until you get better and better at the control of your line and personality of whatever character you’re working from. Other than that I don’t know what else I can tell you. Study, basically you just study what’s already out there and what’s been before you. Practice like crazy until you get very good at portraying emotions or physical action in a 2D or 3D character. And, and that’s a, that’s a great place to start.”