Happy holidays! I have here a free desktop wallpaper for you to download – fit for the season.
Now, full disclosure, my Fan Club peeps got the first download. (They also get a ton of other exclusive wallpaper downloads as thanks for their pledges.) This one in particular, though, I went, “This is too cute – everyone should have it!”
So here’s the link to download it from my Ko-Fi shop…
For 2024, I want to offer monthly freebies to folks much like this offering. These freebies would include phone wallpapers and hi-res coloring pages. If you would like to get freebies next year, sign up for the email newsletter! The freebies will be shared there.
To get exclusive phone and desktop wallpapers (and early access to my webcomics to boot!), be sure to pledge on Ko-Fi and become a Fan Club member! If Ko-Fi isn’t your speed, you can pledge directly through my Fan Club Page.
Oh! You can also watch how I drew this wallpaper by checking out two videos: This one shows the pencils and inks while I talk about my Inktober social media experiment…
And here is an archived live stream where I show the coloring process!
That’s all for now. Happy Holidays, and I’ll see you in 2024!
We’re in the FINAL hours of The Legend of Jamie Roberts, volume 1 on KickStarter.
If you haven’t heard:
The Legend is the story of Jamie Roberts and their two best friends treasure-hunting with a stolen map in a land full of magic.
The story is a long-running webcomic project, but now…
We’re getting chapters 1 through 4 (plus bonus material) in one book.
The KickStarter launched to get funding so the book can go to print.
We reached our initial goal! And now we’re SO CLOSE to our next stretch goal!
Interested in getting the book? Back it soon – the campaign ENDS MARCH 27 – that’s THIS SATURDAY.
Rewards for backers include, but are not limited to:
Books!
PDFs!
Stickers!
Campaign-exclusive minicomics!
And more!
If we reach 50 backers, I’ll add new bonus material to the book: sketched versions of Chapter 5’s first 3 to 4 pages. Will you be our 50th? Or even our 51st?!
Broke? Share this post, or the campaign link (tinyurl.com/jamie-v1) FAR AND WIDE!
In today’s lesson of Writing for Comics 101, let’s talk about making pages you can ACTUALLY read.
How do we do that? By not packing the pages with an obscene amount of dialogue.
Or at least, if you HAVE to keep so much dialogue, how to pace it out so it’s not a word brick.
This technique is something discussed in more detail in Making Comics by Scott McCloud, so what I’ll do for today’s post is share my mistakes so you can learn from them.
Let’s take a look at this page from Seeing Him, written by Kia Crawford and drawn by me:
To be honest, there’s a way to get the information across that we need, without using a fuck-ton of dialogue.
We could:
split this between two pages,
condense the banter,
condense the backstory drop,
change the page layout,
change the balloon layout,
or any combination of these.
At least past me had the sense to split the dialogue into separate balloons. That way the page felt, at the time, a little less like a word brick.
This is me spit-balling some ideas right now on how to fix this page of Seeing Him: we could change the camera focus in the second and third panels, to cut away to framed photos on the walls. Those photos could showcase the history of the venue. With that edit, we can split the dialogue up some more, re-frame where the speech balloons sit, and make the page feel like less of a collection of talking heads.
Compare this page to The Legend of Jamie Roberts, page 65, written and drawn by me.
Here, I let the space breathe and tell the story for me, without so many words.
Whether you can draw or not, comics are a visual medium. Let the environment and scenery describe for you what words could not.
If you have questions, or need feedback, let me know in the comments. I’m happy to help.