So. I Spent More Than A Week On Drawing This. I Am Really Proud Of Being Able To Draw This. It's Kinda

How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist

Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.

Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!

This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)

So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.

I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.

I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.

Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.

Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!

This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.

But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)

I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.

My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!

Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!

panels that look like this in scroll format...

can look like this in print!

because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.

Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!

Enjoy!

Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!

I was reading One Piece fanfiction as you do after catching up with One Piece only to have ao3 go down for maintenance mid fanfiction.....This is what I get for reading all of currently released One Piece in two months.

Goddess Madoka. A little old, but I still love it!

Shitty Madoka doodles made while waiting for a college project to render.

I am beyond hyped for the movie! Even if it sucks I'm probably gonna have a good time just because I've waited so long for it. The people going wild for it on soical media has provided plenty of entertainment value already.

Seeing someone say that the FNAF movie is gonna suck because William Afton isn't hot has been a rather surreal experience.

Me and my friend were reminiscing about how long we’ve known each other and how long we’ve known about fnaf

Like we’ve been playing fnaf games on the day they release together since pizzeria simulator. Even though I’m going to be halfway across the country I’m still gonna come down to his to play help wanted 2 on release. It’s a ritual at this point.

There have been highs (help wanted, absolutely having our minds blown, making funny inside jokes and theorising about lore)

And there have been lows (hey did you know that I didn’t like security breach, watching our hype slowly fade away as we realised what was happening, slowly getting more irritated and frustrated, having to tell each other that ‘oh maybe we were just overhyped it’s not that bad’, the game crashing and losing all our progress so many times that we had to call it quits and he went home)

And I’m very much looking forward to the future of this franchise, even if I don’t pay much attention to the main games much (I’ll play ruin, I probably won’t keep up with the lore unless it’s good, basically my involvement with the main games depends on ruin, i don’t count help wanted or help wanted 2 as main games tbh), the movie and help wanted 2 have really reinvigorated me. Before the trailers I had lost all hope, but now a spark has been set, and I can’t wait for the future.

guess who got screwed over by student finance! and my job! at the same time! The TL:DR is, all the money i was supposed to get for groceries I am now not getting, my job closed early so I’m not able to save up for them, and while I’m applying for places I have no clue if I’ll even be hired. So i’m advertising my commissions and running a go fund me! DM me here (or on my art account @eyelessbunny​) if you wanna commission me directly, or send me a reciept of your donation and we’ll work it out from there! some examples of my work:

I think I get the appeal of crack ships now

Thank you to @star-dee for enabling me

Code: YOU CANT KILL AN IDEA

You get the Silas Birchtree page that’s included in the exclusive B&N Book of Bill, which could help solve the string of riddles in the thisisnotawebsitedotcom.com, which could possibly pertain to the question “what defeated Silas Birchtree?”

Even if it doesn’t work, still pretty cool, right??

Messed around with some filters. Ended up with something I was happier with.

Welcome to the mind f**k!

Mind Brand by MARETU

I don't even go here but forget Tesla this is Joel's symbol to me

So I’ve been hearing some people want Joel’s winner symbol to be a car. Now this leads to a bigger question: what kind of car should it be? I’m proposing the car that went to space in the 9th Fast and Furious movie: