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7 Tips For Designing Comic Books

7 Tips For Designing Comic Books

Everyone loves comic books. It is not just children who love to read comics, but even grownups love them. If you are into photography or design, then an interesting challenge is to design a comic book. In the olden days, creating a comic book was a painful process as everything had to be done by hand.

Today, thanks to the availability of a variety of software, designing a comic book has become easy. Even kids can create a comic book easily. Comic Book Day is coming up soon. If you were thinking of designing a comic book, then we have seven handy tips for you. These tips will help you create a great comic book that everyone will love.

Comic Book Design Tips

1. Begin with an idea

The starting point of your comic book is the theme or idea. Put your idea down on paper. What is the comic book going to be about? What is the story? What is the message you want to convey? Who are the characters in the book? How will the illustrations be done? The answer to all these questions will help you crystallize your idea and give it shape. You can form a team with friends or partners to make your idea a reality. Brainstorming with others can help create a concrete shape for your comic.

2. Get the script ready

A comic book is not a set of color pictures. It is a visual story that is happening before the reader’s eyes. Therefore, it needs a script. You need to elaborate your story scene by scene. This is the first thing to do. Let your story have a good start, a proper build-up, and an effective climax. This is the time when you create your characters and also decide the setting of the story.

3. Get the layout ready

The essence of a comic book is its layout. The layout explains how many pictures you will have on each page and how many pages the book would have. At this stage, you should also decide what would be there in each picture. While creating pages or chapters, ensure that the basic elements of story-telling like suspense and dialog are addressed.

4. Start sketching

Now is the time to illustrate your comic book. You can first start with rough sketches, so you know what to draw. You can also decide the speech bubble contents in each picture. Once your rough sketches are ready, review them in your time. This will help you make improvements, so your comic book becomes perfect.

5. Create the illustrations

This is the key stage of your comic book design. It is the stage where you need to spend maximum time. If you are drawing by hand, the process is going to be painstaking. You can make use of software to create illustrations. There are plenty of websites and tools that help you create comic book-style images easily. You can create characters and just add them to the picture. Adding speech bubbles is also easy when you use the software.

You then need to add color to the comic pictures. The character’s skin color, the color of the dress, background colors, and any other design elements need to be decided. Remember, your objective is to create a visually attractive comic book that people will like and pick up. The font you will use for the text also needs to be decided. Choose a font that is comfortable to read and stands out.

6. Put it all together

Once the illustrations are done, it is time to put them all together. In the digital world we live in, you need to create an e-comic book. A PDF format can be downloaded, and it allows for images to be seen clearly. You can also use an online page where the comic book pages are displayed like a flipbook on-screen. Both these have their advantages and cons. Review them all before deciding.

7. Market your comic book

You need to popularize your comic book. Find a set of beta readers who will read your first draft and give you feedback. Collect reviews and recommendations from them and use them in your marketing campaign. Create marketing material like ads that you can place online. Use social media effectively to market your book, so people are aware of it. If you have an interesting story and attractive visuals, there is no reason your comic book will not be a hit. All the best for your comic book design!

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