How to make money doing web comics

Whether you study illustration, graphic design, game art or fine art every art student doodles in their sketch book and many will make or create funny or interesting comic characters. Some students like to draw Manga characters, funny characters, superhero characters and many times we will fantasize about stories for these characters. Sometimes we take pencil and paper together or digital tablet and create a few frames and start to tell a story about our comic character and this is a start of any comic book or webcomic. Once we have a comic story idea and a few characters we can start sketching out our comic idea, whether by hand or digitally, but the question remains—how can we get our work to be seen, noticed and, hopefully, monetize it? Struggling art students, or recent graduates, are always looking for additional revenue streams of income whether their freelancing in their field of study or have a full-time job, and creating a webcomic is a viable option. We may have doubts that our comic is good enough and most artists are surprised once it’s published at how well their work is received by the comic reader fan base, especially if their stories are genuine and from the heart. Since the Internet is so ubiquitous, with many people making money by writing blogs or creating YouTube videos, it would only be natural for us to wonder if we can also make money creating webcomics and the answer is yes and no.

Step 1: Drawing the Comic: Supplies

The business of webcomics involves webcomic creators earning a living professionally through various revenue channels. Webcomic artists may sell merchandise based on their work, such as T-shirts and toys, or they may sell print versions or compilations of their webcomic. Many webcomic creators make use of online advertisement on their websites , and some have undergone product placement deals with larger companies. Crowdfunding through Kickstarter and Patreon is also a source of income for webcartoonists. Webcomics have been used by some cartoonists as a path towards syndication in newspapers ; however, out of the thousands of comics submitted to each syndicate every year, only a few are accepted. Since the early s, some webcartoonists have advocated for micropayments as a source of income, but micropayment systems have seen little success. Some artists start their webcomics without an intention to directly profit from it, instead publishing through the Internet for other reasons, such as getting feedback on their skills. Other artists start creating a webcomic with the intention to become a professional, but often don’t succeed in part because they «put the business before the art.

Making Money with Web Comics

As of , the vast majority of webcomic creators are unable to make a living off their work. The strategy of building a business around posting free comics online began in the s, when Eric Millikin created the first webcomic, Witches and Stitches for CompuServe in By the s, Millikin had moved to publishing comics on the then-new World Wide Web, but was homeless, living in a car, and working in an anatomy lab as an embalmer and dissectionist of human cadavers. In the year after the debut of Witches and Stitches , Joe Ekaitis began online publishing of his weekly furry comic strip T. Fox in Rabbit and Friends ; however, economic success was elusive. Professional webcomic creators use various types of business models in order to profit from their webcomics. Many webcomic artists have made a good living selling merchandise, including T-shirts, posters, and toys, in what John Allison has called the «T-shirt economy». A Vagrant has said that was a good year for her to get into webcomics, as she was able to make a living off of advertising and T-shirts within a year. Webcomic creator and TopatoCo employee David Malki stated that «part of that was just realizing that people like lots of things, not just T-shirts.

Here’s some information about the Finnish comics scene!

Web Culture. Read more. A lot of my childhood was swept up in comics. Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, and comics in that vein. Nowadays, though, a lot of great comics are being published on the web as webcomics. You might be interested in adding to the pool, but what if you want to do it full-time? This is mainly due to a marked increase in the quality of content, with some webcomics being both magnificently written and magnificently drawn Read More. Whatever your genre, whatever your niche, you will be able to find an audience as long as you write well and put yourself out there every day. So how do you make money from it? Keep reading to find out how most artists keep their bank accounts afloat with publishing Publish Your Own Free Digital Magazine Publish Your Own Free Digital Magazine This digital magazine publishing guide outlines everything you need to put together your own gorgeous online publication, from logos to layout to online publication at Issuu.

Method #1: Web Ads

That coffee tipping app thing?! Still very much learning about everything seems that you need loads of views to generate anything significant from ad revenue. I don’t make money off my work, but I know a few writers who get money from being «Premium» on Tapas. Another writer I know gets money from ad revenue on Wattpad. Although, I heard that Wattpad doesn’t pay well compared to Tapas. If you don’t have enough of a following to get noticed by these websites, perhaps make a Patreon page and see what happens. Right now, I don’t want to charge for my work, as that will hurt me when I decide to publish. For me, conventions.

Introduction: Making a Web Comic: Drawing the Comic

These can be dealt with but it’s a real pain in the rear! If I know I am going to use a digital font to letter the comics, I may skip this step. Most comics have themes, but considerably fewer deal with specific issues. Shanda or Daniel Gentry Jun 10,

Making Money with Web Comics

Give your readers a voice. When your drawing and the ink is still wet, do you roing sometimes its gets smudged by your pinkie? JD Jace Doxsie Apr 30, Already answered Not a question Bad question Other. It takes a lot of hard work and most of the time recognition won’t co,ics right away. This is why pencils are your friends. It should not be too big or too small. Kristofer Straub likens it to Sayre’s Third Law of Politics, which states «Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low. It would if I drew left to right.

Method #2: Merchandise Sales

Hello, friends. I’d like to make a few small updates to the information. Twelve years later, technology and my process have changed. That said, pen tablet technology has advanced quite a lot in 12 years, and I have upgraded much of my process to digital using a Surface Pro 4 tablet and Clip Studio Paint software.

I also recently obtained a used Wacom Cintiq which I am excited to add into my workflow soon. As time permits, I may add more info on my digital process or may create a new instructable entirely unless the topic is saturated Having the original for future use is superb if you want to sell originals.

Useful for gag and one-off strips, less useful for story-based comics few people will purchase an original page from a story, if the page makes no sense on its own, but gag strips tend to work. Good day, and welcome to the first of what I hope to be many tutorials I can help provide for those budding graphic artists and comic creators that want to learn how to make and share good-looking comics.

First off, I’d like to say that I wouldn’t be the obscure but capable webcomic creator I am if it weren’t for a whole slew of artists before me. Thank you, Jon, Jeff, Maritza and Gav. As always I must tip my hat to you and your dedication to the art. Second, anyone really interested in creating comics should pick up and read two or three of Scott McCloud’s books: Understanding ComicsReinventing Comicsand Making Comics.

All are available from Amazon. McCloud is very astute and has great suggestions on putting together a comic. If you read only two, you can omit «Reinventing Comics» — but really, you should read all. It is an excellent book and I highly recommend it. Anyway, this instructable will deal with the useful mechanics of webcomics production, in my opinion: how to sketch and ink your comic on paper. I plan a future instructable about how to make it into a nice-looking image for web — and possibly print — presentation.

Coming Soon! The process I use cribs parts from a dozen other webcomic processes, and of course doesn’t apply to work drawn entirely on the computer, say using a tablet. I do that also, and will create a separate instructable for my fully-digital production methods if someone would like to see one. So let’s get started! For this tutorial, I am going to draw a comic strip. Well, don’t act so surprised Did you use this instructable in your classroom? Add a Teacher Note to share how you incorporated it into your lesson.

I use Strathmore paper when preparing my images. I have a sketchbook I use to plan all of my comics, and the final images are drawn on Bristol Smooth paper, 9″x12″. The Bristol board really holds the ink. Note: some artists just us printer paper, and if this works for you, that’s fine. However I have comics drawn on printer paper and with sharpie markers that have noticeably not withstood the test of time over the past 8 years, while images made with the Strathmore paper and the pens noted below are still as clear as the day they were drawn.

I have a full compliment of artist’s pencils but most of my sketching is done. I erase the lines. Many artists use non-repro blue pencils so they don’t have to erase. I’ve tried this, too, but I don’t buy non-repro blue pencils because they’re expensive. There’s really no «official» color known as «non-repro blue» to my knowledge. Any hard-lead light-blue colored pencil does the same job, for much. Modern scanners and software are pretty good at ignoring the pale blue lineart regardless what instrument was used to draw.

You can also use light green or yellow. My eraser of choice is a white plastic Staedtler eraser. It does a great job lifting the pencil from the paper without removing any ink at all. For detail erasing I use a Pentel ClicEraser, it also uses the white plastic type of eraser material.

I know people who swear by kneaded erasers. Personally, I don’t like. Pink erasers are too rough on the paper and can cause the paper to fray, and then have trouble holding ink properly later on. My pens of choice are a set of Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph technical pens.

They’re anywhere from a little pricey to exorbitant depending on where you buy them and if they’re on sale Many webcomic artists prefer a nice set of disposable Pigma Micron pens or Staedtler Pigment Liner pens, which have archival-quality ink in them and so shouldn’t fade even after many years.

I started with these, and occasionally use them when I travel I don’t travel with the Rapidographs. For coloring by hand which I’m not covering here you have dozens of options. Colored pencils, watercolors, and markers seem to be the most popular choices, but this is really a personal decision. Try them all and pick what you like. I usually color digitally, which will be covered in an upcoming tutorial. Note: as I mentioned above, I’ve seen people use sharpie markers to do the artwork.

I’ve done this. Sharpies however are not archival quality ink, and do not stand up to the ravages of age. I also find that even on high-quality paper, the lines they leave behind look sloppy. If you want your images to last a long time and look crisp, use a pen that contains archival ink. They’re not much more expensive than sharpies, and they’ll look better.

I don’t use white-out or white liners to fix mistakes, because I can do that on the computer. When I work with all of my artist pencils, erasers fix mistakes. When I use charcoal, kneaded erasers are actually useful. When I use colored pencils I haven’t found anything good for that. These are much cleaner to work with, and require less erasing.

For lettering by hand, I highly recommend investing in an Ames lettering guide and looking up a few videos on how to use it, but I will add some info to this tutorial eventually. It’s the tool the pros use to keep their hand-lettering aligned.

The first step is to review the script for the comic, and start sketching the layout. Some comics are simple 4-panel presentations that never vary, and for those all you’re planning is the location of images and words within each panel. This is sometimes called «storyboarding. Some useful info on panel layout can be found at Peter Venables’ 22 Little Panels site, which contains information about Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work.

I just found this myself recently, so I have yet to start implementing all of these ideas in my comics. Another thing I do at this point is to sketch at least one good sketch of my «regular» characters who will appear in the strip. In this storyline their appearances change a little each time so I want to make sure I’m staying consistent. Also it helps to practice. I will also work out detailed sketches for the incidental characters who will appear in more than one strip, and who may at some point re-appear in the future.

When I’m done with the sketches I take an 18″ Wescott metal ruler with a cork backing, and measure out the panels for the comic onto my Bristol board with light pencil lines. Always pencil, in case you mess how to make money doing web comics.

You can’t really see it, but I had to erase 6 lines from this page before getting the layout right. In the next step I actually change the panel layout on-the-fly. This is why pencils are your friends. Some comic creators will draw their frames in ink immediately, but I can’t constrain myself at this step. I change things too. This actually will make it slightly harder for me to draw the comic, but I really need the space. I could split these up onto two pages, but I feel like I’m wasting too much paper doing.

So this is where I do things a little backwards from most comic artists. Because my comics tend to be a little heavy on dialog, I like to plan the placement of text first so that I am not forced later to cover any of the artwork with word balloons. I generally will hand-letter my comics, but sometimes if my handwriting is particularly bad I’ll replace it with a lettering font.

More on that in Part 2. In panel two, you can see I’ve sketched in some artwork. I wanted to make sure the text placement I chose would not obscure anything important, so I had to jump ahead a little to The key is, same with lettering, to keep the pencil lines as light as possible. You don’t want to create «dents» in the paper, since this makes it harder to correct lines that are wrong. Even if you can erase the line, the dent is left behind and the pen may get stuck in it.

Also if you opt to color your images with artists’ pencils, charcoal, or colored pencil, these media will skip over the dents leaving behind «ghost» lines of your original sketch. These can be dealt with but it’s a real pain in the rear!

Sketching for me goes in waves. I’ll re-create as close as I can the light sketches from my spiral-bound sketchbook to ensure the layout is correct.

Have I Made Any Money Off My Comics? — 100 Days of Making Comics — DAY 81

I started the project two years ago and in August a bunch of webcomics artists traveled to Finland for a joint two-week artist residency. The end result is a free PDF book. Spread it around and help anyone with a comics career! I Starting Out. II Monetizing.

Making Money with Webcomics

III Expanding. IV Keeping it. Please note: you cannot share or refresh the direct link to the guide — ot loads when clicked through from this article. Share monye link to this article to spread the word!