I'm Afraid of Comicking.

[colorshy]

I've been wanting to make webcomics for a long, long time now, but for some reason I procrastinate to the extreme on doing it.

Back in the day, I actually did make a webcomic, but every page was done in a huge hurry. As the end result, it was a very poorly drawn, poorly written, and just poor in general.

I believe myself to be going through an art dilemma in my life right now. I'm currently a young college student, and my life is surrounded by changes. I get stressed easily. I'm also trying to figure out who I am and what I want to do with my life. I know what I want to do, and that's make art, not waste all of my precious time searching the net. But when it comes to art, I feel like I should concentrate my efforts on a few limited areas so that I can perfect what I do work on. (If I have too many options, I know for a fact that I get overwhelmed.) Also, I've been trying to establish my art style for a long time now, but it's difficult to do so when I love so many types of art.

I like anthro, anime, cartoony, realistic, macabre, surreal... I like it all.

And I'm also concerned with whether I should stick to more... I guess "fine art" or if I should go more into the comic side of things. I love comics. I enjoy making them. But I always feel like what I draw isn't good enough. I also really enjoy pen & ink, sketching, watercolor, and oil painting. So I'm torn between doing comics and making singular artworks.

The reason I'm so driven to make comics is because I love writing my own stories, and I especially love my cast of characters. I want to give them a huge gift... to be seen and admired by the readers. But I make excuses all of the time. My scanner is beneath my desk, and it's a pain in the butt to constantly have to crouch down there to scan anything. This is just plain lazy, right? Also, my house is small and disorganized. Another excuse. I'd work on my art desk in the front room but Mom is such a huge distraction. Besides, the TV is right there, and I like to listen to music when I draw.

Finally, I'm torn when it comes to my style. I mentioned it earlier, but I can't decide if I want to do something more serious or something more cartoony, lighthearted, and fun. I love dark stuff, but I also love fun stuff. I like each about equally. I don't usually combine them, and frankly I don't know how that'd turn out. And besides, in serious stuff I want my characters to look realistic... in lighthearted stuff not-so-much. The two styles conflict and I don't particularly care for the middle-grounds. (shrug)

Oh, and I have MULTIPLE very good ideas for stories. I feel like if I dedicate myself to one story, I immediate want to work another.

But yeah, please help me. This has been an issue area for years.

My Current Comic Ideas

Spoiler! :

#1 "Pandora." A normal young woman begins college, but finds that her mother has enrolled her in a school for the supernatural. This comic is about someone growing up and discovering who they are, and learning to accept that there are "strange things" out there in the real world that you have to deal with on your own. It's a fantasy/action/drama/romance.
#2 "Pop Crazy!" A town is slowly being consumed by fandom. Nurse Hazel and Doctor Nori team up to eliminate Edward Cullen rabid fangirls, violent paparazzi, and more. This one is comedy/drama.
#3 "Silent Hill Enmity." A Silent Hill fan comic. I won't go into detail, but it's very much in the SH2 spirit. This one is psychological horror and suspense.
#4 "Mother of the Moon." A suspense/drama/action/tragedy about a young girl that was made into a werewolf. She lives among wolves to avoid the town and the town's cult, but becomes conflicted when she realizes that she wants to live among humans again.

[Loverofpiggies]

A lot of these sound like my excuses for not exercising. (lol) But now I force myself to exercise and its really not as hard as I thought.

Honestly what you have to do is just get up and do it. Brainstorm all your ideas and eventually you'll come upon which idea you want to do best. I've had the issue before where I wanted to quit a webcomic and work on another, and even while I work on Gloomverse I have other ideas going on in my head anyway. The point is to put most of your focus on one idea. And the best thing is to just start. Whichever medium works best with the comic you're trying to convey, which is also a medium you like to do, then do that!

You got to tell yourself 'no excuses, I got to do this' and push yourself to start (or at least start major brainstorming on which idea you wish to convey, or think you can convey best).

[corruption]

Which style to draw? Why do people believe they have to conform to what people consider one style? Experiment and maybe even create you own type of drawing. Once you have the idea for a story, which you have more of, plan it out and go for it. You may suck at first, so I recommend a practise comic or two while you are sorting out things like which style you prefer drawing in and other details.

The only way you will sort out these problems is trial and error.

[forgotten_cake]

I've read comics that purposely switch to different styles and mediums, which makes for a pretty interesting read(YU+ME comes to mind). But if you want to stick to one style, first look at the type of story you most want to do--if it's more serious and involved, you may want to go for a more realistic style. Or not. It would be interesting to read a serious/dark comic done in a cartoon-y style... Buuut if you're really having trouble deciding, you could just go by the overall tone of the story and choose the style based on what would fit it best.

Like Loverofpiggies said, the most important thing is to just get up and do it. If you spend forever just dreaming up ideas, nothing will ever happen.

I used to have the issue of constantly wanting to start new comics while already working on others, and it resulted in starting like ten different comics that didn't live past 5 or so pages each, haha. Since focusing on one project and having planned it for a couple of years before drawing it, I don't seem to have that problem anymore.

[mockingbirdflyaway]

You may like it all. And you might like them all quite a bit.

But you can't like them all EQUALLY, and in the end, it doesn't really matter, because you CANNOT waste time worrying about your style or genre when you're still starting at an empty page and you have no experience to back you up.

When you have three or however many stories under your belt and you look back and think "Huh, these all ended up coming out as comedies, so the next one I'm going to write, I'm going to deliberately do a horror story".

THAT'S when you can choose your genre. When you have enough background to actually know how to write/draw the difference from your baseline style of storytelling.

Until then, you have to just suck it up, stop being a whining baby with excuses, and just WRITE and DRAW, because your body will default into a particular style that you're most comfortable writing - and you need to learn what your default is BEFORE you start trying to specifically craft something different from it.

Your first efforts will fall short. That's how things work. I cringe when I go back and look at the Animorphs/Star Trek/Babysitter's Club (I am NOT joking) cross over fanfic I wrote on my first foray into story-telling on ff.net. Actually, my first foray was an alternative ending to the Animorph books, but that was awful too. But then I hit on a project that HAD TO BE TOLD and I just went and wrote it. I never ended up finishing, but 26 chapters and a lot of work meant that the most comments I get on it say "Wow, your writing gets better with every chapter!"

My basic style tends to be character driven adventure or drama stories. I love sci-fi, I love romance, I love adventure fantasy I love those literary type books where the authors craft the language as well as the story.

But that's not what my body defaults to. I have a common touch to my writing and my stories err on the side of interpersonal conflicts with supernatural twists. No big baddies or world-ending apocalypses or blatantly fantastical worlds. .... that is, until I started my current comic project and decided to step outside my comfort zone and create a whole new world. But that's after I've done, oh, at least 10-15 projects in a variety of mediums, both original and fanfic.

You gotta find out what your default is.

[adrilahan]

I'm afraid of comicking too. I finally sat down, and forced myself to start trying, because I have some great stories that just don't want to come out of my fingers onto a keyboard in novel form. They want to be drawn, and be drawn they will!

For my writing style for my first project, I'm going with what I like. I'm a hard, gritty, military space opera kind of person. If it's sci-fi with a focus on the epic rather than the individual, and has a military focus, and doesn't rely on handwavium, it's going to appeal to me. I don't want it sweetness and light, to me the world isn't black and white, it's shades of grey, and it's a tough world. Stuff doesn't always happen for a reason, that's just rationalizing random chance, so no characters are going to have inherent script protection. Right now, I'm not sure whether my main character survives the final scene, just that he makes it that far. I'll find out when I write it.

I'm not trying for a specific art style, I'm already settling into a comfortable style of my own art-wise. I do character portraits, and horse pictures a lot, and they really do have a recognizable style that's definitely me. I've drawn on my upbringing as a Brit (very different art styles in Britain compared to America, France or Germany), my love of anime when I was younger, even some of the art styles of internet artists I admire, and I just kept drawing, like I always did. And what I've got is nothing short of me. I can draw a number of things, and they'll all have that same style. I couldn't tell you how my style differs from something else, but it's definitely me.

I can say that I plan to color fairly simply, actually more toward cell-shading, a decision influenced by expediency more than anything else. I take forever to color things if I don't force myself to simplify.

My biggest obstacles in my adventures into comicking are going to be my perfectionism, my procrastination, and my lack of familiarity with the form. Recipe for disaster right there. That's why any comic I make will never go live until I have every page finished. By the time that happens, it'll be a new experience for me to read them from the beginning.

My second project is already plotted out in rough draft. I actually wrote my draft for that before my current project was a midday nap dream. My avatar is actually the inspiration for the entire project. That style is what I'm aiming for, and that fox guy is my main character. It's straying away from the space opera, but staying very much in the gritty military end of the spectrum.

[Asj]

I think it's good to like a lot of different things. ^_^ (although sometimes I wish I could concentrate one one thing only - but I've never been interested in fine art art) Awhile ago, I felt kind of like what you've mentioned, where I would get all these story ideas and not stick with one thing. But in recent years, I haven't been getting as many ideas, and I want to work on the ones I never got to finish earlier. I think that's probably a good thing for me, and maybe it'll happen with you. Like if you keep doing all the things you feel like doing, and everything you can think of, maybe you'll find a few things you really want to do. I don't think you should try combining things, but just do whatever you feel like doing at the time. (Although I still procrastinate on doing those few story ideas I'd mentioned because I feel I'm not good enough. That's why I've been trying to practice certain things to get better, and plan on working on those ideas afterward.)
(edit: oh cool, you joined on my birthday)

[Apollo_Child]

Just do it.

[mitchellbravo]

Just do it.

and the Nike swoosh comes slapping across the forum.

[desideraht]

I was pretty scared of starting a comic too, because my projects almost always remain unfinished. But I know this is the ONE. This is the comic I'm going to finish! Just go for it!

[Twickitybix]

This sounds so much like me, I know how it feels.
At the moment, I'm making a character-based joke comic, writing several serious story-based comics and I'm writing songs which together tell a story. My ideas vary from very dark, scary stories to very silly jokes; so silly I'll probably never publish them.
Each story comes from a different part of myself, a different part of my personality, so I can't choose one over the others. I want to make all of my ideas into comics and so on, I only hope I have time, I only have 50 years! Trust me, you don’t want to waste the next 20 years on fear and doubt: you will regret it.

The question is: what are you going to do FIRST?

I decided to start with the simplest idea… actually it’s a lot more complicated than it was supposed to be but never mind, it’s something that I can do now, that’s what’s important. Don’t worry about it being perfect, just choose an idea, a simple story is best, and do it.

You didn’t really say what you meant by being afraid of making comics. If you want help with that then you will need to talk about your fears, explain why is your Mum putting you off and so on. Talking about this will help, but at the end of the day you will still have to face you fears and make that first comic.

I’m sure things will not be as bad as you expect them to be.

Twick.

[colorshy]

Yeah... you guys are right.

There's nothing else I can do but just do it.

[Icantdraw]

I don't draw for years...ran out of patience/goals to do it.
People with little to no patience like me can't draw at all, not because they lack skills (I believe anyone can draw if correctly exercised) but because their mind cannot stand such task. After all drawing is all about your mental state to believe and imagine things to be drawn, if you add mental disturbances like frustration and desire to fry your cat everytime you attempt a sketch, you'll override the stuff that's about to drop and puff...nada :p

Also there's the financial side of the webcomics, if you want to become a professional it means you're expecting to sell your comics and that can take a really, really, really long time...if ever.

Bascially after some time artists will question themselves if its worth frying their brains every days for the sake of some ingrate followers, then they quit :p

Anyone can start a webcomic...but very few finish.

[Durvin]

I used to have that same problem with getting into projects just in time to have another idea that needed working on immediately; the only way to stop that is to keep going on the main project and make notes about your next one, especially since experience shows you're going to have another great idea in a few weeks/months anyway. Make sure you pick your strongest project, the one best suited to your drawing style, and the one you're least likely to get sick of. I'd always been bothered by the way I could never draw the same thing multiple times and always have it look right, but then I got into webcomics and found out that if you're not going for hundred-percent realism, you can get away with some pretty stretchy characters, and backgrounds can be malleable as well.

Another thing that helped me out was this. I'd always been sketching and doodling and writing and so on, and I'd never really finished anything because I figured it wasn't like there was anything that could come of it. Then, one day, I was walking through a Barnes & Noble, and I saw a book by the guy I used to sit next to in Earth Science class in high school--Dash Shaw. The guy's been named one of indie comics' up-and-coming stars, and he's got books and series and all this stuff, and I remember back when we traded cartoons in the margins of our notes instead of paying attention. And what had I done with my life up to that point? I'd gotten a job at an office-supply store, and partially wrote a couple of novels. And that was it. I decided I had to make a little more out of my creative career, and I've been working towards it ever since.

And yes, I admit that finishing a novel, publishing a webcomic, and getting a few raises at the office-supply store aren't quite on the lines of getting reviews in Wired, but it's a start.

[karaokepriestess]

My solution is, less talking, more doing. What I would do in that situation is decide to do, say, five fine art pieces, twenty pages on each of those comic ideas, and see what I like best in the end. I'm sure you'll have learned a lot about what you like doing best by the end of it.

(and then show me the silent hill fan comic, because I love silent hill xD)