Quick and Easy Webcomic

This is a tutorial on how to slap together a webcomic using very little artistic talent. This technique relies entirely on using digital photos and a graphics editor. This particular comic was put together in about an hour. It actually took longer to write the instructions.

You'll need:
- some digital photos
- a graphics editor (I use GIMP)
- a Blogger account

Step 1 Source Material

Typically you'll have a background image and some characters. In this case, the background is a magnolia tree near my house and the characters are a plastic lobster ( for reasons that are unlikely to become clear at this point ). The lobster image was cleaned up and its background was erased.

Comments

[PKM]

Hm... I don't think the world needs more terrible webcomics using the same image for all four frames (it's only funny when Jeph does it because it's more ironic than rain at Alanis Morissette's wedding), but the 60% opaque speech bubbles and post-dating blogspot stuff are both techniques I hadn't come across before. Hopefully people can use your ideas in creating work of some creative merit...

[degroof]

Well, using identical frames would be the bare minimum. It's easy to expand on that using the same technique. For example, turning on and off layers and throwing in some scaling will allow you to vary the frames relatively easily. I did this for this one and this one.

Besides, some of the best comics are stylistically primitive. Two of my favorites are xkcd which uses stick figures and dinosaur comics which uses the same drawings over and over. On the other end of the spectrum is something like For Better or For Worse, which is well-drawn but is depressingly poorly-written. Of course, the best of both worlds would be Calvin and Hobbes but most of us don't have anything near that kind of talent.

And I'm definitely aware that the Tree Lobsters comic is not even in the same league as any of the comics I mentioned. I created it as a joke and it turned out to be popular enough within a small group of readers that I'm keeping it alive for now.

I do agree, though, that this technique would make it easy to make a large number of terrible webcomics. They don't have to be terrible but there's certainly nothing to prevent it. :-)

[Chicken2209]

I dont get it... but the comic is a nice start