so there's a couple extra things when it comes to comic composition compared to normal composition.
so number one -- you need to keep your speech bubbles in mind. because you're going to have, you
know, not only just the illustration, but you got to put speech bubbles somewhere most of the time,
so you're going to want to make sure you leave room...leave room for them to be placed.
plan ahead! and the second thing that you need to keep in mind -- you need to make sure that what is
happening in the scene needs to be kept super super clear. you know with compositions, you
can kind of just mess around a lot, right, like sometimes compositions don't make sense at all
when you have just regular illustrations, right? but with with comics you need to keep in mind the
principle of "show not tell"..."show don't tell" is very very strong, right, especially if you have
an action comic, right, you're not gonna say "i'm gonna punch you now" and "i'm gonna kick you now"
and "oh here comes my ultra attack" right? i mean, that's very anime, um, but most of the
time you kind of just want to show them doing the action. there's another thing that, again, kind of
goes along with cinematics... it's called the 180 rule -- keeping all directions consistent. see if
you have one character and they're going into a door, and they're going this way into the door,
the next panel is not going to be that person going through the door and going out this
direction. that makes no sense. if you're doing this panel that if they go in that way, they also
exit out that way. they should all be kind of facing the same way going the same direction,
right, it makes it the action a lot clearer. let's talk a little bit about cinematics. cinematics,
used for any form of visual storytelling, whether that's comics, video games, animations, movies,
any sort of visual storytelling. so those are your shot types. so the first one is your establishing
shot. so your establishing shots...right, so if i kind of drew some mountains...
yeah. so there's the house here... you might put the speech bubble here or something, right,
so it would either be like up here, up here, leaving that empty space to make sure we leave
room for it. so your establishing shots... see our establishing shots are a full view of the setting,
and they're usually used to show a change in setting, or settings in general. so say
if you're going from their characters, like... "okay let's we're taking a road trip now" and
everyone's like "yeah let's go," the next shot may be an establishing shot of a car driving through
the forest. see, establishing shots are meant to show, kind of...going between places. next shot
that we're talking about is the long shot. say we got two people kind of standing around, right,
but you notice how you can see them head to toe. say there's somebody in the foreground here,
just kind of walking away, and there's a fire hydrant... there's the door, sign is up here,
more doors, and then the speech bubbles will probably be back here or something.
so your long shot is when you see the characters from head to toe. long shots are meant to show
characters in a setting, so it's kind of meant to establish where the character is. so if this
is meant to establish just the setting, this is meant to show where the characters are. okay,
medium shot, let's say that i'm drawing -- this is a really common one that everybody knows.
there's buildings, more building....uhhh... sidewalk, lamp post...
right, so medium shots are waist and up / knees and up, right, most common. this common shot,
generally just used for conversation. so you'll see yourself using a medium shot a lot,
totally fine. there's a few other things you can do with a medium shot, like an over the shoulder,
which is when it's like...think of the viewer as a camera,
where you kind of have the camera going over another character's shoulder. close-up!
okay, so close-up shot...let's see, we got two speech bubbles here... this is
my favorite kind of composition. it's always like a close-up and then two speech bubbles.
close-up shots...shoulders and up, usually used to convey emotion. right,
you see the character's face, you see them there you see the little twitches of the
eye. expressions are very, very important when it comes to comics. extreme close-up!
okay, extreme close-ups...close-up shots of the face, also used for emotion, or they're mainly
used for slight changes in emotion. right, you know that super dramatic thing that some movies
do, where it's like, they'll have a character staring at you, and then suddenly, like,
it zooms in on their eyes, and their eyebrows, like, crinkle in, right, that's a very big kind
of extreme close-up shot thing. so the insert shot -- this is my favorite one. i love insert shots.
oh well... insert shots, close-up shots of other parts of a character
or object meant to show interaction or movement or emotion.
right, sometimes you'll have shots of people fiddling with their hands, and their...their
hands in their lap, right, or they're fiddling with a piece of paper on the table or something,
right. insert shots are meant to show those kinds of things. final shot, this is the last one,
it's a dutch angle. so this one's not -- less of a shot, this one's more just something that i wanted
to show. it can be done in combination with any of these shots, but it's more of an angle when the
horizon line or when your horizon line is tilted. meant to show confusion -- oh boy -- or creeping
anxiety. right, so dutch angles are kind of meant to show like a lead up to an action, right, it's
used very often in horror, if you've ever watched a horror movie you'll probably see them a lot.
let me draw a bedroom... i'm gonna using a technique that i like to call my "floor
plan technique." so i'm just gonna kind of figure out where exactly i
want everything to go, so what i like to do is i actually... if it's in a perspective,
right, if it's two point inside of room i like to start off with laying down everything as if
it was a floor plan, right. if you've ever seen floor plans, you know how they're kind of like 2d
top down, right, you look at them that way. she kind of has her bed here... it's a really big bed.
she has a nightstand over here, and she has a headboard that's really big, and a couple pillows,
and then her...there's a shelf here, desk, there's a chair here, she has a television that connects
to her laptop, and then there's a carpet, so this is the room that i'm kind of thinking of, right,
so this is daisy's room. when i have this, right, this is my floor plan, right, what i'm gonna do...
i'm gonna hide this layer, i'm gonna figure out my... my perspective now, and now based off of
how i've skewed it, now i can draw everything three-dimensional. so this kind of plans out
where everything is gonna go. i'm gonna make this smaller... i'm gonna stay zoomed out too because
that makes it easier, so i'm also keeping my rule of thirds in mind while i'm drawing this too. so
i'm kind of thinking about like, okay, it's like, how does this bed kind of work in composition,
right, what's actually happening, stuff like that. but i'm also leaving areas of low priority,
right, so i have this section in the foreground up here, right, so this is going to be the desk,
so the desk is right here, and there's also a shelf here, but these are considered low
priority. they're directly in the foreground, um, but when it comes to priority, especially when it
comes to comics, you have to establish what your priorities are. your number one priority
most of the time when it comes to your comics should be your characters. if there's a main
character in shot, you need to make sure that nothing is covering them up. you can have a
little bit covering them up, um, it depends on the effect that you want, but if they're talking
and you have a setting, you've got to put your speech bubble somewhere, you need to make sure
that your characters are clear, and that you don't have much covering them up. right, so this is more
of an extreme long shot that i didn't talk about, but it's basically just a farther out version of
the long shot. in general, you kind of gotta figure out where exactly you want the eyes to
flow around the composition as well. the ideal is you want to kind of go up to the bottom... top of
the corner, to the bottom corner over here, right, across the screen. that's your ideal
because our brains will automatically prioritize certain areas over others.
yeah, daisy, my main character here, she's like high priority, right, she's the main character in
focus. harkening back to the past, um, live stream that we did, right, with composition, she's also
within the rule of thirds. one, two, three, four. so she's kind of on this pinpoint here,
if you cut your whole composition into a three by three grid,
your main center focus should generally be on one of those intersecting points.
all right, so i'm kind of covering up areas that i feel are slightly lower priority,
but i also have to keep in mind the flow of where the eyes are going, so i'm kind of starting from
the top up here, and then flowing downwards. this is a low priority area, and i would put a speech
bubble here, but then it kind of doesn't flow quite as well, so what i could do is have them go
all across here, but then it leaves a super giant empty space up here. if you liked what you saw, be
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