How To Create A Comic Book - Inspirational Guide Part One - Ideas

Comic books to create from scratch seem something of a dream for most people who like to write and draw and create stories from their imagination, but creating your very own comic is a lot easier now than it used to be what with some print on demand sites you can use to help get your comic book out there and there are vast amounts of specific information you can find out about comic book creation online at the click of a mouse or a stroke of a laptop touch pad.

Story concept brainstorming

The first thing you should be thinking about is a story idea and this can be a one paragraph story explanation or synopsis that will help form the basis of your story and along the way you can think of characters to feature within your main plot, the good and the bad characters usually take time to come up with as the story progresses.

Consider coming up with lists of interesting things to feature in your stories and these could be one or multiple word descriptions to help you come up with ideas and it's these idea prompting words that help spring board new ideas and help to flesh out your story development. So for example you would start a list like this with one words...

• space
• fantasy
• ship
• war
• dragon

Then you can take that list and develop it into a more descriptive sentence for each word, for example...

• Space could be "Dark space with swirling alien planets"
• Fantasy could be "A fantasy fairy floating across the lake"
• Ship could be "Sunken ship hiding an evil sea creature"
• War could be "War, a battle between the undead and the living"
• Dragon could be "The fire Dragon sits atop the fiery mountain"

Now you can see what I've done with the single words as I've added some random ideas to form a sentence that further helps your inspiration and indeed your imagination, if you wish you can extend the above sentences into full paragraphs for each which should give you way more stuff to be inspired to draw and get creative about.

Most times continuing to draw a full page piece can help you to come up with story elements besides being quite fun and relaxing to draw some complete pencil art, You could draw some cool concepts of characters and creatures in a more finalized form and indeed plan out some good progression's in story ideas in a visual sense.

Full pages of art in the comic book world are called Splash Pages and these are quite wondrous and spectacular to look at especially from the comic book artist professionals that deliver this work month in month out. So to aspire to include these full pages of art within your comic can help to provide your readers with your stories high points such as dramatic and action packed moments.

Some people would argue that each panel is like a mini page of art and that can be quite true if your drawing style lends itself to that way of storytelling that helps to explain everything quite clearly.

When it comes to inking the pages you have to follow your gut instinct and really add a mixture of sweeping strokes with your ink pens and try to understand your pencil drawings further by studying the structures you have created. I see a pencil drawing as the beginning of something and it may take many drafts of a single drawing to get it right, just like a written Novel, there has to be some form of editing process that you can use to measure your creative sucesses.

As I've more than likely mentioned before with inking you not only have to ink over the original pencil lines, you have to improve on them by adding weight to characters and creatures and layering in the ink to create light and dark areas that contrast well with each other. The following drawing videos attempt to show an example of some sort of the inking process for your own comic book efforts.

Your imagination is the only tool you need to come up with an idea, the very notion of creating your own comic book begins with excitement and then one of two things may happen to hinder your progress and these are in the form of questions that turn into doubts like Will my comic book be good enough compared to existing books out there? and Is my comic similar to others that have gone before? Doubt about your own goals and future success are quite normal and they affect every creative person right across the board from Writers and Artists to Entrepreneurs and small business start ups.

The imagination is a wonderful thing and if you turn your back on it you are denying the very thing that may make you love the arts and actually enjoy creating comic books and art related to this end goal. Your imagination can be improved by keeping your mind open to others art and getting involved in discussions about art in general or becoming more attuned to many different ways that other artists work can be of great help.

A single comic book begins with an idea and that idea can snowball into something quite magnificent and something you'll be proud to share with the world someday when you're ready. By regularly exercising your imagination by free or random drawing and sketching your are building up a reliance on your skills with drawing and you can only come up with ideas on top of more ideas that will all eventually fit together like a large jigsaw puzzle.

So, always keep drawing, write notes if you have to and tap into your imagination often for best results. Part 2 of this comic book creation process will be about focusing on some drawing examples and tightening up your story so that you don't leave plot threads hanging.