Comments For Page 353

Looks like Slara waited too long. Now she'll have to wait until morning to start searching for the satchel. Hopefully Kang will be better by then and can help in the search.

I think I've finally found the correct settings to fix the problems with working between Photoshop and Manga Studio. The current page looks better then the previous ones.

Notice something different? I've finally added a gutter between the panels. If you go to PVPonline, you can find a new feature called "Webcomics Weekly" This is a weekly feature (every Friday) that has four or five web comic creators talk about their craft. The main purpose of this is to instruct other web comic creators on how to make better comics.

One of the pet peeves given had to do with the gutters between panels. Framing each panel helps the viewer see each panel as a separate image instead of as a big blob of images. If you look at my previous page, you notice that it's hard to tell where one panel ends and the next oven begins. The cage bars really break the images up in a way the just looks wrong. Adding gutters between the panels looks better and helps the reader see what's going on better.

The next step is to use the gutters to create the best effects. For examine, having one panel without a boarder makes the panel seem much bigger and has a expansive effect on the viewer. There are a lot of tricks you can do with boarders that you can't do when you only have thick lines between panels. On thing you might notice is that the word balloons sometimes extend beyond the panel boarders but you can't see the part that goes over the edge. I had a hard time with the word balloons in the previous page because I needed to resize them so they wouldn't cover any other panels. With a gutter, I have room to stretch the balloon over the boarder without it covering the next panel.

It's a little extra work adding a gutter, but the better appearance, the ability to move word balloons over the boarder and the other visual tricks you can do, more then make it worth it. I'm going to keep listening in each Friday to see what other tricks I can learn. If you have a web comic or plan to start one, I suggest you listen in as well. You'll never find a better source of web comic advice anywhere.