As many of you know, I’m the author of Life Outside the Circle webtoon, a comic about two men finding love in the Finnish countryside. Let’s talk about how I made the comic!
I could go on and on about the plot and characters and everything else, but on this post I want to concentrate on the art. So I’ll tell you the main points about the other parts of the process in short.
History of Life Outside the Circle
I got the idea for Life Outside the Circle webtoon in 2014. At that point I hadn’t even started my first Webtoon comic Immortal Nerd yet! In 2015 I started making my first Webtoon original series Immortal Nerd and after that one was over, I asked if webtoon would be interested in Life Outside the Circle. They were!
The plot I had was initially only written in Finnish. I paid a translator to translate it to English for me. Then I worked together with my editor Bekah Caden to make the comic the best it can be.
The Art of my Webtoon
I personally love the art of Life Outside the Circle. I’m so proud of the things I did with it! I think it’s the best looking comic I’ve done in my life, which is why I want to talk about the choices I made with the art in more detail.
Life Outside the Circle webtoon is in grayscale, there’s only one spot in the comic that uses colour. That part is the Helsinki Pride! And in there too there’s no other coloring than the rainbows that are in pastel rainbow colours. Like this:
I have gotten wonderful comments on the colors. People have told me the impact of suddenly having the colorful rainbow flags surprising and memorable. The podcast Talking Comics told in their Thirsty on Toon series that they didn’t even remember the comic being black and white, because it felt colourful.
The drawing process
- First of all, I sketched the comic panels separately on red pencil.
- Then I inked them with a NIKKO school nib and indian ink. The kind of a nib that you dip in an ink bottle.
- Then I colored the smaller details with copic markers in different tones of gray.
- And in the end I used ink diluted with water to do the larger grey areas and the shadows.
- Then I scanned the illustrations and edited the red out of them on Photoshop, making them greyscale.
Here’s an example of what the scans looked right out of the scanner. Bad… The diluted ink wetted the paper and made it warp even if I used thicker paper.
But with a bit of editing I turned this into a neat comic panel!
So this was the process for the normal comic panels. But this alone isn’t the thing that made me love the art I did for Life Outside the Circle… This is:
The emotions! I love drawing them! Let’s analyse these a bit further.
The Analysis
In this picture I have changed the tools I used for inking the picture. Instead of using a thin nib, I used a brush with the ink. Normally I would also make sure the perspective was believable, but in this one I intentionally bent the perspective. It’s warped. I did this so that the panel would look like what Juha is supposed to feel. Juha feels dizzy and he feels heavy. The darker heavier lines make the panel feel claustrophobic. Exactly what I’m trying to portray!
I use a lot of silhouettes in my comics. There’s three reasons for them. 1. They are simple. The readers eye doesn’t focus on anything else than the main point I want to portray. 2. They create contrast. For a very important part in the comic it’s good to create more impact with contrast. 3. They are fast to draw. I save a lot of time with them.
Here’s something I don’t save time with. Panels like this take ages to draw! But I often loved to start a chapter with a beautiful tall illustration of either nature or actual buildings in Helsinki. I love drawing environments and I think drawings like this create sense of time. A beautiful moment the characters have stopped to enjoy.
So what about this one? Quite often I had to draw the same places over and over again. That was pretty boring. Not for me really, I could just reuse the same drawings but I didn’t want to do that too often. So sometimes I showed this aeriel image from the place! I used this in one panel in Helsinki too, but that one you have to go see yourself from here.
On this panel Juha is angry, but he’s trying to keep it in. I drew him with a black crayon, pressing hard and making jagged lines. The illustration was very big, but I scaled it on Photoshop to fit the panel. I think the artwork looks angrier, because I drew it with “angry motions”. While holding the crayon tight I tensed all my muscles. I made myself feel the anger Juha feels and I think it shows on the illustration.
So what about sadness and helplessness? I’ve drawn this with a very thin marker with no sketch. I held the marker very lightly to make it shake a bit more. I would let my hand make mistakes, like the lines that are too long on Juha’s hair. That’s not how I draw his hair normally. This all makes him look very anxious. I drew like I was scared of the paper! The coloring is also threwn in there in blobs, not spread smoothly like normally.
This is what makes me believe Life Outside the Circle is one of my most artistic comics. I set out to portray emotions and even the art, not just the story, emphasises the emotions.
I hope reading me patting myself on the back doesn’t make you think I’m a horribly self centered person. It’s quite sad that artists are often expected to dislike their own works and only find faults in them. Don’t get me wrong, I find faults in all my comics, Life Outside the Circle webtoon included! But the comic is done and published. Only focusing on the faults wouldn’t change anything. Letting myself enjoy my work and celebrate the best parts of it makes me want to draw more and come up with new ways to make my art even better.
Did you like this?
If you want to read my another post where I talk about the thoughts behind my art in my comic book I Survived Him, go here to read my post about the thoughts I had while making that comic!
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