Art has been a large part of my life growing up. Cartoons, anime, and video games were my primary influence. They led me to learn how to write and draw in my free time, and eventually become a frequent event in my life.

After touching Homestuck, my creativity was influenced heavily by it. From the first time I ever saw the trolls to when I actually began reading, it changed me a lot. I began reading more comics and stories, and before I knew it, I wanted to start one of my own. I’ve had a few I’ve never finished, but right now I have two I want to finish. However, I’ll only be talking about one of them, as the other one just started very early in the year.

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

STARTING A COMIC

Personally, when I begin writing something, I tend to start off with a basic idea. It tends to be a sort of “what if” idea, which evolves into something more complex. For my MSPFA Explaro, the “what if” question was “what if there was a planet populated by descendants of Alternian rebels?” and I continued from there.

Afterwards, I tend to start designing characters immediately afterwards. It’s something I can’t help, as characters always seem to matter the most to me in all sorts of creative media. I’ve always seen characters as one of the biggest driving forces for a story.

In Explaro, it took me about a couple nights to write out my basic ideas for Explaro and start it, which was a bit of a bad idea, since it put me under a large amount of stress. I’ve learned now that it’s better to start a comic after you have a majority of or the entirety of the writing, character dynamics, and personalities laid out so that you don’t have to ask yourself constantly, “what the hell am I doing?” Because unfortunately, I made the mistake of starting it very early, and it put me under a large amount of stress.

Since Explaro is a Homestuck fancomic, I hosted it on MSPFA since it’s 1) easy to host on 2) easy to work with and 3) already imitates the Homestuck comic layout.

WRITING AND PLOT

PLANNING

I’ve never been the type of person that was patient enough to sit down and think things through. When I want to do something, I do it immediately if I really want to. However, I personally believe it benefits the author if they at least have some kind of floor plan for the entire comic.

I usually start out with a basic outline for each act or chapter of the story I’m writing. I don’t make it detailed, I just write a list of whatever events I want to happen in it. I include the key moments and dramatic scenes that my head plays constantly, like a character giving a speech or a plot important point, and I write down a brief description of it.

Once that is done, I go back and revise it a bit to make sure the pacing isn’t too slow or too fast. For me, I tend to make it a bit too fast, so I try to make things just a bit longer. Of course, writing doesn’t always have to be a one man team. I occasionally ask a friend to help out with lengthening the writing and ask for advice on plot and ideas.

When it’s all planned out, I move to a separate document and begin writing pages based on the outline I have.

ACTUALLY WRITING THE PAGES

I like writing before drawing the art sometimes since it helps me figure out what I want out of the pages. It helps me visualize the story better.

When writing my MSPFA, I divide the writing into separate pages with the heading describing what title I want to give the page. I always keep each act of the MSPFA separate from each other as well for easy organizing.

I can’t exactly describe my style of writing, but I always have to feel like I’m in the moment of the story when writing the characters. I try to step into their shoes and say, “what would I do next if I were them?” And then everything continues from there. Afterwards, I do revising and make sure the characters match my image of them.

ART PROCESS

Ah, art. The hardest part about producing an MSPFA is actually getting yourself to do the work. Occasionally, I lose myself in the other things I do in my free time and forget to do work for my comic, and starting panels is even harder for me. But that’s another story I won’t get to.

Moving on, I always do my panel work in the program Paint SAI since it’s one of the only art programs I know how to work with. I mostly work with binary brush since it offers the same pixely style that Homestuck uses frequently. The standard size for panels is 650 x 450 pixels, so of course, I start with that canvas size, but you can always use a different canvas size and MSPFA can adjust according.

The way I start doing panels for Explaro is to sketch out the scene. I tend to sketch the character first with whatever brush I want, and if there’s a complex background, I put a different layer underneath and take a bit of time to work at the scene. In this case, the background is fairly simple, so I don’t have to worry too much.

Afterwards, I use the binary brush provided with Paint SAI and go over the simple details in the sketch in black. I don’t include details like colored glasses, patterns, reminders, etc. in the lineart and save all that junk for last.

When I color, I always color the character first. I can check for missing details and fix them if needed.

I always color the hair black, which can obscure some of the hair details, so I go back to the lineart and color it dark gray so that the details of the hair are visible. Occasionally, eyebrows will be obscured as well. So naturally, I go over that in dark gray as well.

Then I move onto the background. I always keep the background color separate from the character’s color layer and put it underneath the character. If there are any patterns visible, I always make another layer for it so I can make use of Paint SAI’s preserve opacity function and color that area without the risk of coloring over other areas.

I don’t shade the panel at all to preserve the simplistic art style and such. I plan to save shading the panels for big and important scenes. Afterwards, I save as PNG to keep the pixely style. GIF works just fine as well from what I’ve heard, although it cannot process gradients very well and instead does a really cool effect on the art called dithering. I cannot demonstrate that at the moment, but you can probably see a lot of it in the MSPFA Vast Error.

Oh yeah, here’s the final version of the panel with other details added in.

PUTTING IT ON MSPFA

The final step is to upload the update. I use the site developed by one of the MSPFA admins, pipe miroware, to host the images, since MSPFA relies on image links rather than uploading images to the site directly.

The format that most MSPFAs use is images first, and then text, although you can play around with the formatting however you want. Readers love it when creators work within the limited boundaries of pretty much anything like a website or art program and produce something magnificent with it. Or, at least, I love it when creators do that.

To prevent notification spam when the update is done, I add all the pages to the MSPFA at once and use the “save all” button. That way, MSPFA notifies readers once with a group of pages rather than sending individual notifications for each separate page. Also, it’s just faster to update that way. I recommend combining updates with each other and releasing them all at once if you’re running a suggestions comic that you update often.

Aaaand that’s all I have! The cycle repeats, and the comic continues on, gradually picking up more and more readers. I hope this is at least a bit helpful to those wanting to start their own fancomic/MSPFA.