Welcome back to "Your Webcomic Sucks". Today you readers are in for a treat. Since people don't seem to understand the concepts of subtext, sarcasm, writing persona and facetiousness I am forced to write about something much less subjective this time around: "How to make your webcomic not look like crap."

You see, many people will tell you that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The truth is, aesthetics have the amazing capacity to be objective, and most of the people who laud this Postmodern garbage are people who have no artistic ability themselves. It is quite difficult to believe these days but the real deal is that people can tell the difference between good and bad. It's instinct. This ability has been around since the beginning of man; it kept us from eating rotten food and from taking a dump where we ate. This is my proof:

It is quite obvious that this is just plain terrible. It violates all laws of design, color theory and tastefulness. There is absolutely no justification for the existence of this piece of crap other than for instructional purposes. However, there are plenty of webcomics out there that resemble this artistic abortion. The problem is that these people are presenting this garbage as actual content. In a just world such "artists" would be sanctioned by the U.N. for crimes against humanity. Then again, if this was truly a just world, Garfield would have ended years ago.

These basic technical fixes can give people a chance to judge your art on the merits of your artistic style, rather than being distracted by glaring presentation problems.

Let's start off with people who do their art in pencil. While it would be far more preferable to use something like ink, many people still post pencils as finished work. I blame Fred Gallagher for this in the same way that I blame Andy Warhol for the modern art movement. You see, the reason that Megatokyo can get away with posting pencil drawings as finished work is because Mr. Gallagher knows how to pencil. He also knows that your darkest shade shouldn't be 40% gray. Let's examine the difference between a higher range of shades and something scanned half-assed.

While admittedly both drawings are rush-jobs, the one on the right is much easier to see than the other. I have seen submissions on the KeenSpace Signups that are even less visible than the image on the left. There are at least three solutions to this problem:

1. Learn how to pencil. This will take practice and some kind of effort, so this is not the solution for most fledgling webcomic artists.

2. Get a mechanical pencil. While not a sure fix, it's much easier to get sharp, darker lines that will be picked up by the scanner, and eliminate excess gray dither on the edges of your line work.

3. Photoshop the hell out of it. If steps 1 & 2 don't work out, try using Levels. Go to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels. See the little black eyedropper logo? Click that and select the darkest gray you can find in your art. This tool makes that gray into the darkest shade of the image (black) and adjusts the range of your piece automatically. Many people use the contrast tool to accomplish the same result but this often eliminates the full range of grays between black and white and also doesn't give the user a free range of adjustment.

Something else I've often found in conjunction with bad pencils are images that are excessively large. When you are saving your image for the web, make sure the resolution is 72 dpi, and keep track of the pixel width and height. Nobody needs to see the terrible, inept details of your Brobdingnagian-scaled art. When you can't draw for crap, you normally don't want to make it obvious to the viewer. When they can see the ugliness magnified it spells disaster for your comic.

Moving away from pencils, our next stop is in God-Awful Technicolor Land. Color is an excellent way to improve the quality of your artwork, but only if you understand the basics of coloring. If you have ever experienced the ocular agony of all the Sonic/Megaman sprite comics that create a neon-green ground with a retina-frying blue sky, you have experienced my pain. Photoshop is definitely to blame for a lot of this; the first set of default colors are what I call "The Neons". Stay far, far away from these unless you're creating a neon-light effect. Otherwise, use the color picker and stay away from the upper-right corner, otherwise known as the "ZONE OF UGLY" illustrated here:

Being able to choose your colors well is only one side of the problem. Before you even begin to color, make sure your lines are ready for this process. If you have any grays on the edges of your lines, you're going to experience the white jaggies (depending on your tolerance settings of your coloring tools). Scan your artwork at a higher resolution, and reduce your image to black and white using either brightness-contrast or levels. One of the easiest techniques is using blue pencil, tracing with black ink, and scanning it as a black and white image. (The scanner will see the white background, the black lines, and eliminate everything else.) You can now color as you please without fear of white jaggies; but make sure that sharp corners and thin lines have color in them as they're often closed off by small black pixels, blocking the areas off from the fill of paintbucket tool. You can then reduce the image to 72 dpi for output where the computer will anti-alias your image, making it smooth and presentable.

Now you know not only how to digitally prepare pencil drawings but also how to color your images with at least marginal competence. While this can't help the artistically-challenged, it at least allows the audience to see your work on the basis of its own merits, undistracted by bad presentation.

For those of your with short attention-spans, here's a summary:

If this doesn't make it any clearer, perhaps a bat to the back of your head will.

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