Roasting my 2011 Webcomic. Part 1: Introduction.

Way back in 2011, a 15-year-old me attempted to make their very first (original) webcomic.  Despite having enough artistic talent to barely fill a thimble and not having a lot of experience with comics in general, I was fairly confident that I could make this happen.  And thus, Plumis was born.

*Insert Price is Right losing horn*

Each of the 25 pages were lovingly crafted in Paint Tool Sai with the stabilizer set on 0.  Gradients and canvas textures were used in lieu of actual dynamic shading.  Even when not taking the art into account, the story was a bloated disaster that wasn't coherent enough to be readable, but not interesting enough to be an enjoyable train-wreck.

It holds a special place in my heart.

It's very easy for me to point my finger and complain about every mistake I ever made in this experiment (which you'll see plenty of later), but part of me can't help but be thankful that Plumis even exists.  Mainly because it helps me feel so much better about my current webcomic attempt, Shai Away.

Shai Away was created in April 2016 and at nearly 200 pages at the time of this writing, it's by far my most long-running project (not that there's a lot of competition).

Between 2011 and 2016, there was this dark period where I would start webcomics, only to drop them well before the first page was even thumbnailed.  This was for a number of reasons, but mostly it was because I didn't have a process.

This is why I'm making this series of posts.  Because I know there are plenty of artists who want to make a webcomic, but they don't know how.  They may know how to draw a picture or how to frame a story, but I came to discover that there's way more to webcomic production than that.

So to properly explain my current process, I'm going to detail how my process back in 2011 was just wrong (for me, maybe it would work for you).

Part 2: What I Wish I Knew