How to Panel a Vertical scroll Web-comic

Introduction

I’ll go through my steps in chronological order..

I was reading The S-Classes That I Raised and thinking about how great the paneling is.

Its distinctly a vertical scroll comic. There are large, flowing panels which make great use of the infinite scroll format of the webcomic.
I really wanted to try to absorb some of the skill of the author, so I decided to do a study of the chapter I was most impressed with at the time - Chapter 50.

Table of Contents

Introduction Panel Study Use a Grid & create a base Now - panel!Key Take-aways Length of a phone screen = ~4 400 px “sections”Panel & Gutter space in pixels Main goal: Get your ideas on paper - fast!!👁️👁️References

Panel Study

I started out by opening Clip Studio Paint and creating a new canvas. From my last comic study, I learned that even though the Webtoon upload size is 800 px, its better to start with a much bigger canvas, then make it smaller on conversion. Why? It will help with pixelation tremendously.

So, my canvas was 1600px x 20000px, and I ended up using 7 files of that size for the entire chapter study. It was a long one.

Use a Grid & create a base

From my previous comic study I also learned that having a grid on your panel makes studying spacing much easier. You don’t have to approximate the distance between panels - instead you can easily measure them with the grid you made.

Here’s the specs of the grid I set up! The important numbers are the gap - 800 px to split the canvas in half, and then I subdivided each section by 4 for a total of 10 mini sections across.

After I create a blank “base” canvas with the dimensions and grid I wanted, I duplicated it in my files a couple of times so I would have to start from scratch each time.

Now - panel!

From there - I just started from the beginning of the chapter and went all the way through! I typed out a lot of the dialogue in the beginning, but once I got a feel for what that was like, I only did circles for the dialogue bubbles and no text.

Tips:

Go ahead and type out your dialogue while thumbnailing. I learned this from looking at Hanza’s (author of My Deepest Secret on Webtoon) thumbnails. This is gonna save you from 2 things:

The time it takes to retype what you have handwritten
Trying to read your shitty fast handwriting. Even if you have amazing handwriting - thumbnailing should be quick-quick and your handwriting will inevitably being messy.

Created my own Sub tool pallete for commonly thumbnailing tools. It reduces the amount of time you have to spend switching back and forth between sub tool sections. Create a copy of each of these tools and add them to their own subpalette:

You favorite thumbnailing pen
The rectangle tool
Straight line tool
Text tool - with the default set to your dialogue font and size
Lasso tool, for moving around parts of your drawing quickly

Go for the bare minimum of readability and spare yourself the details! Focus on paneling and story/text. Your characters and creatures can all be stick figures.*

Create shorthand for yourself to be able to recognize characters as stick figures.
For new locations, characters, creatures, and buildings you can label and describe them with words for your future self in the penciling stage.