This page is an exploration into not only the style of Jean Giraud (aka ‘Moebius’), but also my own personal style. At the time, I was looking for ways to pare down the amount of work per comic page. I defined aspects of my style to rely less on painterly polishing and more on reaching a state of ‘complete’ in a quantifiable way. During the coloring of this piece I looked into flatting colors instead of placing them on top of a gradient mapped grayscale painting. I realized that I preferred having more manual control over my colors so that I could push the emotional aspect of colors more, over the ‘realistic’ aspects. My first attempts at defining my own comic style was deeply work-intensive (see below).

Let’s see…Overwhelming noise, textures, weird human facial features, colors all over the place,
takes forever to paint…Not to forget the hilarious mispelling of my old homepage url in the corner…
Yeah, let’s not do this anymore! Let’s get simple!

Not only will simplifying my style help me produce a long-form comic in the first place, but it will also be easier to pull off last-minute revisions at the end. I developed this new style on this piece during a Zoom class offered by Push/Pull Seattle.

Art software: Photoshop
Lettering software: InDesign
Typeface: Cloudsplitter by Blambot; hand-lettering by me

Comics Tip

Want to examine another comic creator’s style? Here are some small aspects to look out for when analyzing a comic aesthetic. They may seem like superfluous details, but they all add up in a big way.

Layout
How thick are the panel borders? How thin are the borders of speech bubbles and narration blocs? How big are the gutters? The margins? The margins inside of text holding elements? Is text allowed to break the grid? Is artwork allowed to break the grid? I’ve been using rather thick outlines for the panels so that readers notice my layout and where my layout gets broken, but I may experiment with thinner outlines.

Line weight
Does the artist use thin lines? Big, chunky lines? Closed lines? Open lines? No lines at all? I picked up a technique from Moebius of uniformly thin, closed lineart, so that I could quickly and easily fill tool my flat colors underneath. My lines are set at 5px for 1200dpi fidelity.

Color Scheme
Does the artist carefully balance their colors for maximum impact? Or, are they a rampaging, zine-spewing punk who slap down whatever’s on hand? As I find harmonious color schemes easier to apply, I usually head to paletton.com to restrict the colors I’m using upfront.

Shading
Does the artist use spot black to shade with sharp, dark shadows? Do they use animation-like cel shading? Do they use soft shading? Do they use no shading at all? Do they use a combination of techniques? If so, where do they apply each technique? I leave most of my colors flat, but use a combination of cel- and soft shading on areas of focus.

Every drawing style trend is fleeting, so none of them truly go out of style forever. Don’t feel shy about analyzing your favorite comics styles, even if they’re guilty pleasures. Fear neither bean mouth nor sparkly eyes criticism. Whatever keeps you drawing is the best style for you!

Draw However You Want!
And respect your inspirations!