 Hello and welcome back to The Average. Today I'm going to talk about my slice of life comic that I made for a year and a half straight every day for five days. Monday to Friday I would make a comic and I want to talk about that but first I want to say a huge thank you to Skillshare who are kindly sponsoring this video. Skillshare is an online learning community and it has dozens of courses that follow totally different array of skills that could be helpful for you. Premium membership gives you unlimited access to all the classes and I've used Skillshare before actually had it whilst I was working for a company. They bought everybody in the team access to Skillshare and it was really helpful for me in my graphic design career. I learned a lot how to use Photoshop and using anchor points particularly because I was very bad with the pencil but it really helped me whether it would fuel your curiosity, creativity or even career. Skillshare is a perfect place to keep learning and thriving. This is a class that I really enjoyed I think it was really helpful for illustration and comic design. Skillshare is also incredibly affordable especially when you compare it to other classes that you could take. For instance my master's degree was quite pricey and it's really nice to have access to different courses online that you can just look at one day graphic design, next day comic making, next day illustration, music design, an array of different courses are available to you and the annual subscription is less than 10 dollars a month because Skillshare is sponsoring this video you can sign up with the link in the description and get two months for free. Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video and let's get down to it. All right okay um you guys asked for this sort of not really at all I said should I do it and then some people commented that they would like it. These are some comics I made for one and a half years every single day without weekends so every Monday to Friday I would get up draw a comic, post it and then work on other stuff but that would be like my daily warm-up, my daily grind because sometimes it would take half the morning, sometimes it would take longer and my whole idea was that I wanted to make comics for a living so I wanted to do these funny little slice of life comics and live off them somehow I don't that's very hard to do by the way so it didn't come to fruition but I really feel like I got a big stack of comics here that I'm really proud of and some of them are really very good I think you know good job stuff and um some of them are not so good because that was the great thing about working every single day on something and having to come up with an idea so the constraints really helped me be creative so these are sort of the starting ones so what I would do is in the beginning I would draw a lot of panels and it would sort of make the joke not as punchy but I think that can work for some people but I like the idea of having four little panels on each page and you can see the panels are just rounded and I really like that aspect of my design and not having boxes is there something really freeing in just being able to have different shapes so yeah I started out by just going for the slice of life comics and some of them are not funny some of them are just like daily things because and I try to make them funny but they didn't really work out that way some of them are just storytelling so these are the beginning ones as you can see the character design is not quite the same as it is now basically I think this is sort of the character I came up with that's me and it's more like a bean head kind of style where this one is bean head but a little bit off well I definitely improved painting them as I went on if you'd like to read these comics then just pause them but yeah I definitely improved as I went I think the year and a half of doing something daily really helped yeah I would say if somebody if you want to start doing like slice of life comics then it's definitely a good idea to just dive into it and go for it because anything that you make in the beginning is not going to be the best thing ever but it's a start and then you get better and I think that I came to a really cool style in the end and I think as well like as you can see here the beginning is just very different to the style that I came up with in the end so this is kind of like a finalized one and it's kind of more it's better drawing it's just cleaner and the joke is a little bit quicker to the table and obviously I started to get better at them I feel like the jokes got better that were more punchy they made more sense I don't know I think like if you do something every day for a year and a half of course you're going to improve and so these were the beginning ones nobody really read them because I just had a few friends on Facebook who liked them at the time and then I opened a Patreon and I put them on Instagram but I didn't have a very big following but so I was basically doing this out of just pure passion at that point which was scary but also quite freeing I think this was something I did for Patreon no no this is for because I used to post on Tapastik Tapas that comic website it's kind of like webtoon but you can tip people with money if you watch adverts you can get like coins but I think the coins are like 0.001 dollar or something and yeah it was quite fun I used to like posting on there but I wouldn't really get any traction so I was just thinking like I need to expand and this was obviously this was all before I started with YouTube and I just felt like I didn't have anybody like the people who did enjoy them really enjoyed them so that was something that kept me going and I really liked making people smile I think that was a big deal for me is if somebody found it funny even if it was just one person I really liked that so it was just I felt like I was doing something nice for people and yeah I really love these comics and I think I really want to continue them I never put them into a book and I would really have liked to have done that so I might do that but with the more on point ones which I'll show you in a second yeah these are all very loose and long stories if you'd like to see more I post a lot on Instagram now with them I'll also put the tapas link down below with all the old comics so you guys can just go look at them if you fancy going back in time and seeing them lots of the early ones make me cringe a little bit because they are not what I wanted at all but you know you've got to start somewhere what I would do is I would pencil them out then I would ink them up and then I would color them in with pencil and I made that decision from the beginning to color them in with pencil because I really like the way the texture looked and it added kind of a movement and a feeling to them and I really enjoy that the problem we're doing it straight um traditionally is that then I would have to scan it and fix everything up and that would take another little bit of time so it was another step added to the overall process of this but that was fine by me I really didn't mind it because I was enjoying what I was doing some days were more challenging than others especially if you put a challenge on yourself to post a comic every day for a year some days were tougher than others I there was days when I was sick and it was quite stressful but overall a good experience and I really want to do more comics but not maybe not under that kind of pressure just to create them again this was based on a let's play of don't starve together that I played with my friends and I was just picking out the funny bits and drawing that in the style I think I posted this as one of the comics of the day which was kind of a blend of my style and and uh don't starve together I I just really liked doing something a little bit different because I think I was stuck in a certain way of drawing things and it was nice to like mix up the style for just one day this was an ending for another comic which I can't find I think I was trying to use as much paper space as I could because I think I really liked this paper and I was running out of it and when you do something every day you want to keep it consistent so I was getting like no I don't want to change the paper this one's about Harry Potter and I'm not quite sure it's very funny but I wanted to draw characters in this style but that worked me I wanted to see how that would work and I do like it but I don't think it's funny oh like I said not every comic is gold but you've got to you've got to experiment you've got to test out the waters and learn from your mistakes there's some things in this that's funnier the joke could be tighter obviously and yeah I just I think it's all right I don't even remember what this joke is oh right they're sending a message to aliens and the aliens like me this is spam kind of funny but also not really on point on brand for the slice of life comics I think later on I don't really look into other stuff like I don't do Harry Potter or other characters or imaginations I do slice of life things as I continued I focused on things that would happen in my life yeah that's the story of my comics really I think what I'll do now is just go through everything and you can pause these whenever you like I don't know how many to show really because we've got a lot to get through and some of them are just not funny all very good but I think sometimes when I was like I need a comic and I need to get it out I would get stuck and I would have to put something up so it's not that I didn't think that it was funny I just thought like okay this is another comic time to move my collection and if it's bad then I've learned from it I went through a stage because what I would do is colour in the skin with pencil and then I realised what looked quite good if I left it blank and then I would take it into photoshop and colour in the skin in photoshop it made the characters pop a little bit and I really enjoyed that so I just did that every time I fixed up the panels in photoshop and then I used a multiply layer over the top of the panels and I used a skin tone to colour myself in and I think it just yeah it just made it better I did go through a phase I think I did a couple fully digitally and it just didn't have the same quality to it and it didn't really stand out from other things that I've seen online and I wanted to be different and I think it just it was more my style to do this so that's what I did and this is a comic about Pesto and it's really funny because I still to this day call her Chris Chris is my fiance by the way in case you didn't know um we live together and I call him and then Pesto is like yes me my name's Chris Chris yeah this one is one of my favourites I think Chris bought this um giant beer mug and he really liked it and then Pesto just smashed it and I really liked the end panel it's just like if you own a cat then you know what happened here to it without me having to panel it out and I think this is one of the tighter comics that I did because it tells a story without having to be too in-depth and you just get it within the four panels hopefully that's one of my favourite ones so I guess I won't go through all of these comics again if you'd like to read them then just follow me on Instagram or Twitter or whatever and then you can have a look at some of these old ones it was overall a really good learning experience and I really like the style that I came up with in the end I think there's so many comics here and some of them are just good and some of them are not so good and I think that's all part and part of the process because obviously you're gonna have days when you don't really feel like it but if you push yourself through you might come up with something really really good so I could go through these forever because obviously I have a lot of them and they go on for a while and I'm really proud of them I'm really proud that I did this it was really hard I think one day I want to collect these and make these into a a book and I was thinking like maybe I might do a Kickstarter just to fund help fund printing and I don't know if that would be cool or not I don't know if people really want to see these again or have them in book format but let me know if that would be something you would be interested in or I don't know because it's one of those things that I would like to have and it would be really cool to share these more widely with people yeah I think these are really old ones I think I would like to do that so if you would like to see a Kickstarter or maybe like a pre-purchasing of a comic like this with all these pages in it probably from the older ones to the newer ones or something like that and then I'll talk about the process within the book then I probably would like to do that so comment down below if that be something you're interested in and again I would like to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video it's so nice to have a sponsorship and be able to make videos so thank you guys for supporting the channel and thanks so much for watching this video but for now I'm just gonna say goodbye and I will see you next time