Comic Tip #2: Movement in Comics

Continuing my comic tip series (nothing professional just my amateur opinion) I'd like to talk about movement in comics.

This is one of my other areas of struggles. Since comics are still images (except for some comics that use gifs or so), movement itself can be a little tricky to portray in your drawings. I have a few drawings where I made a couple of simple examples on how to give some movement to your drawings while keeping things simple.

In this first example we have 3 images

1. No movement portrayed here, the scene is still and it looks like one of the characters is threatening the other but holding his actions
2. Extra emphasis is given in the grip so it looks like more force is being applied in the grip, or he just lifted the guy. Maybe some extra lines under him could show that he is actually being lifted off
3. The lines behind his arm indicate that he's about to punch the guy he's holding.

3 Same images, just with different lines around them can tell a different story altogether.

Now let's go on to another example

In this second example we have a guy in a weird pose.

1. If curved lines behind him are drawn, it seems like the guy's jumping, leaving behind those invisible lines
2. Straight lines behind him indicate that he's running.
3. Straight lines above indicate he was falling, but the shock lines on his feet show contact with the ground on his landing

Again, same image, different lines, different story.

And I have one more example

This is an example on different ways to show the same movement.

1. This is your reference image, the guy looks like he's just holding that position... nothing too exciting about it.
2. Here we can see how as he makes his kick, he traces those curvy lines, but also leaving a phantom leg up in the air. This type of movement indicate that the kick was done so fast that it leaves an after image behind
3. By adding spikes to the leg and some extra movement lines, it looks like the leg has just recently started to move, and some blurry effect is captured, kinda like when you take a picture and there's some blur on moving objects.

And that's it, super easy quick guide on how to give some extra life to your comics. Practice a lot this tip (I still have to learn a lot). Once you master this technique you'll see how your comics will get a big improvement in portraying your ideas :)

Please let me know what you think of the tutorial, I know it's simple and short, but I would like to know what you think, what you may want me to research and share with you. Do you want me to talk about comic frames? character design? story telling? something else?

Remember, I'm running a Discord server and also a Facebook group with @jonathan-greer, in case you want to join and we can talk about webcomics and even collaborate to make ones.

If you also like to make webcomics or comic strips, you can use the tag #steemit-webcomics

Until next time!