Top Ten Reasons You Should Draw a Guest Strip
Subtlety is dead.
- It’s good practice. All art is, really.
- If you’re not already drawing a comic, it’s good to learn how to. Anything that encourages you to find new ways to be familiar with Photoshop can’t hurt!
- Free publicity! Because we all know everyone wants more traffic/popularity, right? What better way to get it than to have a sample of your work on display somewhere you know people are already looking?
- So many artists insist on sticking to their personal artistic ruts. Some people draw only girls, or only furries, or only characters that look like you just put together some paper dolls… doing a guest strip forces you to stretch your creative horizons!
- It’s a way to volunteer your time. Ever wanted to volunteer your time to something worthwhile but don’t have the energy to go spend a day picking up litter by the side of the road? Guest strips take a load off the artist’s back by giving them time they would be spending on that update and being able to put it towards other projects!
- You get a link back to your own projects / accounts! People knowing you’re cool is one thing, but people knowing you’re cool and knowing they can go to your own webcomic / dA / FA account to find more cool stuff you drew is even better.
- Acknowledgements from the artist(s)! Hey, this just feels good.
- Transformative works rock! People love to see stuff in a new light — this is why people love parodies, after all, and being able to take the same stuff on in new perspectives is really eye-opening.
- Legitimate fanart! Fanart’s a tricky subject to broach, but let’s face it — being legitimized by having it featured on the website is a great thing, and plus, it’s not only fun, it’s also directly beneficial since it’s helping the comic you already know and love!
- I need Guest Strips! Yup, this one’s the real reason I’m telling you all this other stuff – and go on, you saw it coming anyway.
Don’t worry, nothing bad’s happened — in fact, just the opposite. Volume 1 is almost over, which means we’re about to shift storylines, and more importantly… there’s a book coming soon!
… and I am freaking out like crazy over it!
Books take a lot of things, but in this case, they mostly take time — time to do print-exclusive material, time to draw the cover, time to assemble the book in a way that the printer can handle it, time to find a printer that’ll print it for cheap enough that I’m not losing money on the sale, time to promote the book so I actually sell enough preorders to afford the first print run because NOBODY who does Print-On-Demand does color at anything remotely close to reasonable prices… you get the idea.
Long story short, I would love a few weeks off like you wouldn’t believe. Save somehow learning to clone myself so I can draw pages in half the time, the easiest thing to do is post some Guest Strips as a breather, but in order to do that, I need guest strips in the first place!
There should only need to be about a month’s worth of guest strips, but I’ll post all the strips that I think’re good, and each one of ’em will come with credit and a link back. This ought to be plenty of time to get things right, and then when we’re done, we ought to be ready to leap into a whole new volume and get the heads ball rolling again.
And oh, will it all be glorious.
Discussion (10) ¬
I already have an idea in mind. It seems kind of obvious (to me) but I’ll try to knock something out tonight.
Question: Assuming I can actually put together LR sprites, would you accept a sprite comic?
@Nifar: It’s a guest comic, for freak’s sake. As long as it gets the job done, I won’t worry about the format. 😉
Heh. It’s just, I know that some folk are picky about stuff like that. I’ll see what I can do.
It’s understood. My logic is that guest comics are already derivative (so it’s not like making them into a sprite comic will make them any less so), and as long as you’re making your own sprites ala Diesel Sweeties or something, it shouldn’t make a huge difference.
Just caught up will do. I will start thinking of a concept soon! X:3
@Koru Paua: Nifty! I can’t wait to see! X3
To be honest I’m very interested in making a comic of this but I don’t know too much about the character or storyline yet. Still, I’ll come up with something =3
@Arkani: As long as you at least look like you “Did the Research”, it should be just fine. I’ll be glad to give you a nudge if you think you need to ask.