Audrey Guo

I made a comic every day, for 100 days! You can read all of them here.

Days 11-13 are probably my favorite, together titled “Creatures”:

My mindset going into this project was basically just “I want to make myself make a bunch of comics,” because I love comics, and I thought it’d be cool to learn how to make them. It was very cool for about 20 days before it started to become routine, and then quickly a little bit boring...

It turns out, that boring trend would roughly continue until Day 100.

I think the reason I felt this way was because I had never worked on something with such stick-up-the-ass consistency before. Even with something like a film, I would usually put away work on for a couple weeks to focus on schoolwork. With 100 days, though, I couldn’t put anything away - my only choices were to scale down, or miss a day if I was busy, and I never wanted to miss a day. Despite the occasional tedium though, I never felt like I was forcing myself to make anything...I still like comics.

Also, during the 100 days, I would record little things I was learning in a Google doc. Here are a couple of excerpts I like:

• The contrast between panels matters more than individual drawings

• Doing a light sketch with notes to get the layout down, then inking the details directly works best for me

• Working in series, generatively, like writing…

• Straight lines for the panels is less distracting, though of course it depends on the emotion you want to convey. Ruler helps

• Try to use less shading when possible — tends to read better on the page

• Keep the lines human, authentic — don’t fix it too much/overwork it

• Going to the edges of the page…good for immersion + creating atmosphere!

• I should probably do a longer story again soon, starting from a character and seeing where it goes…I like those…

• Don’t try to do it all on one page! It’s an easier read, and an easier write, and better pacing to spread what you think will go on one page over several.

• Giving characters a really stupid naturalistic voice is fun, like putting in “like” and “um” and a bunch of cuss words and things I’d normally say

• Wish fulfillment: flying, kingdoms/royalty/power/beauty, magic, superpowers (be them real things that exist like singing or not), having your own space/planet/kingdom/fort/igloo/dissociating/escapism, bending space (physics, size, inventing stuff outta thin air, shapeshifting, limbs ultra flexible, super speed)/time (time travel, aging up or down or staying young, youth, rewinding time, pausing time)
  

• What Rebecca Sugar said, comics as a good way to learn a specific thing in the realm of storytelling

  
  

You can see that the content of my learnings vary greatly from what styles I was learning toward, to how I liked to work, to fundamentals of comics themselves. I think by far what I gained most though was just general confidence in telling stories this way. I feel now that if I ever wanted to pursue a longer-form comic project, I would feel prepared in doing so.