A post that I plan to keep adding to, as cool new things keep crossing my path.

This is part of the “how do I webcomic?” series, with useful information on all kinds of comicking-related topics.

Artistic resources!

29 Panels that Always Work – the Wally Wood classic, expanded

Artist-Advice, Art-Tutorials, and Help-Me-Draw on Tumblr

Blambot – free quality fonts

Color harmony posts: by gigi d., by Justin Oakford

Fantasy map generators: Polygon map generator, Mapgen4, Azgaar’s map generator

GauGAN – AI that builds photorealistic scenes from the basic elements you scribble in

Howard Schatz’s photos on the diversity of athletic body types (that link has the women; there’s a matching lineup for men)

Height/Weight Chart has user-submitted photos for many combinations of height and weight, perfect for deciding what realistically fits your character’s body type

MightyDeals – heavily-discounted graphic-design bundles with fonts, tiled patterns, and other resources (don’t be too pressured by the countdown clocks, they tend to rerun the same “limited-time deal” a few weeks in a row)

SenshiStock, Tigers-stock, and my stock & patterns on DA

RoomSketcher – for creating handy modelinteriors

Worldbuilding Stack Exchange – Q&A for writers/artists needing references for science, geography and culture

…and Bing Images for all-purpose reference-image searching. (I know, I know, but Google keeps making itself deliberately harder to use.)

RoomSketcher model vs. final panels: Rowan’s bedroom, Thorn’s living room.

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Productivity resources!

5 Simple Website Blockers – Apps you can use to limit your access to distracting parts of the Internet

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Website accessibility resources!

Smashing Magazine – fonts, layouts, coding, and general design advice

W3C Markup Validation Service – checks your code

Browsershots – how does your site look when loaded in a hundred different browsers?

Responsively – same thing, but it’s a program you download

WAVE – evaluates different measures of site accessibility

Coloring for Colorblindness – enter your color palette, see how it looks with different vision

Worth checking: whether your site is still legible to colorblind users.

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Webcomic podcasts!

“Cartooning has this wonderful ability to let you be a super-performative public isolationist.” …it’s like the #ComicLab podcast knows me personally.#WebcomicWednesday #webcomicchat #webcomics

— Erin Ptah 🌈🌿🌹 (@ErinPtah) April 18, 2018

ComicLab, with Dave Kellett, Brad Guigar, and Scott Kurtz. They’re old friends, which means sometimes they’ll wander off into a ten-minute digression about shopping habits or renovating their houses, but they’re also old pros, which means they have a lot of useful thoughts about comicking. Tends to focus more on the business side than the artistic.

ComixLaunch, with Tyler James and a variety of guests. Specifically about Kickstarter, more generally about the business of comics. Goes pretty heavy on ads, but offset by having lots of good advice and listener freebies/discounts.

Dirty Old Ladies, with Spike from Iron Circus Comics, Kel McDonald, and Amanda Lafrenais. Also friends, all with different levels of experience, covering both business (Spike is on the Actual Publisher level) and creativity (their digressions come in the form of ten-minute summaries for projects they want to work on).

Two of them have erotic comics in their repertoire, thus the title. It’s kind of misleading because they aren’t the only focus — they just come up when it’s relevant.

The SpiderForest Podcast, with various members of the SF collective, plus guests. Each episode includes an interview and a moderated roundtable discussion, so it’s less banter-y, but organized well enough to move along nicely.

(I have more discussion about individual SF podcast episodes over on their forum.)

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What not to do!

How Not To Run A Webcomic, a collaborative project that ended in 2006 but is full of solid still-relevant advice.

(…give it enough time and I might add some personal complaints to this one.)