Changes in my webtoon workflow
During the pandemic and before Blue Tea, I was working on a webtoon called New Century Club.
This webtoon was located in a cyberpunk environment in which a lot of gadgets, science fiction architecture and action scenes. As a experienced comic artist I thought it could be interesting to make a first approach to the webtoon format in the same way I did with paperback comics.
How naive of me.
The development became a disaster, a living nightmare, and this is not an exaggeration. My first shock was to discover that every week some artists created the equivalent to three to five pages of a full-colored paper comic. My jaw just dropped in incredulity. Even though I have already seen the use of 3D assets in some webtoons, the reality is that in Occident it wasn’t that common. I didn’t see anything in Lore Olympus nor Edith by that time. Let’s Play! and Siren’s Lament used it, of course, but by that time I thought it was an option instead of an obligation.
If you asked me nowadays, I will say the contrary. There are lovely examples of artists who doesn’t use 3D for their webtoons, however, it’s a dangerous approach for your wrist(and I’m saying this while I am in the process of recovering from an epicondilitis), your arm, your back and your health in general. Line Webtoon said that webtoons could be a ‘nice side-hustle’ once; I said it can be a nice job if you know how to make the best of the resources you have.
I’m in the process of turning Blue Tea into a vertical webtoon. I think it will help people to read the story from their phones instead of suffering from a small size font. This change of format worries me, it would be a lie not to admit it. Would I be able to do it better than with New Century Club? Or I’m doomed to fail due to my occidental manga/manhwa style?
While thinking on this and testing the waters with the first chapter of the comic I noticed several mistakes in my pages and remembered how much time I invested in certain assets that could be easily done by a 3D asset.
And yes, I’m talking about the wheelchair. I love Kim with all my heart but it was pretty naive of me to think I could manage to draw an entire comic without a 3D reference for his wheelchair. Blue Tea counts with an specific vintage/grunge style that demands a traditional approach regarding backgrounds, assets and the use of 3D could be dangerous.
However, I have been investigating for months, reading examples from Korea, learning their techniques and how they will approach a comic with a style such as mine. The results have been quite interesting, and thanks to them I am looking forward to create Blue Tea as a webtoon.
Please wish me luck in this journey! I’ll share this knowledge with all of you as much as I can.