Hi, I can see the progress in your fourth photo as well. It looks good. Some things that help me and I think could help you too, is to always build whatever your drawing with basic shapes and forms first before you do any outlines. I don't quite remember if Stan said that yet, but building the figure out of boxes, spheres, and cylinders etc helps visualize its 3D form a lot and helps you learn to see form instead of just outlines. Don't sweat the small details. It's better to get major things down first anyway, then you can get more detailed. As for the pencil thing, it's not a right or wrong thing. you can hold it however you need to to get the best results. It just helps you use your whole arm more, which is the more important concept I think. Your doing good, hope you keep going!

These look very nice! I would say that they're a little clean. Remember that we're not copying the reference images, we're sketching and trying to get the major flows. Here it looks like you've gone line for line to try to capture the details. On digital, what is nice is you can do layers. Maybe do your exploratory sketching in the first layer -- find the long lines and the major forms. As you refine and eventually get to linework you can go on different layers so you have the final image but we still see your thought process as you figure out the flow of the lines.

Hey there. The way I keep track of it is: - If there is a twist in the pose resulting in an "S" curve, the overlap will follow that "S" flow on either side. If ever you find yourself going against that "S" flow with your overlaps, instead of going along *with* it, it's probably incorrect. - For most other situations, the mass closest to the camera/viewer will take the overlap. - For situations where it isn't clear which mass is closest to the viewer I would say the pose should be pushed more so that this doesn't happen, even just a little -- otherwise this is a pretty flat pose and I would think this means there wouldn't be an overlap. I hope that helps.

The most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to comics is an understanding of what it means to have "succeeded". It's not when you get your first hundred readers, it's not when you get your first thousand. It's not when you make your first dollar, or when you sell your first piece of merch. It's when you hit a point of critical mass. Critical mass is basically when your comic (or anything else you might put out there) is basically able to grow on its own, without a continuous injection of attention from you. It's.... a long way off. My comic's been around for three years now, and we've got a solid 18,000 subscribers on WebToon, and all that is great - but we still haven't succeeded. Not yet. But we will. As long as your content is good enough to promote further growth (with your own continual investment of time and effort), as long as your audience is engaged enough to stick around and wait for the next page, and as long as you don't throw in the towel, hitting a critical mass is inevitable. It may take a year, it may take five years, it may take ten - we can't say how long it'll take. But it will happen. The reason this matters, is pretty simple. It means that no matter how you choose to start, starting now is better than starting later. But that doesn't answer your question. I think there's a few things that can really help with getting started on a web comic, though none of these things are going to catapult you to popularity. Firstly, the days of standalone web comics are kinda dead - I mean, we went that route too, and we still are sure to update ours regularly, but the biggest shortcoming is that it's not designed for people to get automatically notified when your next page goes up - so you'll probably be forgotten once they've gone through your backlog. Sure, there's RSS feeds (which.. some people still use, I guess), there's that INCREDIBLY annoying browser notifications thing, and there's mailing lists, but these aren't built into the platform - because there is no platform. So, putting your comic on something that allows and encourages people to follow you is important. WebToon, Tapas.io are good bets - they have different kinds of audiences, and for us Tapas.io was a total flop but WebToon worked out pretty well. But there are other options - Instagram, for instance, is great if your comic format allows for it. Not all do. Each platform will have formats that they cater to more effectively, and their audiences will respond better if you stick to their conventions. That doesn't mean you necessarily have to - our comic for example is not remotely close to a webtoon vertical scroller, but I don't really feel like it hurt our chances. While I can't speak to most platforms, I can speak to my experiences on WebToon, and there are some things to keep in mind there: do not expect "fairness". Moral stories predispose us to expecting things to be fair, but they're not - and frankly, we're not really entitled to fairness. Every platform is a business, and they will always operate as such. To this effect, WebToon has two classes of comics. There are the comics in their ad revenue sharing program, which actually have ads displayed on their comic pages (they're quite small and non-intrusive, but they're there), and there are the comics that haven't reached that threshold of subscribers/views, or haven't opted in. This distinction isn't actually about *you* making money - rather, it's about which comics earn WebToon their revenue, and in turn, which comics they want their readers reading. If there are no ads rendering on the second group's pages, then they must provide WebToon with some other kind of value, and they do. I can't necessarily guarantee that this is *true*, but it makes perfect sense and aligns with what WebToon's own "advice for beginners" things offer: those smaller comics, of which there are thousands, are how WebToon brings in readers. If you're a new comic, that's your job - you bring in new users, the sign up, and eventually they get enticed away by some other comic on the platform that is going to make WebToon revenue. They expect these smaller comics to attract users by posting their updates to their social media mostly - twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. anything to bring people over. Of course, being that they're small comics, their followings are also small - but we're talking about thousands of comics doing this, and as a whole they end up bringing in fairly decent numbers for WebToon as a whole. Eventually, some of them might really hit it off, but it's not because WebToon helped them by featuring them and giving them away to access the readership on WebToon. Pretty much the only way to get attention there is to update frequently, because each time you update, you end up back on the top of the "canvas" page where people can find new comics to read. All the other feature spots are pretty much reserved for comics that can show ads, and earn webtoon money. Now don't get me wrong - I still think WebToon was great for my comic, and I think it can be very useful in general. The very fact that people can easily subscribe, and then will be notified on their phones when you update, is incredibly valuable. What all of this does mean, however, is that it's a long up-hill climb before you pass the threshold where webtoon is going to help you out themselves. The threshold being 1000 subscribers and 40,000 monthly pageviews, which is what qualifies you for the ad revenue sharing program. So, what did we do? Advertising, baby. Specifically, we had a considerable amount of success using Facebook's targeted ads to put our comic in front of people we thought would be eager to read it. We worked within WebToon's expectations - bringing visitors to their website - but we did so in an accelerated manner. Obviously, it isn't free, and therefore it's not an option for everyone - but it's at least something to look into. Facebook ads are pretty accessible, and *relatively* in expensive. In that they're still expensive, but if you use them well and consider your targeting, you can get a lot of bang for your buck. You can even target people who are already on WebToon, and therefore are already familiar with the platform. So here's what we did - we jumped onto WebToon after.. I forget, maybe a year and a half or something of being on our own standalone website, so we had a decent backlog of 75 pages (so obviously quite a bit for people to sink their teeth into). Once we hit around 315 subscribers, I pulled the trigger and dropped $300 on facebook ads. Obviously that's no small amount of money, but if it's something you save up for *while* you build up your backlog, knowing what you're going to be spending it on, it can be manageable. That $300 in ads didn't propel us past the finish line (the 1000 subscriber/40,000 pageview threshold), but it did push us much closer, and made passing it a realistic goal. Once we did pass it, and got into the ad revenue sharing program, that's where things started to grow more on their own, because now WebToon had a stake in our success. I think we hit 3000 subscribers not long after that. So! I've obviously rambled a lot, and at this point I'm not even sure how close I am to actually answering your question, but burgers just arrived. I hope this has been helpful to you, and has given you an idea on how to think about promoting your comic. The answer being "spend some money" obviously isn't ideal, and it's also not the whole thing. You need to have enough of a backlog so that you have a higher chance of each ad click you're spending on yielding a long-term reader. You also need to consider doing everything you can to engage with your audience - responding to comments, giving your audience somewhere to talk to you (a discord server, perhaps?) and obviously your comic needs to be interesting enough for them to want to read. That doesn't mean it needs to be amazing - in fact, the art itself is probably the least important part of a comic. As long as it's not outright offensive to look at, they're only going to spend a handful of seconds looking at it - the rest is going to be reading the dialogue, and then absorbing the story itself as you move through. To that end, my writer is actually the one having the greater impact... even if I'm the one pouring 12 hours a week into making pages.