ohhhhmy god bill watterson horror graphic novel...........

Hi! I've been kind of lurking for a while, your art is gorgeous and your comics with Telios are what made me realize just how incredible and emotional a few comic panels can be. It's kind of inspired me to try to make my own, but the one problem I run into to even start is size. How do you decide what size to make your artboards? Is it by pixels or by cm...? Every program seems to be different, and just looking up advice on the internet is giving me mixed signals... T_T

Hello! Thank you so much!!

And honestly, this is a general question with many answers depending on what you want to do in the long term. There's really no right or wrong way (or size) to start your comics!

I'm assuming when you say 'artboards' you mean the finished page? So I'll be answering to the best of my abilities with that in mind.

If you're just starting out, there's nothing wrong with just drawing in small squares to explore the genre. My favourite artist : insertdisc5 does some incredible work with just drawing squares and dialogues. These are great if you have a quick idea and just want to communicate short stories. (But honestly, if you want to do long form stories, these are also great to start out with and just get a feel of the medium)

If you mean page by page, I actually draw everything on B5 size or A5 size, so if I need something to be bigger or smaller, I'll just scale up or scale down.

There's also webtoon style comics that area veeeeery long vertically. For those I used to work in 2100px width and however long I needed them to be (They would go up to 50k px per episode) But again I'd have to scale them down to 900px wide to adhere to posting limits.

I think ultimately, there is really truly no real or proper size or way to start. It depends on how comfortable you are with big or small canvasses since you can always scale to fit your needs. I personally prefer to work on 1200 - 2000px wide canvasses, bc anything beyond that makes it difficult for my textures to show and I have to draw a lot more details. I have no idea if I managed to hit any points you were hoping to have answered, but feel free to pop another ask if you'd like :)