Any advice given here is just that, advice. You will need to find your way to navigate this process.

Be yourself

You are yourself. You have an artistic method and outlook that is yours. You can play around with all of the tools provided at the event, and learn new techniques, but be yourself. Bring what you have to the table. Everyone is different, and there is no better or worse in this event, only different. So bring your uniqueness to this project, and find a way to make it work with everyone around you.

And don’t worry if you feel like your art won’t fit in with what other people are doing. Everyone naturally plays off of each other a bit, and interestingly when everything is in black and white, we found it all naturally looks like it fits together. This is especially true if you’re using the tools provided.

SPEED, SPEED, SPEED
The name of the game is speed. 24 hour comic day (which is our inspiration) participants finish pages in 1 hour on average. Each page in this project might take longer, but if you can do something to make the pages go faster while still telling the story, do!

You have the hardest and most fun job in this event. The key is to make things easier for yourself:

• Keep things simple unless they are important to the story.
• Focus on characters.
• Use the minimal necessary detail to the backgrounds. 
• Work together with other artists, and find a process that builds on your strengths.

The key is to pick your battles – spend extra time when you’re working on important panels. 

1. Leave space for the word balloons. Speech is always at the top of the panel – they are balloons, and like balloons, they generally float upwards. It’s important to leave space for people to talk – so generally it’s best to place the characters’ heads mid-way or lower in the panel. The side effect of this is that you can spend less time on detail at the top of the panel. This will save time, and prevent from having awesome art covered up. 
2. Photo reference can be extremely helpful – if this is helpful you can use the internet, or run around outside if it helps. The latter will help connect the project to the city you’re in.
3. Ask your fellow participants to pose for you. This is a good way to get reference for specific, weird poses (and also potentially for the organizers to get photos they can use to promote the event which will haunt you forever… so, maybe make sure to ask the participants if they’re okay with that).
4. Try to draw the story you’re given in as few panels as you can. Example: If you have a shot of a gun on a table, and in the next panel your character is holding a gun people will understand what happened, and so you wouldn’t need to show a panel of the character picking the gun up.
5. Listen to the writers (they will be there so talk to them as much as possible – they do need to collaborate with other artists, as well, but without your product, there’s little they can do), but be yourself. They have the story in mind – they are the writers and the directors of this project. But you are the actor and cinematographer. You will decide how it comes out, and how it looks. Try to bring their vision to life as best you can. Make sure you understand them, and do what they need in a way that is true to yourself.

The fewer panels on the page, the less work will be necessary.

So if you want to include a lot of panels on a page of two people talking, consider digitally duplicating panels.

This is done all the time in professional comics, sometimes with minor changes here and there. The story is what’s important, so if you can tell a better story by using identical panels here and there, do it.

I recommend that you draw quick small sketch versions of your pages in advance. They are called thumbnail drawings (because they are roughly the size of a thumbnail. They do not need to be drawn on your thumbnail).

The whole team (writers and artists) can work together on layouts with these thumbnail drawings. Writers are recommended to defer to the artists where possible, if something the artist wants to draw fits within the structure of the larger story.

If you have two artists who are working independently on one scene, or on separate scenes with the same characters, it can really help them to lay out everything together in advance to avoid causing trouble for each other.

Remember that the writers have to figure out as group where the scenes go and in what order. They are taking the place of an editor in this project, so the more they can see before there is a final project, the less rework they will need to do.