WebComic Banner Help.

[Vanilla Chai Latte]

Ello'
My roommate and I just started making a webcomic and we still unsure on what to do for the banner and/or avatar
I made this:

to promote it on my profile but we don't know what to do for the banner or how else to make the page... prettier... some tips or ideas would be really helpful .u.

The comic is hand drawn then colored in watercolor. The first few were just photographed until we got the scanner working again and the only computer use was for the speech bubbles so no it's not supposed to be highly detailed if you're wondering about the... quality.

[Kyousouka]

I'd pass that banner by if I saw it somewhere. The composition is very weak, it doesn't grab me at all. Worse, the pixelated look makes it look like you either don't care or don't know how to make an image look good, which does not say good things about the comic.

Focus on strong visual elements in your banner. Learn about composition. Use these things to improve both your comic pages, and the banner. At present, both are rather boring because you're just drawing the characters/events without thinking about how you can use the overall composition to help convey information/tone.

Consider the colours you're using. Are you sure that a plain white background accurately represents the tone of the story? If you're going for blood-on-white, then make the blood more white. It may be more realistic for thickly pooled blood to be dark, but it doesn't suggest "blood" as well as a brighter red would.

Try to use the same style of artwork in your banners and other advertising materials as you do in the comic itself. False advertising, even when it's minor like this, tends to be a turn-off for readers.

This is a bit of a nitpick, but try to avoid situations where you have identical glyphs (letters) next to each other in fonts that are meant to look hand-written or otherwise organic. It looks artificial. In words with doubled letters, like "doll", modify one of the letters. Some professional fonts meant to look handwritten offer multiple versions of each letter specifically for these situations.

On the subject of text, I know this is getting off-topic, but please put more love into the lettering in your comic. The font you're using is hard to take seriously, Comic Sans is pretty much the stereotypical "this is an awful comic" font, and you might be losing potential readers just by using it.
Your text is also arranged rather poorly, the text doesn't sit comfortably in the bubbles and the bubbles don't lead the eye in the right order in some cases.

[Vanilla Chai Latte]

Kyousouka

Ah yes thank you for the constructive criticism, very helpful.

Yes the banner I have up there is terrible I know, all I had was MSpaint which is pitiful to use but it wasn't meant to be permanent anyway, nor am I the artist so no, I don't know what I'm doing xD I'm just trying to promote it and get her but in gear...

Sam has changed the font later in the comic, or at least that's what I was told.....
also thanks for those links I'll be sure to share them with her, and hopefully we can improve this comic greatly xP We're also using sad excuses as for editing since the only computer with photoshop is dead. When we showed this comic to friends/classmates/etc all they said was "it's good" so again thank you for the detailed review

[blueRose98]

Vanilla Chai Latte

Ello'
My roommate and I just started making a webcomic and we still unsure on what to do for the banner and/or avatar
I made this:

to promote it on my profile but we don't know what to do for the banner or how else to make the page... prettier... some tips or ideas would be really helpful .u.

The comic is hand drawn then colored in watercolor. The first few were just photographed until we got the scanner working again and the only computer use was for the speech bubbles so no it's not supposed to be highly detailed if you're wondering about the... quality.

i'm not a skilled banner maker, but i know how to make things from scratch. to animate your banners, you can go to lunapic.com, and to make a small gif, go to gickr.com. both are free and easy.
as far as prettying up a post,(see right link in sig for examples) i use gifs and get some interesting fonts from glitter-graphics.com, i also gradient text from tektek.org smile
~happy bannering smile

[Vanilla Chai Latte]

blueRose98

Thanks for the advice and links I am aware of how to make those
it's not for "prettying up" a gaia(or other forum) post but thanks anyway :]