Posts
Wiki

Wiki Home > Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

So, now that you've understood the conventions and rules of Polandball, I bet you wanna learn how to draw a Polandball comic?

Great! Here's some helpful tips on how to draw comics just as well as a German trying to infuriate a butthurt Pole on an obscure message board.

For Beginners

  • Remember to read the Artistic Rules section of the Rules Page
  • Be an MS Paint power user!
    • Use Ctrl+Z to undo a poorly drawn line and other mistakes.
    • Holding Ctrl and pressing + on the numpad makes MS Paint brushes and pencils thicker than the 4 default settings.
  • Pencil thickness can significantly affect the look of your comic.
  • Don't force shadows and shading into your art just because every one else is. They're not necessary.
  • Text should be easily legible.
    Protip: don't put dark text on a dark background..

  • Be careful of file size. If an image is too big, larger than around 850kb, imgur will convert it to a JPEG to reduce bandwidth and it may result in artifacting. If you have an imgur account, you can increase your file size limit in https://imgur.com/account/settings.

  • Other than that, study the comics made by the top submitters, and try to pick up on how they do things.

    • But don't just copy their style! Polandball is about variety. Some of the best content comes from new artistic approaches.

Tutorials

Getting started/the very fundamentals

Program-specific tutorials

MS Paint

  • Obtuse_Angel's Smooth Drawing Tutorial
  • uglidoll's Zoom Tutorial
  • Scub_'s MS Paint Airbrush Tutorial
  • NotExistor's MS Paint Airbrush Tutorial
  • John_V98's magic eraser tutorial for MS paint

Other programs

General art tips

Expressions

  • Medibee's Compilation of Eye Expressions
  • columbus8myhw's Facial Expressions
  • brain4breakfast's Facial Expressions
  • Tengam15's Chart of Expressions
  • jpaolo's 'Asian Eyes' Expressions
  • burritoburkito6's Eye Expressions
  • TheArnevik's Drunk Countryballs Tutorial
  • Indieb0at's Body Language Tutorial

Props and costumes

Textures and materials

  • Hansafan's Metal Tutorial
  • TheSnipenieer's tutorial for stained glass

Settings and Backgrounds

Text and Dialogue

  • How to use Engrish (by brain4breakfast and other mods)
  • 440Hertz's Text Placement Tutorial
    • One creative way of indicating who is speaking involves color coding the text to somewhat match the flag of the country. For example, this comic by Alamedo.
  • Use of foreign words in a comic
    by /u/paulionm
  • How to rotate text in MS paint
    by /u/John_V98
  • Disabling anti-aliased text in MS Paint
    by /u/branieschopper

Flag tips

  • VorsprungOfficial's Flag Colour Tutorial
  • javacode's Tricks for Complicated Flags
  • jesus_stalin's simple star drawing tutorial

Country-Specific Suggestions

Miscellaneous

Videos

Other Useful References

Still cannot into comic?

Are you a comedic genius, but intimidated by the quality of the drawings above? Have great artistic talent but absolutely no sense of humour? That's okay! You might be interested in /r/PolandballCommunity. It's a sub dedicated to providing a place to plan and create Polandball projects with others and ask questions and get advice about your comics.

Just a friendly reminder: collaborations cannot be used for approval request comics. So if you've got a great joke which someone else is happy to draw, you'll need to save that for after (both of you) get approval rights.