Less can indeed be more......

Drawing sequential artwork in any form is challenging, stressful at times, but very rewarding.  I'm not going to go in a lecture to any extent about this but I really wanted to comment on something I see a great deal and certainly have done in the past.  It is a huge faux pas you want to avoid.  DO NOT draw your artwork panel by panel in all medium shots.  It is very natural to do this because of how we visualize our world, but you must think in a cinematic way when laying out panels or pages.  There are a number of reasons to use many angles both uber far and uber close.  Firstly is it adds a ton of appeal to your pages.  Secondly and more important is it saves you tons of work.  Learning to do your pages this way allows you flexibility and often less is indeed more.  Also your pages with have more emotional depth as well and visible impact.  This also allows you to control the pace of the story allowing you to speed the reader up and slow him or her down.  It's a very powerful tool in that respect.  Lastly know that publishers can spot this instantly and consider endless pages full of medium shots a real flaw.  Some even call it a 'rookie' mistake. They also know that you'll never finish your pages on time.   I think it can happen to even a veteran artist at times.  Sometimes it just reflects your mood about a scene or a story you are working on.  Sometimes it's even ok to do a slow moving page like this and works well for that, but it really is to be avoided throughout your work.  Try to really vary your panels up a lot and think in terms of a dynamic camera and you really will do faster, smarter and simply better sequential artwork.  An eye can say as much as a face.....Hope this is a helpful bit of insight.  Best Wishes and Blessings to all!

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As an aside to this try writing short one or two page stories and drawing them.  It forces you to vary up your shots.  It's a good exercise and teaches you to work on one or two pages at a time thinking of each as a mini chapter or story with it's own problem, climax and conclusion.  When I go through a script I usually chop them up this way.  I also like to sometimes draw all my panels for a pages or series on separate sheets of paper, then either cutting them up and pasting them together(yes paper and glue was how they did that before digital)or just using Photoshop to composite them.