Online Advice!

Hello all of you Afro Stachers! It’s good to see you all again! Welcome to another Super Fabulous Frog Blog! I know, I know! I missed last week’s blog. But I think I have a pretty good excuse: my alternator on my car died! The one thing that I keep hearing is so expensive to replace just died! Talk about stressful! So the calls started to local mechanics on how much it would be to fix it. So just over $450! Ouch! Wasn’t as bad as I thought, but still sucks! Then I wondered if I could do it myself. So I got online and talked live to a mechanic through a website for free. I described what happened and he verified that it was indeed my alternator. Next, I got onto YouTube to look for instructional videos on how to do it. Let me tell you, there are a whole lot. It actually didn’t look all the difficult. So I grabbed a buddy of mine who changed out an alternator or two and we got to work. Of course, the work wasn’t exactly like it was on the video, but we figured it out and got it changed out and now I’m driving around again! Whew! What would have cost me $450 ended up only being $116!

So what amazed me is that you can find anything on the internet these days. I was surprised that someone with basically no real experience with working on cars could fix something big. So I got curious about what else was online and did a little research.

Did you know that you can get writing advice online? And from big names in writing? People like Stephen King! There’s also tutorials on writing comic books! You know I’ll be spending much more of my time watching these!

There’s also videos on how to pencil and ink comic books. Heck, just plain how to draw videos are available for people like me! You know, those people who can make stick figures look bad! Do you remember watching How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way? Yeah, there’s the book, but there was a video that Stan Lee and John Buscema made. Even that’s on there for your viewing pleasure.

Still don’t think you have the talent to write or draw? What about lettering comics? You know, putting dialogue to the pictures from the script of the writer. Yep! That’s online too!

Coloring comic books is mostly done by computer these days. Most of the time, colorists use Photoshop. That’s right, you guessed it! You can learn how to color comic book pages with Photoshop online with YouTube video tutorials. Yes, I know there’s a whole lot of other things you can do with Photoshop, but we are talking comic books here!

I am just amazed at all the things you can learn about through YouTube alone! Everything you wanted to know about creating and self-publishing can be found online. I’m not saying you can do everything from online videos. I am pretty certain you cannot become a medical doctor solely from YouTube videos. Then again, would you trust a doctor who got his degree like that? But there is a world of education out there on the internet. Sure, you can’t trust all, but there’s still good stuff out there. Go look for it!

That’s about it for this week. Until next time, be good to each other!