Many teenagers find outlets for creative expression, such as visual arts or writing. Junior Paula Sipin does both, and her short story webtoon she submitted to a contest this summer made her a published creator on Line Webtoon.
Line Webtoon is a publishing platform for webtoons, a type of fully-colored digital comic. Since launching globally in 2014, Line Webtoon has amassed content across different genres from creators around the world. Sipin has been taking art seriously since she turned 13 years old, and would go to Line Webtoon to read comics, she said. She first heard about the Line Webtoon contest through Instagram this past summer, and decided to create and submit her webtoon, Sipin added.
“Well, the main thing was that I already had a short story in mind, and I always wanted to make a webtoon,” Sipin said in a Zoom interview. “So I [was] just kind of like, ‘You know what? I’m going to try this out’ because I had the short story in mind. And I just thought this was an opportunity.”
The webtoon she submitted was not her first attempt at making a webtoon for the contest, Sipin said. She had two ideas for a webtoon but did not like the product she made using her first idea, so she started over with her other idea, she added.
That other idea resulted in a psychological horror webtoon titled “Phantom Guilt.” “I was actually listening to a song from Zach Callison called ‘Phantom Love,’ and I was like, ‘I really like the word “phantom,”’ but what other words can I use to make it interesting?” Sipin said. “‘Phantom Guilt,’ it sounded like an interesting title for a short horror story, so I just kind of based it off on that.”
She spent much of her summer writing and making the art for “Phantom Guilt,” Sipin said. She began by writing out the story of the webtoon and dividing it into five chapters, she said. Once she had a solid storyline and script, Sipin started storyboarding and making the art, she added.
Sipin’s art went through several layers of artistic elements before her webtoon was ready to publish. “I just kind of sketch out their movements and the camera angles,” Sipin said. “And then after that I do line art. And then I send the line arts to my sister so she can do the flat colorings. And then she sends those back to me so I can start shading and adding the backgrounds and adding the text messages and final effects.”
The story of “Phantom Guilt” explores the five stages of grief through the main character, Fonias, as he deals with his brother’s murder of their parents. However, the story leaves much to the reader’s interpretation, Sipin said.
“I don’t think I meant to have a message because it was just there for entertainment,” Sipin said. “But … I kind of want to leave it that way so that you can see different people with their own different struggles, because people deal with grief very differently.”
“Phantom Guilt” currently holds a 9.5 out of 10 rating and has over 1400 views on Line Webtoon. Sipin said she feels motivated to create more webtoons from the positive comments she has received.
“I got a lot of comments on the art style,” Sipin said. “I also got a lot of support from my friends … I put like a code [into “Phantom Guilt”], like a Caesar’s [cipher] I think, and a lot of people actually managed to decipher it, and I was actually really impressed.”
Sipin is not just a webtoon creator, but also an animator. Two years ago, she started taking characters from her favorite series and animated them singing songs in skits, Sipin said. She also participates in projects with other animators, Sipin added.
“I had a moment where I was obsessed with ‘Invader Zim,’ so I made animatics with ‘Invader Zim’ characters,” Sipin said. “Right now, I’m hyper-fixating on ‘My Hero Academia,’ so I’m making ‘My Hero Academia’ animatics.”
Regarding the future of her art, she is planning to create another webtoon, Sipin said. This webtoon will be a completely different genre from “Phantom Guilt,” she added.
“Before ‘Phantom Guilt’ … I was planning on a long-term webtoon that has a much longer storyline,” Sipin said. “And I recently got back into that because I made that a year ago … and I am now revamping it. I’m rewriting it and giving it a different art style. So I am going to be making that into a webtoon.”