Impact panel

An impact panel should convey a strong sense of action. To this end, speed lines are used often, but there are other ways to make a panel more dynamic.

This is the original hand-inked panel for an impact panel I drew recently.
Curved speed lines have been drawn to show the direction of the action of the hand and small explosion-like lines have been drawn around the area of impact. A big sound effect conveys the strength of the impact.
Small pieces of debris have been added as extra dynamic elements. A common trick when drawing impact and action panels is to arrange pieces of debris or other flying elements in a way that follows the direction of the action in the panel. Here the debris originates from the punch, so the direction of action is outwards from the hand.


While there is a sense of impact is present in the original inks, I further improvements were made digitally. Focus lines were added in Manga Studio and more pieces of debris were drawn long the direction of the focus lines.
For those who are interested in small details, in the original inks a piece of debris has one square side perpendicular to the impact lines (the big one underneath the 'A'). I felt that instead of helping the action, the perpendicular side hemmed the flow, so I changed the shape of the debris in the panel below.

A big thing that needed more work was the sound effect. A simple outline is neither particularly dynamic nor contains any weight or impact, so it needed to be filled. Instead of using solid black I chose to once again follow the focus lines of the panel, making the sound effect a part of the action.