Posting on strips.ink
You are looking at your studio on FoundryInk, and at the project that holds your comic strips. This is the other half of strips.ink: same account, same work, more controls. Everything you post from your phone lands here, and everything you build here can reach the feed. This walk-through explains what you are standing in, how to make the next strip, and the three settings that decide whether anyone sees it.
1Where you are right now
strips.ink is the reading side. FoundryInk is the making side, and they are one account: the sign-in you use on strips.ink is this sign-in. Nothing to join, nothing to link up. When you post a strip from strips.ink it is filed into a real project in your own studio, and that project is the page you are on. Each strip is an asset inside it, and every asset is yours to keep editing long after it went up.
- Studio is your publishing house. Your personal one came with the account.
- Project is a series. Your strips share one, so they stay together and share their settings.
- Asset is one strip. Open it and you get the editor, the cover, the price, the rating and the Shorts switch.
2What a strip is here
A comic strip is a cover plus an ordered set of images. The images are called segments, and each one is a panel. That is the entire model, and it holds whether you have one drawing or twenty. There is no separate one-panel kind, which is deliberate: a single image posted from strips.ink becomes a one-segment strip, so you can add panels to it later without starting again.
- One panel. A single drawing that carries the whole idea. Still a comic strip, still extendable.
- Several panels, in an order. Two or more images read in the order you set. Each gets its own beat on screen in the feed.
The feed frame is vertical 9:16, about 1080 by 1920. Draw to that and your panels fill the screen edge to edge. Anything else is shown on a blurred fill rather than with black bars, so a wide newspaper-shaped strip works fine, it is just smaller in the frame. One post from strips.ink carries up to 20 panels; the editor here has no limit at all.
Making the next one
Two routes to the same asset. Pick by whether the art already exists.
Post it straight from strips.ink and skip everything else. Tap upload, pick your image or several at once (the order you pick them is the order they read in), give it a title if you want one, and post.
The uploader does the whole job: it creates the asset, attaches your panels in order, makes your first panel the cover, sets it free, turns on Shorts and publishes it, all in one pass. Those last three are the settings people get wrong by hand, and this route gets them right for you.
While you are there, open Describe the art and write one line per panel. That is the alt text, and it is the only moment you will be standing there to write it.
Make a Comic Strip asset in your studio when you want to reorder panels, write captions, replace artwork, or work across several sittings.
In your project, choose New asset. On Asset basics, under Type, pick Comic Strip: "A cover plus an ordered set of strip images (one or many), read online. No playback." The next step is Pricing & access, where you can tick Free to read online right away, which is one of the three feed settings already done. Then Finish, which creates the strip as a draft.
Open the asset. Its content has two views, Artwork and Publish. The strip is built on Artwork. Upload a cover on the Cover card of the Publish view before you try to publish: a comic strip has no natural cover to fall back on, so publishing without one is refused with "Add a cover image before publishing."
4The editor, control by control
Open a strip and the editor has three tabs. Segments is your panels, and the heading counts them. Settings is the reader layout: Vertical scroll stacks the segments in one scrollable column, Paged (one segment per screen) gives one at a time with prev/next and arrow keys. That is the layout for reading it here on FoundryInk; the feed paces itself and ignores it. Validate checks the strip is publishable and names what is missing, and "All good. Ready to publish." means the content side is done.
- Add segment(s) uploads one or more panels. Select several files at once to add them in order.
- Move up / Move down reorders a panel. There is no dragging, the arrows are the whole mechanism. This order is the reading order everywhere, including the feed.
- Segment N label (optional) is a private name so you can tell rows apart while editing. Readers never see it.
- Caption (optional) is visible text printed below the panel and read by everybody. It comments ON the art and assumes you can see it.
- Alt text (optional, screen readers only) is what the panel shows and says, spoken instead of the image. Never on screen, and never the same words as the caption.
- Manage image replaces, adjusts or removes that panel's artwork.
- Delete segment removes the panel.
5The three things that decide whether anyone sees it
This is the step people get wrong, and the reason is structural: publishing and appearing in the feed are two different gates. A strip can be finished, correct and live and still never show up, because free, published and Shorts on are feed rules, not publish rules. The feed is default-deny and nothing turns the opt-in on for you.
- At least one panel. On the Segments tab. Publishing refuses an empty asset, and Validate says so before you find out the hard way.
- A cover image. The Cover card on the Publish view. Posting from strips.ink makes your first panel the cover automatically.
- The series is public. On the project page, Visibility & discovery, the Public choice. A private project publishes fine and then never appears, which is the hardest version of this to debug.
- Free to read. The Publish view, under Pricing & access, the Free to read online checkbox. The feed is a discovery surface, so it only carries free work.
- Published. If your studio uses the review workflow, move the status through Submit for review and Approve; either way, finish with Publish. Approved is not published.
- Shorts turned on. The Shorts switch beside the Publish heading, labelled Show in Shorts. Off by default on every asset, forever, until you move it.
One nuance on the Shorts switch: you can flip it whenever you like, even on a draft. The free and published rules decide when it takes effect, not whether the switch will move. A note beside it tells you what is still outstanding, Free assets only if the strip is paid, or Shows once published if it is not live yet, and its hover says the same: it takes effect once the asset is free and published.
6How long each panel stays on screen
Every strip in the feed is paced like a story: each panel shows for a set time, then the feed moves on by itself. You set that time per strip, anywhere from 2 to 10 seconds, and it defaults to 5. The control is the small dropdown that appears next to the Shorts switch once the switch is on. It has no printed label, the values read "2s" through "10s", and it is called Time per page.
Take the long half. A comic is the slowest thing in that feed, because the reader is not watching an image go past, they are reading every word you drew into it, and the timer does not wait for them. For a single panel carrying a whole joke, 8 seconds. For panels in a sequence, 6 seconds each is usually enough, because each panel holds less and arrives with the last one already read.
7Rating your own work
Every asset carries a content rating, and setting it honestly is your job. Nobody rates it for you and it is not a formality: the rating governs whether the art is shown or masked behind its cover, and whether readers under 18 are shown it at all. You set it on the Publish view, under Pricing & access, with the control labelled Content rating.
- Leaving it on Inherit project default takes whatever the series is set to, which is usually what you want once the series is right.
- The two restricted rungs are R (NSFW) and X (Explicit). Work at either is masked in Browse and hidden from under-18s.
- The control tells you what readers will actually see underneath it, so you are never guessing.
Rate up rather than down if you are unsure. An under-rated strip is a reader's problem; an over-rated one is only yours.
8Alt text, and why a comic needs it more than anything else
On most of the web a screen reader has something to work with: headings, paragraphs, a transcript, a caption track. A comic has none of that. Every word you wrote is inside a picture. A blind reader arriving at your strip with no alt text gets an image, silence, and nothing else. Not a reduced version of your strip. Nothing.
- Say what happens, and include the words in the art, because nothing else carries them.
- One line per panel, not one per post. Several images are several segments, each held on screen for its own beat, so a single description would be right about the first panel and wrong about the rest.
- Do not retype the title. A screen reader has already announced it, and hearing it twice is worse than hearing it once.
- Keep it to about 500 characters. Not a database limit, a listening limit: alt text is announced as one uninterrupted run with no way to skim or re-read.
Both routes give you somewhere to write it. On strips.ink it is the Describe the art field under your panels. In the studio, each panel has its own Alt text box under its caption, with a character counter. Neither ever prefills from the caption, on purpose: a filled-in field that repeats an aside looks finished and describes nothing. It is never required and it can never stop a post going up, which is exactly why it needs a section of its own.
9Getting it onto a shelf
strips.ink groups the feed into topic tabs, and each tab draws on several genre codes at once, because creators reach for different words for the same thing. An untagged strip still appears on All and is still read by everyone who follows you, it just never lands on a shelf somebody is browsing.
- Tag the series, not each strip. On the project page, under Visibility & discovery, the Genres row is a set of chips.
- The first one you pick is the primary category shown in Browse.
- Assets inherit the series tags, so tagging the one project that holds your strips tags every strip in it, including the next one.
The shelves worth aiming at for short comics are Gag-a-day, Comic strip, Humor, Comedy, Satire, Slice of life, Drama, Funny animals, Romance, Action, Adventure, Superhero, Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror and Mystery. If none of them fit, open More genres and pick the accurate one.
10Save a draft on your phone
Posting from your phone but the strip is not ready to go live? Tap Save as a draft instead of Post to Strip. Your artwork uploads and is kept safe in your own studio, out of the feed, and it shows as a Draft at the top of Your strips. The confirmation says it plainly: Saved as a draft. It is not in the feed, nobody can see it until you publish it. From there, Finish it now takes you to your strips to publish, or you leave it and come back later.
11When readers talk back
Your strip carries a comment thread, and it is a real conversation, not a flat list. Readers Reply to each other, and a reply nests under the comment it answers (the composer shows Replying to whoever you are answering), with Show N replies and Hide N replies to fold a busy thread. Anyone can Like a comment, a reader can Report one, and you can Delete your own. There is even a Reply with a strip button, so someone can answer your strip with a whole published strip of their own, an ink-over or a response, which shows in the thread as Answered with a strip.
12Make an animated strip
A strip does not have to hold still. When you start a new post, the kind chooser offers two things: Comic strip (panels you draw or upload) and Animation (Frames on a timeline. Opens the animation studio.). Pick Animation and you get the full studio, scenes, rows, and frames on a timeline, the very same one FoundryInk uses. It is a different kind from a comic strip (frames, not panels), it wants a tablet or a desktop rather than a phone, and it publishes once it has at least one drawn frame instead of needing a cover. Like a strip, a free, published animation can ride the Shorts feed, where it plays to its own end rather than on a page timer.
13Where it lives now
Two surfaces, doing two different jobs. On strips.ink, your account page lists everything you have posted under Your strips, with what is happening to each one: Live, Draft, or waiting on your account. That is the page to check when a strip has gone up and you cannot find it in the feed, because it tells you the difference between "not surfaced yet" and "not actually live". A brand-new post is not guaranteed to be on the first screen of a paced feed.
On FoundryInk, the asset is yours to keep working on. Add panels, rewrite captions, replace artwork, change the rating, adjust the display time, unpublish it. The strip in the feed follows the asset. And if you have not claimed a handle on strips.ink yet, do: it gives your strips a public page at your own address, which is the link worth sharing.
The feed checklist
Six things, in the order the work happens. All six true and your strip is in the feed. Miss one and it is published, correct, and invisible. Saved on this device.
Quick questions
No. It is one account across both sites. The sign-in you use on strips.ink is your FoundryInk sign-in, which is why posting a strip from your phone lands in a studio you already own.
Almost always the Shorts switch, or the project being Private. Run the six-item checklist above in order. Publishing and appearing in the feed are two separate gates, and the second one is default-deny.
You can flip the Show in Shorts switch at any time, even on a draft; it is not disabled. What the free and published rules gate is the effect: a strip only actually appears in the Shorts feed once it is free to read online and published. A note beside the switch (Free assets only, or Shows once published) tells you what is still outstanding.
Yes. A single image posted from strips.ink is a one-segment comic strip, not a flat picture, exactly so you can open it here and add segments later. Reorder with Move up and Move down, then republish.
A caption is printed under the panel and read by everybody; it comments on the art and assumes you can see it. Alt text is spoken instead of the image to a reader who cannot see it, and it has to carry the words drawn into the panel. Never write the same thing in both.
No. Anything off-aspect is shown on a blurred fill rather than letterboxed, so a wide strip reads fine, just smaller in the frame. Authoring at vertical 9:16 fills the screen edge to edge, so it is a recommendation and never a requirement.
Up to 20 from the strips.ink uploader, which is a phone-upload ceiling rather than a limit on the format. Building the asset here in the studio, there is no cap at all.
If it is a long read with chapters, yes: make it a comic, which is a separate asset kind built for that. A strip is something quick, seen between two other strips on a phone.
Post it, and be seen posting it
You know what a strip is here, both ways to make one, and the six things that stand between a finished strip and a strip somebody reads. The rest is drawing the next one.
What next?