We present a communication support system, namely \textit{We-toon}, that can bridge the webtoon writers and artists during sketch revision (i.e., character design and draft revision). In the highly iterative design process between the webtoon writers and artists, writers often have difficulties in precisely articulating their feedback on sketches owing to their lack of drawing proficiency. This drawback makes the writers rely on textual descriptions and reference images found using search engines, leading to indirect and inefficient communications. Inspired by a formative study, we designed \textit{We-toon} to help writers revise webtoon sketches and effectively communicate with artists. Through a GAN-based image synthesis and manipulation, \textit{We-toon} can interactively generate diverse reference images and synthesize them locally on any user-provided image. Our user study with 24 professional webtoon authors demonstrated that \textit{We-toon} outperforms the traditional methods in terms of communication effectiveness and the writers' satisfaction level related to the revised image.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3526113.3545612
The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology