An Experimental Life

As mentioned before (I know I keep saying it, but if I don't someone will inevitably miss it) this tutorial assumes that you already know how to produce whatever kind of artwork you intend to use, so we're focusing on the technical side here; things like dimensions and resolutions. Even if you plan to do a photo comic or use computer graphics, read this section anyway. There is advice that will work for you, as well.

Art size and format
Our pre-art process is pretty simple, and works regardless of what kind of comic you choose to do. I come up with a script (as mentioned before, more about the process of writing a comic in another tutorial coming soon), then block out the action in a rough storyboard that is little more than blobs and shapes with notes detailing what is happening in each frame and blocking out where I plan to insert dialogue later. Then one of us (usually Shan) does the actual pencils and inks for that day's strip.

Before you can do your art, of course, you have to choose a size and format. Do you want to do a three or four-panel-across single-row comic? A two-column, two row? A full comic book page? Maybe even a single-panel comic like The Far Side? There is no right or wrong answer here, and when we get into templates and scanning we'll talk about factors that might influence your final decisions, but in general you'll want to keep your art at or under 13 inches wide. Any larger and you run the risk of losing detail when you shrink things down. If you find you cannot fit all your envisioned panels in a space that wide, consider a multi-row layout.

Standard drawn comic size is 13 inches wide by 4 inches high (this obviously gets shrunk down later), but you're not limited to that, especially on the web. As I said, much larger than 13 inches in your original art is probably a bad idea, but the exact proportions are less important now than they used to be. More and more comics, both on and off the web, are breaking the old rules. You will want to work with proportions that will be conducive to layouts in standard book formats, though, if you ever intend to publish your work on dead trees.

A couple of things to keep in mind when doing your art: Leave room for dialogue, and pay attention to the order in which characters appear in the frame, and how their placement relates to your planned dialogue. You won't always be able to place the characters in order in which they'll speak, but it is a good thing to do whenever practiceable.

We draw BCK at about 10.5 wide by 4 inches high. Once the pencils are done, we go over them carefully with a Sakura Pigma Micron 02 (.30mm) drawing pen. Then we take the plastic eraser (again, available at pretty much any office supply store) and erase the pencil lines. Then we go back over those pen lines to both make certain we darken any lines that may have been "grayed out" by the eraser, and to vary the thickness of various lines to add dimension.