An Experimental Life

We'll cover suggested sizes, scanning resolutions, etc., here, with a little bit of advice for people who--however talented they may be--don't have experience with comic layout. Art size and format 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 a little under 13 inches wide. Any larger and you run the risk of losing all that detail you so painstakingly included. If you find you cannot fit all your envisioned panels in a space that wide, consider a multi-row layout. It may help in choosing a format (if you haven't already) to take a few of your scripts and rough them out with circles and blobs and notes to see what format you think will best serve your needs and to get a good feel for how much room you will need for dialogue. Standard newspaper 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. 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, and you don't want to force it, but it is a handy thing to do whenever practiceable. Different people have different processes for actually drawing their art. Some do everything digitally, but most people still draw by hand. You'll develop your own workflow, but here's an example one. (YMMV.) 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 a plastic eraser--NOT a rubber one--that you can buy at pretty much any office supply store, and erase the pencil lines. After erasing the pencils, we go back over those pen lines to 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. The main reason for the plastic eraser is that rubber ones tend to smear more. Go ahead and get a couple of comics drawn, but don't do too many yet, as you'll want to do a couple of tests to see how everything works together. If for some reason you have to redo your art, the less you have done, the less frustrating it will be. You can do your frame lines either by hand or later on the computer. We often do them in light pencil as a guide and erase them before scanning. Go ahead and scan the comics you've drawn at 600 DPI. No, you're not going to post at 600 DPI, but it will be much easier to make any adjustments you need at high resolution, and you'll want high-res copies if you ever decide to go to print, since while 72 DPI looks fine on a computer monitor, it looks horrible in print. If you're scanning line art, use grayscale as opposed to black and white or color, even if you plan to add color on the computer later. Some lines. despite your best efforts, will get a little smudged or grayed out, and you still want to capture those. Once you have two or three comics scanned in, open them in Photoshop (or Gimp, or whatever you're using), and make any adjustments you need to. For instance, with line art--especially if you were paying attention and scanned in grayscale--Open your levels control (You can use contrast and brightness, but levels gives you more control), and adjust things until your art is crisp, clean, and smudge-free. If you're doing any computer coloring, now is the time. (If you scanned in line art, you'll convert to CMYK or RGB first.) If you don't have frame lines drawn, create a transparent layer on top and use the pencil tool (or whatever other method you prefer) to make them now. Don't worry about perfection yet--This is just a test run. Once you've got all that done, save a copy, reduce the resolution to 72 DPI, then reduce the image size to whatever size you plan to post at. Does it still look good? If so, optimize it (If you're using Photoshop select "Save for web") to get the file size down as much as possible without making it look horrible. Make a note of the width and height in pixels. You'll need that info later. If you're going to post black and white line art or block color, you'll want to save in GIF or PNG8 format. If you're using a lot of shading and blending of colors, you'll want to save in JPG or PNG24. If you're happy with the results so far, it's time to build a template file. The template file you are about to create will be a huge time-saver later on. Move on to the next page to see how.