Previously On

I figured I should start talking, so lets talk. I'd learned quite a few things about making a comic prior to starting this blog. I've known this is what I'm going to do since I started high school, and it's the one area of study I've been able to excel at. I've picked up many many books on how to draw comics, learned a thing or two about putting them together, and recently picked up a few useful tools for printing them.

First off, for anyone who's used to working on, say, Deviantart, and assumes shrinking the image down to print size will work for a printed physical copy. It doesn't. Well, not alone. My current scanned scans at 300 DPI automatically, so I'd imagine other modern scanners would too, but my older one, the one I scanned and worked on a pair of pages for one of the prologue stories, scanned in at around 72 DPI. Which looks fine, on a computer. Once you print it, though, it's pixelated to all hell. You want to do at least 300 DPI if you plan on printing your work.

Second, and I find this incredibly important. I went to a class with a bunch of people who couldn't draw, and one who could. When I looked at the people who couldn't draw, I noticed something. Most of them were very opposed to doing thumbnails. Thumbnails are little preview sketches of the final product, for those not in the know. And because they were so opposed to it they simply didn't do well. They could get the layout and the poses right but they were limiting themselves on what they could do because they wanted to work fast, not smart. Take your time and the pages look fantastic.

Third, solidify your line work. I ink with a tablet on Photoshop, and recently I started inking a character design I started ages ago. But I liked the design and I threw it in  to fix up. Something that's changed for me since I drew it was that my lines have gotten a lot more solid. Trying to ink that older character was a nightmare. In pencils it looked fine, it just looked like someone was sketching things out, a little messy but hardly noticeable. In ink you noticed every stray strand. I work on a tablet, so maybe zooming in might have been the problem, and if you're a talented inker as well as a penciller you can work on you own stuff just fine. But having solid lines, especially if you're sending it away to get inked, is incredibly helpful.

Well, that's all for today. I should have aforementioned character pic up tonight, assuming the shelves I'm installing don't fight me.