In case you’ve missed my posts for my development process for making Incident at the Game Store, here’s an index of links to all the parts in the process. I hope that any aspiring comic makers will look through my articles to learn how to make comics themselves. Good luck and keep drawing!
The inking is done, the lettering is done, everything is nearly done! Now it’s time to put it together for printing and showing off!!
At this point I can go two ways: I can set up the for printing physical copies or I can set it up for sharing and downloading online, phones, or tablets. For the moment though, this is how I set it up for full resolution 300 dpi printing and general purpose use.
So when setting up for printing, I use Ka-Blam for printing my comics. I make sure to adjust and build my all of my comic pages to their specifications. They’re even nice enough to provide a template they use for printing and cutting.
Arrange your art to this template and shift and scale the edges of your panes; to the edge of the live and margin area. Keep all of your pages in that same document so you can use the Multiply Blending Option or Lowering Opacity to keep the panels and art uniform in proportions between pages.
I have all of my pages gathered from the start to export. First, I begin in Manga Studio by Exporting a Single Layer as a PNG file.
Make sure you make a New Folder somewhere you can find it and name it something consistent and memorable so others can find it and access it for printing out.
So it turns out I need to draw a cover of my comic book to print it out and sell it to people. Imagine that.
I’ll be going through the entire process of making the cover for Incident at the Game Store. This much more compressed and I did a majority of my coloring work on my Art Stream.
I entirely used a Size 1 Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable brush to ink this with Carbon Black Liquitex Acrylic ink. Since it’s a cover and the printer I use, Ka-Blam Printing, allows color covers with black and white interiors, I’ll actually be coloring this in Manga Studio!
I will begin, like anything else, by making small thumbnail sketch to figure out the composition. As I do this, I’m trying to remember the point of this comic story, which is a simple funny potentially true story that veers into fiction for humor. Not much character development, no deep themes, just a straightforward joke(that I blew months of time on…)
Lettering is definitely a discipline that I’ve never been taught when I was in college. But, after hunting for a variety of articles and getting some tips the few pro letterers I encounter in my life, I’ve managed to teach myself how to letter with some amount of competence. I’m lettering this as I prep my ink stuff as I don’t plan to color the comic at the moment.
The first step is to save my cropped unedited artwork as high res PNGs. Since, I’m making them with print in mind, I need the images in as high of a resolution as possible so it won’t get hurt too much when I reduce the final comic down to print or web.
I usually do my lettering in Adobe Illustrator as it gives me more options to mess with my text than just Photoshop or Manga Studio. I make a new file with six art boards to the pixel size of the pages I plan to import.
This was originally going to be in the digital touch ups step of my series of articles of my comic process, but it was getting a bit long, so I broke this into a separate article!
It’s time to utilize Manga Studio to do something personally experimental. I’ll be adding screen tones to give some of my art a grey tone with only black and white dots. I’m mainly working from a tutorial on screentoning from Whyt Manga. Also check out his comic, Apple Black!
In Manga Studio 5 EX there is a Material Tab. It would be in the default UI but if it is not, it can be accessed from Window>Material>Material[Dot]. You will find a variety of textures and screen tones from this tab, and you can make custom ones, which is what I’m doing.
I’ve finished my Inking and it’s time to touch up my stuff. It’s more or less my technique of how I edit black line art on the computer.
I usually scan my pages in a PDF format at 600 dpi and I use Photoshop to import the PDF pages.
It’s inking time! Since I’m inking my own art, I blue lined my pages making it faster to get to the inking!
I want to ink this comic with the nibs that I have at hand: a Speedball #513EF Nib, Zebra Manga G nib, and a Speedball #101 Imperial nib. I still have a holder from my crappy set of Speedball calligraphy nibs. I’m not sure if the holders make that huge of a difference other than being able to hold certain sized nibs, so I wouldn’t know if this it’s any special. I use all of this with a large 16 FlOz Bottle of Blick Black Cat Waterproof India Ink.
