You will also notice I decided to have white gaps between frames, and black borders a few points wide around them. Having said the above, remember that this is my first attempt at a comic! I don’t claim to be an expert! But I have found thinking about the eye flow down a page helpful. In the following example, the alignment is more down the page for interest, but the speech bubbles have been positioned to held draw the eye down the page. Horizontally aligned frames encourage sideways reading. The most important tip I picked up was to make sure it is clear how an eye should flow down a page. I normally go with rectangles because its easier, with the occasional exception to spice things up where I want to draw special attention.Įven with rectangles, changing the size and positioning makes a page more interesting. So how to lay out a page? Again, there are lots of guides on the web, and a lot of creativity can go into this stage. My covers are not attractive, but they do the purpose while I am learning the ropes. So I picked “Type” / “Create Outlines” which turns the highlited text into paths, I set “Stroke Width” to around 3pt, set the color, change the Object effects to include drop shadow (distance = 0). I also found a font I liked, but it was a bit light. The front page I found doing things like subtle drop shadows on the title text helps. I do create the occasional scene in Character Animator for higher resolution images (like the front cover with full height characters), but most of the time I just use my video projects as is. This made my life easier as well – I can share the same scenes and resolution for my cartoon videos as my comics. With 300dpi and a page being around 3075 pixels high, as I plan to put multiple frames down a page, 1080p images (1920×1080) came out just right. I don’t want to go too high in resolution however as it increases the file sizes. Also 200dpi I know looks pretty grainy from scanners, so to me 300dpi is on the edge of acceptability. So you want enough resolution for it still to look good zoomed in on a high resolution display. It has worked fine so far, but you have to remember if someone is viewing on a tablet, they have very high resolution screens these days, and the user may zoom in on the image. Personally I am a bit worried it might not be high enough. You might think 300dpi is pretty high for comics. As my artwork is in Illustrator (not Photoshop where you have to watch for pixilation), it scaled up pretty well. For my front page, I created a special scene in Character Animator with those dimensions so I could get full sized characters on the front page at good resolution. Taking those dimensions, it means a full screen image is 1987 x 3075 pixels. Do you want to display online? You might want to think about common table aspect ratios. Since my artwork is Anime inspired, I went with the Japanese Manga book size of 6.625 x 10.25 inches (although I don’t know where I got this from now!) Definitely think about this before you start – its hard to change later! For example, do you want to print a comic? Check standard sizes for printing (custom sizes can cost more). For paper size, I found there are a few standards. So what DPI (dots per inch) and resolution (pixel dimensions) are best for a comic? I thought I might try print it one day, so I targeted 300dpi (the limit of what most home printers can handle). My video is 1080p (1920×1080 pixels), which turned out to work well for comics as well. For me I use the same project as the actual videos I am also creating, so its frequently just a matter of going through the scenes and saving a series of screen shots. I use Character Animator to position the arms, legs, mouth positions, etc, then capture a single frame. (Sometimes I render out a video, then use Premier Pro to extract a frame instead – it works better with walk behaviors and physics behaviors.) In particular, I export PNG files from Character Animator using “Export Frame” from the menus. So to be consistent, I went with Adobe Indesign to lay out my pages. I use Adobe Draw on my iPad for drawing artwork, Adobe Illustrator for computer based editing and drawing (and assembling it into better structured layers), Adobe Character Animator to animate the characters, and so forth. I am not going to cover it all here, just what I found most useful. A few web searches brought up lots of good advice. How to lay out pages, how to draw and position speech bubbles, and so on. No voice actors required! I still want to finish the videos, but this blog is capturing some of my discoveries, as a newbie to comic artwork.įirst, there are numerous articles around on all sorts of topics with artwork. After hitting some delays with volunteer voice actors, I decided to have a go at turning my animation into a comic.
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