Now, we're going to go ahead and move in to page layout.
Just as we started out rough with designing our character and designing our story, we're
going to want to start out with a rough design of our page.
This leaves you free to make any of your mistakes and get them out of the way before you finally
start putting down ink.
So, the best way to do that is to start out with something that I like to call [xx] and
you may have heard that term before but it basically means just making a rough sketch
roughly out of what you're going to do.
I like to go ahead and just lay out the shape of my page so I know what format I'm working
in.
I like to work, kind of a traditional comic 11 by 17 and I get that set up and then I
start figuring out where my panels are going to go on the page.
The panels are the most important part of laying out a page of comics, so do not rush
over this.
Do not leave anything to chance.
These panels are going to help communicate the pace of your story and they're going to
help keep things clear for your readers so they can follow along.
I like to stay with the pretty basic panel layout, I know there's tons of fancy stuff
that you could get into but especially if you're just starting out, it often helps to
keep things pretty basic.
You don't have to have crazy shape panels or like things busting the panel board or
whatever, that can get really confusing especially if you're not familiar with using it.
So try and keep things pretty simple, pretty clear, at least when you start out.
The more confidence you get with it, the more you can go ahead and move on.
I'm going to show you two different ways to create a panel border quickly and easily.
The first one is to use the spots ruler.
Go down here and select this icon and make sure it's the rectangle and then go ahead
and find the brush size and you can set it to whatever you want.
I have it set to about 19 which is going to look like this.
I don't like to have my panel borders be too big and chunky but again it's your preference.
So, what you do is you click and hold and pull it out until it's about the size that
you want and then let go and it will autofill with whatever the foreground color is.
So, if you want black, use black.
I like red, so I'm using red.
Now, the other way to do that is to take any brush tool whatsoever, I'm going to use the
pencil, you click at a point, hold down the shift key and pull down the line until it
is straight and then you let go, and you just do that until you've drawn your entire panel,
like so and just kind of look at the edges of the lens there you can see when it finally
lines up, what it kind if ends up looking like.
Now that's the way I normally like to do it, I'm going to go ahead and use that technique
to finish off this page.
Try and think about your gutters which are the spaces between your panels and keep them
even and straight if you can.
It helps to give your page a nice professional look.
When you're designing your panels, you're going to want to go ahead and try and think
about how the eye is going to move around, not only the page but also your panel in general.
Keep pretty clear simple compositions.
Try and keep your motion flowing in the direction you want the readers eye to move.
Alright and there's your page with all of your panel borders already set up.
So, now that we have the panel borders, we're going to want to talk about thumbnailing.
I'm going to go ahead and pull up the page that I've already done, that has a very similar
layout to this, so you can have a look at what thumbnailing looks like.
Al right, so here you can see, I have two separate layers.
The top layer is my rough artwork and my bottom layer is my panel layout.
It looks pretty similar to the thing I just laid out on the other file.
I like to keep my artwork separate from the panels in case I have to go back in an erase
something, I don't end up taking out my panel boarders while I'm redrawing somebody's face.
As you can see, the other care is really rough and that's kind of the point of thumbnailing.
Really, you're doing this so you can figure out how everything is going to fit in each
of your panels.
Also, try and at this stage think about lettering.
We're not going to talk about lettering for a while, but it's really important when you're
laying things out to leave enough room for all the stuff that you're going to want to
do and lettering is a big part of that.
Nobody wants to try and cram lettering balloons in to a panel that is over crowded with characters.
So please do think about keeping space traditionally at the top of the panel, for all of your balloons
to go later and they don't accidentally draw too much background.
This is going to get covered up or put a character's head in the way of a giant balloon where they're
going to need to be talking a lot.
In this page, the two characters are having a conversation.
You notice that I have left room at the top of the panels for there were balloons to go.
So while your filling your panels up with thumbnails, you're going to want to think
about what you want to go in each panel and how it's going to be laid out.
It's more interesting to the reader's eye if you pick a wide variety of panel compositions.
For instance, these feel similar and they're about mid shots, but then I've gotten a closeup
on the two characters holding their hands together, and I've got a long shot, here where
we pull back to see the bird sitting on something here and you can see both of them in full
body.
I've also got a close up where you can see a mid-shot of one character, and then a super
zoomed in shot of the arm of another character.
It helps to keep it interesting, and that way you reader won't get bored, and it gives
you new and interesting ways to communicate the points in your panels.
I've also kept it incredibly rough, and that's totally fine because right now you're going
to make decisions, you're going to be trying out and seeing what works and what doesn't.
If it's a rough drawing, you're more likely to want to erase it than if you spend 20 minutes
making the most perfect character ever.
Once you're done laying out all of your rough panels with all of your rough pictures inside,
you're going to want to clean it up.
Now for me, since I've been drawing this comic for a while, I'm pretty comfortable knowing
what I want to do when I clean things up So I tend to jump straight from thumbnails into
my inks, but for you, if you're just starting out and you're not really sure that you're
comfortable going over something this rough and making it look clean and beautiful, you
might want to go to the penciling stage like we talked about in character design, where
you lay down those finer lines in pencil before you commit to anything with ink.
This is where you're going to make your scribbles something that actually reads.
Go through, clean up your character, if the eye is wonky, fix it, if the perspective is
wonky, fix it now, that way when you go to inks you don't have to think about it.
I like to just make to sure I have everything as tight as possible so that when I'm going
to inks and laying down brush strokes I'm not freaking out going, Did I really want
that here?
Did I really want that here?
Go ahead and make your final decisions.
Once you've finished cleaning things up with your pencils, you're going to want to go ahead
and move onto inks.
Inking is where you're going to solidify everything.
So if anything is still looking a little bit wonky, a little bit muddy hopefully you cleaned
it up in the pencils, but if not inking is your chance, so go ahead and take care of
that.
Alright, I'm going to go ahead and start inking this page.
The way I like to start, I'm going to combine two files using Control E, so that my thumbnails
now one layer and then I'm going to go lighten that just a little bit so that I can still
kind of see the hint of it but that it is not too distracting.
Then I'm going to create two more layers on top of that.
One is going to be from my final ink to panels and the other is going to be for the final
inked art work.
Now you can start with whatever panel you want, often times I like to start with the
panel that seems the simplest or that has something that looks like it might be fun
to do, so I can kind of warm up my hand and build my confidence before moving on to a
more complicated part of the page.
So for me that would be this panel here on the right.
Now let's go ahead and grab our pen and set it to the color of ink that we want to use.
I'm going to go ahead and use black.
My brush is too thick, so I'm going to use the bracket key.
key to turn down my brush size just a little bit until it is the size that I want to have
for my panel borders.
And again I'm going to use that same trick where you start at one point, hold down the
shift key and drag out your line.
Do this until you have completed your panel.
There you go.
The panel is ready to go.
Now let's move to our other blank layer and start creating our art work.
Adjust my brush size and so it's something I'm comfortable with and maybe zoom in just
a little bit so I can see things just a little bit better.
You don't want to zoom in too much and get too [xx], otherwise you are going to end up
wasting a lot of time drawing in a lot of details that no one's even, just a little
bit, it's totally okay.
If your brush size isn't the way you want it, just go ahead and adjust it until it's
right and then start.
As you can see, sometimes, inking can be pretty time consuming.
So, for the sake of time, I have another example of this page that I have already inked to
completion.
You can see my thumbnails, underneath my inks, and you can tell that I have something changed
my mind while I was inking where I wanted things to go.
As you become more confident, this is something that you'll probably end up doing quite a
bit.
Sometimes where you come up with a new thumbnails looks great in thumbnail but once you start
inking, your hand and your brain decide to do something else entirely and that's totally
okay.
You'll get a feel for it as your skill and confidence level grows.
So now do we set up our page layout with our thumbnails and then gone through and cleaned
it up with pencils and finalized everything with inks, it's time to move into the coloring
stage.