The Section Comics

An experiment in comics

Category: 6-Finalizing and Publishing

  • Practical tips for artists for the best printed result

    NOTE from site: This post was written by David den Ouden, who’s worked on all 3 of the Doe Het Niet Zelf Dutch Graphic Novel weekends. It has not be further edited by the site owner.

    If you want to publish a graphic novel made in 48 hours, you need 2 things:

    •  Speed (so you can create as many pages as possible)
    •  High quality art work (you can publish)

    ‘Just’ creating two page spreads is not enough. The art work needs to be scanned (if on paper), processed and made ready for print.

    Based on experiences with GNW Utrecht 2019, GNW Haarlem 2020, and GNW Amsterdam 2021, we had some lessons learned. So we have some practical tips.

    Sketching and setting up the page

    If you work on paper:

    • You don’t want lead pencil sketches on the final art work;
      • Erasing takes a lot of time, so we can’t do that (because we need speed).
      • Pencil is graphite and is highly reflective. Even light pencil lines show up quite dark in scans.
      • Exception: if it is your style of art to always leave your pencil sketches visible in the final art work, go for it.
    •  So DO NOT sketch with lead pencil on the same sheet as your final art work.

    Some possible solutions:

    • If you ink your sketches directly (on the same piece of paper):
      • Use a light coloured pencil or mechanical pencil (for the Dutchies: vulpotlood).
      • RECOMMENDED: use a (non-repro) blue color! (this can be filtered out very easily, big time saver)
      • E.g. I work with pink colour pencil and a blue mechanical pencil.
    •  Do not ink your sketches; use a light box or other tool to trace and ink your work on a new sheet of paper.

    Working in gray

    With the previously mentioned GNW’s we did not only work in black and white (= time saver, aka speed), but also in gray. Which can work very well. But you have to make sure you can print it in the same quality as the art work itself.

    If you work in gray, for the final printed graphic novel, you want your blacks to be truly black and the gray to have all the nuances and levels as the original art work. You do not want your black lines to turn out dark gray or black-ish. It kills the page.

    How to do the scanning properly, is described in the next section.

    These practical tips we’ve learned the hard way; it will give you better quality and in the end save a lot of time.

    • If you work in gray you have 2 options:
      • 1.   Add the gray to the black and white on the same sheet of paper.
      • 2.   Add the gray on a fresh sheet of paper (use a light box for gray).

    So:

    1. If you draw on the same sheet of paper:

    •  First draw the black and white (line) art.
    •  Scan the black and white sheet.
    •  Add the gray to your sheet.
    •  Scan the sheet and this is really, really important: scan the sheet with the same scanner and same orientation (upper right corner of your page) as the black and white sheet.

    2. If you draw your black and white (line) art on one sheet and the gray on another (using a light box):

    •  Scan both pages with the same scanner and same orientation (upper right corner of your page).
    • Add indicators (e.g. +) in the corners outside the drawing area so the 2 scans can be lined up perfectly.

    Those 2 emphasised sentences are really important. I’ve learned the hard way with GNW Haarlem 2020. The art work was scanned in black and white at the event. Back home, doing post production, I scanned the gray page on another scanner. It was impossible to line up the 2 scans; rotating and correcting for distortions did not work. I’ve spent hours cutting up the gray scans of for pages in small pieces, panel by panel to rotate and deform them so they lined up.

    Most scanners are not perfect and they all distort pages slightly different. So to compensate for that, use the same scanner. And the same orientation, since the scan might have small distortions from top left to bottom right. Rather have the same distortions in the same places.

    Scanning the art work

    Even if the artist is not scanning the art work themselves, it is good to be aware of the process.

    • Scan at the highest possible resolution: 600 dpi (preferred), no less than 300 dpi.
      • This leaves most room for adjustments, polishing up pages and high quality printing.
      • The industry standard for American comics is 350 dpi.
    •  Save as TIFF and if that is not possible, JPEG.
    • Scan as a photo, not a document:
      • Even if you only have black and white line art.
    • If your art work is black and white or gray scale (no colour on the sheet):
      • Scan as gray scale (NOT black & white).
    • If your final art work has unwanted colour:
      •  Like sketches in colour on the same page.
      • Like with fancy comic art board paper with a blue print for panels.
      • Scan as colour.

     Digital art work

     If all is fine, you work on the same format as the paper artists.

     Preferably you work in 600 dpi. If that is not possible, at least work in 300 dpi.

     The industry standard for printing comics is 350 dpi. Which can be an issue if e.g. you have (an older) non-professional version of Procreate. With just using black and white you should be fine, if you use gray scale as well,  better check with the organisers of the GNW to see what will work.

    Post production of the art work

    We can’t do a whole course on Photoshop and post production here. But there are a few basic things we can mention.

    You want the black and white (line) art to be truly that: just black and white.

    In post processing we want to optimise the art work, so we have the best quality. If you scan as a document or black and white, the scanner takes all the decisions for you. And you want to make those decisions yourself in Photoshop (or another tool).

    To create high quality black and white images, there are different approaches that all work.

    I usually take the following steps for processing a scan in Photoshop.

    For scans with colours (from pencil or art board paper):

    •  Especially with removing colour, there are many solutions. Pick whatever works best for you.
    • Recommended for (non-repro blue):
      • Create an new Channel Mixer adjustment layer and set the Preset to ‘Black & White with blue filter (RGB)’
        • This method may still need some polishing up, but most blue will be gone swiftly

    Or otherwise:

    •  Copy the background scan layer to a new layer; from this layer you will remove all the colour.
    •  With the magic wand with high enough tolerance and no anti-alias you can select the colours and delete them.
    •  Make sure not to accidentally select any gray scale you want to keep.

    Next:

    • Proceed with the following steps; use this layer without colour instead of the background layer (original scan).

    For black and white (line) art scans:

    • Copy the background layer to a new scan layer.
    • Rotate and move the scan so it lines up with the final page template (panels in place, etc.).
      • Most scanners have some sort level of distortion, so you might have to use a lens correction filter instead or other tools as well to restore the shape of the scan.
    • Add Levels as an adjustments layer and optimise the levels;
      • The white of the paper will be white with some margin (output level < 255).
      • The output level of the black will start in the black ink range (so not just at the beginning level of the black spike).
    •  Add a Treshold as an adjustments layer and optimise what you want black and what not.
    •  Copy the scan layer and 2 adjustments layers and merge these layers.
    • Select all white in the merged black and white drawing and delete the white.
      • You now have a high res layer with a drawing where you can put a gray layer under, without any lighter gray edges.
    •  Add a white background layer.
    •  If needed, go back to the first step and optimise the levels and threshold.

    For gray scale scans:

    • Add levels as an adjustments layer and optimise the layers.
      • The white of the paper will be white with some margin (output level < 255). You don’t want the paper itself to be any gray scale.
      • The output level of the black will start at the beginning in the black ink range.
      • Tweak the middle gray output level.
    •  Add other types of adjustments layers and optimise the grays.
    •  Copy the scanned background and adjustments layers and merge these layers.
    • Select all white in the merged gray scale drawing and delete the white.
      • You now have a high res layer with a gray scale where you can use under the black and white art work.

    Next: Clean up the scan. Duplicate the layer with the art work (so you preserve processed scan). Erase all specks, errors and other things that should not be in final art work. Usually you do not want anything outside the panels.

    Combine the processed gray art work with the black and white (line) art work and make sure they align. This can require some rotation or even a lens correction filter to align them perfectly.

  • Lettering tips: General

    I recommend that lettering (and all final production work) will be done digitally, to allow for easy translation and editing.

    Because this sort of project is not working from a full script (due to the amount of time necessary to write a full script), the writer may need to change dialogue to cover something that comes later. It’s important to have that ability.

    Translations

    In addition, if you want to do the story in multiple languages (as we did with the first GNW), it’s better to be able to redraw and modify the balloons and text boxes. Why? Because lettering itself is an art, and there is also an art to translation work in comics. A translator working in comics would generally always prefer to be working off of the unlettered original pages, because then they can translate the intent of a sentence, rather than the words in it, and draw a balloon that fits that text well.

    Within comics, this isn’t always possible, and often they will get the pages with the word balloons already present. This means that the text has to be written to fit the specific size of the balloons. And because the text has to fill out the balloons more or less uniformly, the translator has to carefully work through the text to make it the same size as the existing balloons. This takes considerably more time that re-lettering and creating new balloons would. It also takes a considerably more specific experience than simple translation would. It’s more like trying to dub dialogue over an existing film and match the movement of the speakers mouth than it is like subtitling.

    Hand lettering

    If you want to hand letter, and you have a skilled hand letterer (or letterers) available, then the key to making that work is probably to create a rough guide for the text and placement during the event. This could be done by printing, and drawing text in pencil over the art, or things like that. The more stable the text is at the end of the day, the easier it is for the hand letterer to work. Editing may be more difficult, however, so it is likely that you would want the hand lettering to be done after the end of the event. So, make sure you have the text placements figured out, and a final script typed up by pencils down.

    If you are going to letter or hand letter, I recommend working with the writers and the artists to make sure you can fit what they need in the space available before you start lettering.

    Font size

    As with the page sizing, you will want most of your dialogue and narration text to be the same size (with the exceptions or yells and whispers, which should be larger or smaller to indicate how the person is speaking).

    Unfortunately, font size itself is never going to be a clear standard. Even if we consider the art and resolution to be a standard of say 300dpi at 11×17 inches, I can’t tell you a font of 9pt or 13 pt would be the best choice. The is because fonts themselves vary in size widely. You pretty much have to eyeball it.

    Often the best way to determine the font size to use may sound pretty weird. Scan an existing professionally made comic book page (with text), put it into your lettering software, and add text. Size the font to match the size of that page’s text. That’s the font size you should use for this font in your project.

  • Digital Team

    We totally dropped the ball on having a digital team in the first GNW. Arnoud from Doe Het Niet Zelf and I thought we’d be able to manage the digital production work in addition to organizing and arranging things. This was not the case. I spent a great deal of time walking around and working with artists to help them with comic technique, giving advice, pointing them to the books we’d provided. Arnoud was managing things the entire time, as well, and the amount of work needed for doing the technical portion of the production was much higher than we expected. This was especially true on the last day of the event when everything needed to be scanned, last minute digital work needed to be done, and etc.

    We ended up having to push lettering to post-production, and continually try to work through the page ordering throughout that process.

    So in reality, managing the digital tasks is a job that’s as important as any other, and you will need people to manage it.

    • You will need someone responsible for scanning hand drawn art
    • You will need people capable of doing digital retouching to hand drawn art
    • You will need people capable of digital lettering
    • You will need people capable of using digital publishing software (adobe indesign, affinity publisher, etc.)

    It’s ideally important to have these people involved throughout the process, because this is a lot of work and it’s not a simple matter of finishing this up after the event, because that will probably take some of the creative work out of the hands of the creators and that’s not the intention of this type of project.  

    Everyone is together during the weekend only. It’s important that the writers and artists can connect with the final product. So it’s good to have a clear picture of how everything is fitting together. This will also help writers see gaps that need to be filled. 

    This isn’t to say that everything with regards to production will be possible in the weekend. It’s impossible to know whether that can be done on such an aggressive timeline, but the more stable the product is when pencils go down at the end of the last day, the more the follow-on work which is done after the event becomes practical, rather than creative.

    What if we can’t do the production work during the event

    My recommendation is that you do the following:

    • Work on the page order through out the event, so that it is solid – try and number the pages in a way that will make it clear where they go.
    • Draw clear lettering guides (i.e. sketches of where the word balloons should go on copies or digital versions of the pages).
    • Type up all text clearly

    In the end, what you want is a final product that might not be perfect or finished, but is something you can actually read (with some difficulty), so that it takes away any need for the production staff to do anything other than make your product shine.

  • Two page spreads

    Always work in two page increments – they can be two page spreads or two individual pages that go together. You can work with another team so that each team creates one page in this combination. But always work in two page increments.

    This was a place we dropped the ball in the initial graphic novel weekend was totally my fault. Because I thought it was important to be as flexible as possible with positioning the story, I said to only create single pages, and work together if there were two page spreads necessary. 

    Unfortunately, without a digital team, all of the arrangement happened months later, in some cases without the original artists involved. 

    If you work in two page groups (keep in mind that the first and last page will both probably be single pages, but we can deal with that separately) then placement becomes easy, and you will have more control over how your stories get told.