Holy Page Size, Batman!

Anyone looked at Megatokyo (http://www.megatokyo.com) lately? He's posted a pre-production sketch of one of his pages...and DAMN, does he draw big, or what? He says he does three or four of them per page. Nutter. XD No wonder he has a reputation for taking so long. But yeah, that really surprised me. I'd love to know how big Poe (http://www.errantstory.com) draws his stuff.

SO! To come to the point of this; How large are the originals of your comics, and how large do you work when you come to photoshop/psp etc?

9x12" for ribald youth.

11x14" for another work that requires a bit more detail.

I like small pages so I doubt I'll ever go higher than 11x14"~

My (old) comic was always 433x563 (pixels). The panels were always small. I'm very used to drawing in confined areas.

Anyone looked at Megatokyo (http://www.megatokyo.com) lately? He's posted a pre-production sketch of one of his pages...and DAMN, does he draw big, or what?

For how he draws, that's just a bit excessive (so is scanning in at 1200dpi.) Especially when you consider that some comic-book artists who are the most anal about detail, they work the entire page on a 9" x 14" sheet.

SO! To come to the point of this; How large are the originals of your comics, and how large do you work when you come to photoshop/psp etc?

I work with a 9" x 14" sheet, it gets penciled and inked there and then it's set at 480x800 for the webternet. When I scan, it's at 300dpi, which is fine in case my comics may go over to print.

I work actual size. I've been thinking about working larger, though, since I ink with a brush and it does better on details when they're not so small. :D

The things keeping me from working larger are:

1: I hand-color. I don't want to use up a marker within 4 pages, they're expensive. Going with larger paper would mean I either spend more on markers or have more PhotoShopped fill/filtered/blurred backgrounds, which I try not to do too often. (The less I do them, the less noticible they are. :D)

2. Scanner size - my scanner will only scan 9x12, and for some reason it only scans within a certain margin (which is aggravating but unvisable) so 8.5 by 11.5 is really the max. I'd have to draw on two different pages and then piece them together on the computer if I wanted to make the panels larger. When you hand-color, you are NOT gonna be able to scan two halves of a paper and overlay them together very correctly. And that would mean I'm not allowed to do full-page spreads, or full-height or full-width panels...

If I computer colored neither of those would be a problem. So if I do a comic that I'll color digitally, I probably will work larger. Meanwhile I consider my small detailed panels an exercise in patience and brush control... >_> 'course then I end up wanted to redo the whole page sometimes, like I did recently. :D


As far as scanning size- my normal comics I just scan 2x actual (144, but 150dpi would work just as well) and then I reduce things down to smooth them out. When I color digitally I scale up from that depending on how important detail is going to be. I think the largest I've ever worked is 600dpi, normally it's around 300.

When I post my comics for web (those that are on my deviant art account), I just change the DPI from 300 to 72...

And, I normally work with A4 (8.5 x 11) sheets of paper (as what most of my drawings are done on).

Now, if my scanner could handle it, I would use some of the comic book pages that I've got, and be more than happy to go out and buy some more. But, alas, my scanner can only handle A4 sheets (that's what I get for buying a three-in-one scanner)

For how he draws, that's just a bit excessive (so is scanning in at 1200dpi.) Especially when you consider that some comic-book artists who are the most anal about detail, they work the entire page on a 9" x 14" sheet.
The first MT book measures 5x7, and the print quality isn't THAT high either. Good, but not excellent, imagine a newspaper photo, kinda like that. So yeah, I can only speculate scanning at 1200dpi is futureproofing, 'cos that's as good as you're going to get short of having the original, so maybe if he wants to reprint it bigger in future it might be to his advantage to have it as good as it gets. Saves him doing it all again I guess, putting a book together can be dead stressy.

I don't have that problem (problem? having opportunities to print is a problem chikin? XD) though! :D For comparison, I do GV at 7x10, or thereabouts. I just started drawing another comic, and I'm doing that at 6x8 1/2 (which is about 1:1 to what I see on my screen), and I'm much preferring the look of the smaller one at the moment. Go figure. :D
Scanning, I scan at 300dpi in B&W mode. (Spent stupid amounts on my scanner when I got it and now all I use it for is as a glorified photocopier. -_-) I normally work at 1500px wide in general, then shrink it down to 500 when I publish, for nice, easily divisible resizing.

But yeah, this is all mucho interesting informationo, thanks. X)

I draw on 12X12 squares of paper where I usualy fit 4 panels of varying sizes. I tend to scan at 100 dpi, weither I digitaly color them or not.

Then I cut every single panel individualy and place them on a blank 750X20000 file, where then I cut them in bunches and glue them on another black file, making a page varying between 1500 and 6000 pixels long.

Wee !

Scanner? What?

My old hand drawn comic was done on 8.5x11 cardstock (you wouldn't believe how fast thinner paper gets wrinkled in my unstoppable filing system). Every panel of the comic was square, so I printed markers at each corner to help me with layout. My upcoming hand drawn project is probably going to use whatever I can get my hands on that works, including all sorts of paper, canvas, and found surfaces. I've always wanted to illustrate a project with photos of graffitti, but I haven't found the right project yet...or a willing property owner.

I like small pages so I doubt I'll ever go higher than 11x14"~

After reading this topic, it seems I like large pages.So I guess I ought to move up to 18x24 in the future or something. thats as big as the scanners here will accept.

for clayton, its all on the computer, so i do it at 600x800 pixels.

for something else i'm working on, plus any illustrative work i ever do, i like to use 9x12. sometimes 11x14, but thats only for stuff like huge BGs.

i don't think of those sizes as big. 18x24 is big. 24x36 is huge!

and i can't draw big. i fall apart.

It's kinda funny, I do it all on the computer, too, but I still work at a much larger size than the final version. For a normal strip, my work area is 5790 x 1950 pixels--I don't remember exactly why I chose those numbers--then the whole thing gets shrunk down to 625 x 210 (600 x 202 for the Comics Sherpa version)

Even though I'm not working on paper, I still find that the larger size allows me to produce greater detail, that will look a lot smoother when shrunk and anti-aliased than it would if I was working directly at the finished size. Plus, if I ever decide to produce a printed anthology of the strip in a book, I already have the original file at 720dpi broken into the appropriate layers.

I *just started working on real paper. I'm working on all purpose 8.5x11. I'm actually looking for some good pens to use, 1mm is the thickest one I could find without having to use calligraphy pens.

I actually scan at anywhere from 300-1600 dpi, depending on the quaility of what I drew.

I work on 8.5x11, and now I'm going smaller because I seem to, paradoxically, be able to get more detail in. hard to describe, but check the guest comic I did for Ronson to see the smallest I've worked.

I'm actually looking for some good pens to use, 1mm is the thickest one I could find without having to use calligraphy pens.I'm surprised you were even able to find 1mm. The only one's that wide that I've seen are these Zig marker things.

You may be able to find a calligraphy marker with a flattened nib- if you use the "wide" angle you could get 2-5 mm widths. You could also look for a dual-point pen or marker.... often it will have one small-nib end and one fatter one. I know some people who just use acid-free sharpie markers (fine point) to do stuff that thick, and to do fills. I dunno how archival that is, though.

Personally I use a Kuretake brush pen (they have them at DickBlick.com) and it's niiiice. Fat lines, thin lines, no cleaning, just refills! Only hard part is brush control. :3

Edit: If you're willing to spend money, it looks like Koh-I-Noor pens get pretty wide.... http://www.dickblick.com/zz210/03/products.asp?param=0&ig_id=1395

I've drawn on 9x12, which is about as big as I want to get, because it's such a pain to draw any larger and scan it in.

Right now I draw everything on A4 Hammermill lazerjet paper, which has incredibly little bleed. I draw everything up to almost an 1/8" border heightwise and about 1" border widthwise. I'm not sure about the exact dimentions though. I basically created the size I want as a template in Illustrator and made it as large as I could for A4 paper. :)

I reduce down to 5.125" x 8.25" for print and proportionally scale it down to 600 dpi wide for the web.

I love my Kuretake brush pen, though sometimes I cheat with my felt tip brush pen and some disposable pens .5 mm (background outlines, character detail) and .1 mm (additional character detail. i.e. Ronson's Stubble).

First off, thank you both for your suggestions. Since I *just started drawing on real paper, I think I might give the Kuretake brushes a try, and if not those, then I'll get some of those pens. I've copied your posts onto notepad.

I thought about using a felt sharpie for some of it, but the paper I have bleeds too much unfortunately, and my lines look... hairy?

Anyway, thanks again, this has been really helpfull.

I don't think sharpies hold onto paper very well, either. That's part of the reason they bleed so much for you, I think.

You can get the Kuretake pens on dickblick.com also... they're about 35 bucks, + s/h. They come with a refill or two.