You might have noticed, in my last tutorial, that my comic starts out gray (yes, for the record, I do NOT draw with a purple pencil, just a regular one!) But how do I get it that purple tint, and how do I get that tint to stay consistent over all the comics, and even on multiple computers? Well let me show you!

Let’s just start out with a photo (this works on photos too!)

Fire up Photoshop (any version down to 5 should work for this) and open your image. Now, go to Image>Mode>Grayscale. That should give you a grayscale version of your image. Don’t worry if it looks icky, we’ll fix that later.

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As some of you may know, I work on 11×14 paper for my comic - but my scanner is only about 8×12, so I do a lot of stitching. I’ve actually become quite adept in stitching art together. This piece was actually stitched together using my methods from 6 different scans. There are no noticable seams, I hope!

What you need to do first is scan your pieces into Photoshop. If you can, butt the edges of the piece up to the edge of the scanner (this’ll minimize the headache of having to rotate the pieces in tiny ways later on.)

Okay, you’ve got the pieces in Photoshop. For the record, I’m using CS2, but you can use down to at least 7 for this method. Now, rotate your piece to right-side up. (That’s Image>Rotate Canvas)

Now go to Image>Canvas size, set the values to percent, and increase the height (or width if that’s the way you need to extend) to 200%. Also make sure you set it so all that extra canvas is being put on in the area you need it.
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Disclaimer: I hesitate to call this a tutorial - it’s really more like ‘observations I made when making my comic and looking at other comics’. I’m not an expert so what’s written below should be taken with a grain of salt! Hopefully you’ll be able to glean some interesting tidbits out of it despite that.

Laying out panels – it seems like a really simple task, but I’ve discovered it’s a little more complicated than that in my own comic. I guess I’ll start this tutorial at the beginning – thumbnails! Making a thumbnail sketch of the comic page is important. It’s much easier to fix a five minute scribble than a page that took 5 hours. So let’s start with a sketch of the page:

Okay… well, that’s a little boring. You can do full pages every once in a while, but not with every page! Let’s just divide that up into panels already:

That’s about as boring as you can get with a panel layout. It’s good to remember that a comic page is just like any other art piece. You want to lead the viewer around the page in a pleasing way, get them to feel involved. The above layout is just too boring to do any of that.

This is a little more exciting – you got a couple of different sizes that you can do different things with. You also have some different shapes that you can use to lead the viewer’s eye around.

Try not to get carried away though. When you start adding too many boxes, the comic can feel overcrowded, with everything far too squished. It can also get confusing for the viewer to figure out the order in which the panels are supposed to be read. If you have a lot of plot, try spreading it between 2 or even 3 pages instead.
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