Process & Craft

The holidays are coming! Here’s a gift idea for you friends/relatives/encouragers/enablers out there: a beginning cartoonist’s starter kit! To get your special person started in comics, just use the following checklist to buy him or her the basic tools of the trade: Drawing Words & Writing Pictures will explain how to use all of this…

In a few short weeks (January 29-30) I’ll be hosting the annual 24-Hour Comics event held at the Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France (where Jessica and I are currently residents) and sponsored by La Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image. The 24-hour comic, invented by Scott McCloud, has become one of…

When we left off, we had a scanned and merged grayscale, 600 dpi, TIFF image. Right? If that’s not what you have, go back and check the scanning quickguide. There are many ways to approach cleaning up your image and preparing it for print. The one you choose will have a lot to do with…

Comics are all about reproduction, so scanning and preparing your work properly couldn’t be more important. Learn to do it well. What you need for this tutorial: a scanner Adobe Photoshop ® your finished comic pages. Make a plan. Your finished comic pages will usually be on paper that’s at least 11″ x 16″. If…

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to lay out a live area. What is the live area? It’s the area of your paper that you’ll fill with drawing (you can draw outside of the live area, but then you get into advanced cartoning: bleeds). Your live area does not include the paper margins, but rather,…

Now that you know the basics of laying out a live area, you can learn some tricks that will help you with the task of laying out different ratios and types of pages and we can also start discussing bleeds. Lay out a live area at the right ratio without measuring anything. Let’s start with…

Lettering tutorial: Using the Ames guide Materials: Ames Lettering Guide Mechanical pencil T-square or ruler Bristol board Pens Instructions:  Make sure your Ames guide is set to size”5″. Locate the 2/3 row, the bottom row of the three rows. Look carefully at the holes. You’ll notice that some of them are linked together with a…

What are bleeds? Bleeds—where the image runs off the page—are a powerful dramatic tool in comics. In some traditions—manga in particular—bleeds are so essential as to be part of the basic storytelling vocabulary. However, you can only “see” bleeds in the final printed book and you need to plan ahead if you have decided to…

You can find printable PDF handouts of this page here: color | black & white | text only PAPER 8.5″ x 11″ office paper for sketching, thumbnails, taking notes 14″ x 17″ pad of  bristol board – regular (vellum) or plate (smooth) surface for final artwork. Try Strathmore or Canson brand. Strathmore 300 Series Bristol…

Man, we have the awesomest interns. Hilary Allison, star of one of my huge student spotlight posts last summer, has been our intern all year, and she’s as fabulous as one would have thought having read that post. She’s also as obsessive. She came in one day beaming because she’d cracked the Nib-Holding Industrial Complex’s…

A bit of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures history: when Matt and I began working on that book, back in 2005 or so, we planned a 30-chapter behemoth. The idea was to have one chapter per week for a full academic year of work at an art school like the School of Visual Arts, where we…

Nick Bertozzi is an amazingly talented and prolific cartoonist, a teacher, and a good friend. I was thrilled when I saw this post about the process he used to make his new book Lewis & Clark over at the First Second blog, and asked if we could repost it here. The book itself is out,…

Here’s a gift idea for you friends/relatives/encouragers/enablers out there: a beginning cartoonist’s starter kit! To get your special person started in comics, just use the following checklist to buy him or her the basic tools of the trade: Drawing Words & Writing Pictures will explain how to use all of this stuff! Download your gift…

Mary Churchill discovered our re-vamped website early on and has been an enthusiastic RT-er and #FF-er on Twitter. Here she shares some observations about comics as a field of study in academe. She is already threatening to write another post that delves into some notions about the process of comics-reading from her upcoming book. I…

At my recent workshop at the Miami Wolfsonian Museum, I taught the students about live area, how to lay out a page, and how to hand-letter. This is the second batch of videos, on lettering. The layout videos can be found here. All of this material is drawn directly from Teacher’s guide chapter 7: Lettering. Part…

At my recent workshop at the Miami Wolfsonian Museum, I taught the students about live area, how to lay out a page, and how to hand-letter. I’m working on breaking down that demo into a series of short videos. These are the first few, on live area, original size, laying out a page, and laying…

Welcome to the first iteration of a regular feature, Tools & techniques. We’ll periodically post about tools and techniques of the cartooning trade here, illustrated with drawings, photos, and video. Our topic today is a handy studio item that is essential if you ink with a brush: the brush basin. Let Matt take you on…

Before you forget everything we just did, test your skill with the proportion wheel a few different ways. Remember to use your logical brain. If you’re getting confused, think: Is the number I’m looking for supposed to be larger or smaller than the number I’m starting with? Is the proportion I’m finding logical? Will it…