Sunday Surgery: But at my back, I always hear…

… Time's winged chariot hurrying near.*


Following up Thursday's post about saving time, I wanted to share the following time management technique, brought to my attention by the sickeningly talented PJ Holden (follow him on Twitter: @pauljholden).


I know every third person thinks they have some magic solution to time management, but I've only been working like this for a few days, and have found my productivity noticeably increased, so I thought it was worth a blog post.


I've started using the Pomodoro technique which, put simply, involves working out your tasks for the day, ordering them and working through them. You work absolutely flat out, with no interruptions and no distractions for 25 minutes, and then you take a 5 minute break before resuming. Each of these is called a pomodoro and, every time you complete four of them, you take a longer break.


You don't need anything more sophisticated than a kitchen timer for this, but you'll be unsurprised to hear that there's an app for that, and a variety of Android apps, too. There are actually several iPhone apps, too, but I'm using the free LE version of the app linked above and it seems more than sufficient.


To be honest, I don't have a problem with my work ethic, which is pretty strong. My problem is with my ability to become distracted, and for those distractions to quickly start eating into what should be working time…

Up - TM & © Disney/Pixar

So, whilst the enforced 25 minute working period introduces a useful sense of purpose and urgency, it's the five minute breaks that really work for me, bringing my time-wasting activities into very sharp focus!


(In fact, there's been an unexpected peripheral benefit, in so far as five minutes is almost exactly enough time for me to boil a kettle, make a cup of tea, and get back to my desk. This has largely eliminated my habit of snacking and forced me to schedule a proper lunch break into my day.)


Obviously, you still require a certain amount of willpower, without which the exercise is ultimately futile. It's still an effort of will, for example, dealing with e-mails. When one announces its arrival, I permit myself to quickly switch to my mail application and check the sender and subject line. If it's not work-related, it can wait for a break. 


If the e-mail is work-related, I permit myself to read it but unless the message is saying: "OMG! My regular letterer on Captain Stupendo just fell into cement mixer! Can you letter all 24 pages of #47 by this time tomorrow?" Then, frankly, it can wait!


An additional benefit, for me at least, has been a more acute appreciation of how my regular working tasks break up into these 25 minute chunks; just a better understanding of how long things take which, as a freelancer, is pretty important when making a judgement on how much to charge for a job!


So… all in all, a deceptively simple time management technique that I've found to be of surprising value. Give it a try -- it might be of benefit.


Cheers!


Jim


* From Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"

Sunday Surgery: We're Caught In A Trap

With apologies, once again, for the length of time it’s taken to get things back on a sufficiently even keel to start giving this blog some attention, I’m pleased to bring you the return of the Sunday Surgeries.

Today, I’m just going to pick up a couple of queries out of the recent comments, but we’ll be getting to more in-depth content in the near future.

First of all, jteethy asks:

How much leeway do you have with moving balloons to another panel? There were a couple of instances in Salem's Daughter where it would have improved the flow of dialogue and still made sense with what was drawn. Also: "Shriek" doesn't work particularly well as onomatopoeia...

This is the sort of thing you should always establish upfront with your editor. As soon as you get a script, you should ask how much freedom you have with this. The editor may have a policy on this, and will also know whether the writer is the kind that’s happy to leave lettering decisions in the hands of the letterer, or the kind that, well, isn't.

To be honest, you can infer a great deal of this from the script itself. If it has instructions like “Screaming FX” it’s a fair bet that the writer is looking to you to pick up this side of things, and that was certainly how I read that “Shriek” in the script and changed it for a more traditional effect.

(Interesting that you should mention onomatopoeia, because it’s a little considered aspect of lettering that the word of a sound effect not only has to say the noise it’s making, but needs to look like it, too. This is why “CRASH” is generally represented as “KRASH”… the soft curl of the C simply doesn’t look like a harsh, crashing sound. The angular K makes the word look like it’s supposed to sound, a consideration unique to the comic medium.)

Shunting balloons backwards or forwards to preceding or following panels is certainly a legitimate technique to create space if the artwork will still make sense. Again, it’s something I’d clear with the editor, perhaps even e-mailing them an example (“I think these two panels work better like this -- are you happy for me to rearrange the balloons as shown?”)

Once given the OK, I wouldn’t personally then pester the editor with every single change, but I would highlight the changes I’d made in an e-mail at the end of the job.

Second question, from Airy:

In the Balloon Tales article, it instructs to select the Text and Balloon layers and then use "Overprint Black..." with the Fill and Stroke options checked. In my version of Illustrator, this option is not found in "Filter > Colors" as stated in the article but I found the "Overprint Black..." option in "Edit > Edit Color" so I used that method in the process to save several eps files. Reading Todd Klein's "DC Guide to Coloring & Lettering" he describes a slightly different method. It states to use the "Attributes" window so when you select the text layer you can set those to "Overprint Fill" and when you select the balloon layer you can set those to "Overprint Stroke." So I tried that method as well and saved several more eps files. Either method looks fine in Overprint preview. However, when I click on text or balloons in eps files I've saved in the Balloon Tales method, they don't show checked stroke or fill boxes in the "Attributes" window like they do when I use the Todd Klein method. Being new to this, I'm not sure what this means or which method is best to use when preparing files for output. Also, (okay, this question in particular is probably very stupid of me but...) if I were to make a white SFX it will not show up on overprint preview, so how do I handle those differently?

The first thing to do is to understand what overprinting is, and why you’re using it. This is one small aspect of the dark and arcane realm of four-colour printing known as trapping, which could comfortably fill a year’s worth of blog posts on its own. Of necessity, the following simplifies the subject drastically, but should illustrate the point. I hope!

Overprinting only applies to CMYK printed pages and relates to the way the four colour plates interact  when prepared for printing. Essentially, the four colours overlay on top of each other to create the full colour image: an area with 100% coverage of yellow ink is (obviously) yellow; add 100% magenta coverage over the top and the area will print as red.

The black plate will, by default “knock out” the other colours where it overlays them. For example, if you were to create a graphic with a smaller black circle on top of the red area described above, then the black circle would automatically knock out its own shape on the other colour plates, so that it would print directly onto the white paper.

If the black is set to “overprint”, then it literally prints over the other other plates without knocking them out.

The disadvantage of overprinting in the example above is that the black will take on a distinctly reddish cast but, by the same token, the knockout version relies on the printing to hold exact register and align all the plates precisely, or a ‘halo’ may appear round the black circle where the empty area of one or more of the other plates shows.

Overprinting, then very specifically relates to the way that elements on the black plate interact with the other printing plates. There is no need for any other colour to be set to overprint and, in the example you give, white will fail to print at all if set to overprint because all white is is a hole in the other colour plates that allows the white of the paper to show through. By its very nature, it has to knock out.

Similarly, if you have black that is sitting on white -- the text inside normal speech balloons, for instance -- there is no need for that to overprint, because it doesn’t interact with any other colour plates. Generally speaking, the strokes on speech balloons (and on SFX if the stroke is black) need to overprint in order to prevent the ‘halo’ effect I describe above, resulting from mis-registration of the printing plates.

Note that if you have black text in a coloured speech balloon or caption, you will need to set that text to ‘Overprint Fill’.

As far as actually achieving the overprint is concerned -- I have never used any method in Illustrator other than the ‘Attributes’ palette to set overprints:

I hope that goes some way to answering your query -- please feel free to post follow-up questions in the comments, if I’ve been unclear, or if anyone has further questions.

Sunday Surgery: Miller Time!

One of the odd pieces of statistical data that Blogger offers is to show you which search engine queries have led people to your blog.


Yesterday, I discovered that someone had visited my blog as a result of the query: "What lettering font was used in Frank Miller's 300?"


It seemed like a very specific question, and I felt kind of bad that whoever had asked it didn't find an answer here, nor, indeed anywhere else if my own Googling of the same query is any indication.


It appears that Miller does his own lettering -- he certainly did for Sin City and 300 appears to be the same style and there's no credit for a separate letterer.


However, looking at the irregularity of the spacing, the hyphenation and the fact that the lines of text aren't accurately centred*…

300 © Frank Miller -- Art by Frank Miller & Lynn Varley

… And I'm pretty sure that this is hand-lettered. So… to whoever was searching for an answer to that question, I'm afraid that (to my eyes, at least) there is no font, because Frank has lettered the book the old-fashioned way, and more power to him.


Cheers!


Jim


*Note that I don't say this as a criticism!

Sunday Surgery: Practise Packs

This week's Sunday Surgery brings a couple more batches of sample pages for you to work, courtesy of the nice people at Zenescope Entertainment.


First up, we have the first five unlettered pages, plus script, for Salem's Daughter #4. The pages are the correct size, but have been reduced to 150dpi to try and keep the file size down. Click the link below to for the download, which is about 19Mb.

Download Salem's Daughter #4 Pages


Next, we have the first five pages of Neverland #0, along with the script. Again, the resolution of the artwork has been reduced to keep the download reasonably quick -- about 17.5Mb this time.


Download Neverland #0 Pages


As previously, please feel free to use these for practise and/or portfolio pieces but not for any other purpose and please do not, under any circumstances, remove the copyright notice on the artwork.


If you'd like to post a link to your lettered versions results on the comments section here, or post the pages themselves on the Digital Webbing lettering forum, for a critique, you're most welcome to.


I know several people posted links to their versions of the previous practice packs, and I have downloaded them all -- I hope to bring you some crits in a Surgery post fairly soon.


In the meantime, I hope you find these new packs helpful. There'll be some more to follow shortly.


Cheers!


Jim

Sunday Surgery: Providing A Sample

The promised new practice packs will be along shortly -- having slain the Deadline Beast with a day or so to spare, a plumbing catastrophe has struck Campbell Towers, bringing further disruption to the festive season!


However, I do just have time to follow up on the following question from Robert Kurthy.


(I have no idea why you couldn't leave this in the comments, Bob -- it doesn't even seem to have been caught up in the spam filter… my apologies!)

"Can you elaborate on the contents of a typical 'sample pack?'

I can't imagine a letterer would be given enough (free) sample copies of an actual printed issue to mail out all over the place.

So what do you send: color printouts? How many total pages? How many pages from any individual book? From how many different books?

Also, anything else one might send, including important things to put (or avoid putting) in a cover letter, etc. etc."

The first thing to keep in mind here is that I'm hardly a towering example of lettering success! I mean, seriously, how many of you have actually bought a physical comic that I've lettered? Very few of you, I suspect! Once you've considered that fact, treat all advice that follows with the suspicion it so richly deserves!


The most important piece of advice is that anything I say here is automatically over-ruled by anything a company's own submission guidelines say. 


Quite a few companies have submission agreements on their websites so make sure that you've checked for this before you submit and that you've included a signed copy if this is something they expect. Otherwise, you're wasting a stamp.


In addition, always do your research. The recent advert by DC Comics for an in-house letterer and subsequent discussion on Digital Webbing strongly suggests that there is little or no point making a cold submission to DC. Similarly, I believe that Marvel have abandoned the slush pile some time ago and no longer even look at cold submissions, so that's another stamp saved. Top Cow have an exclusive agreement with their letterer, who does all their books; IDW have (I believe) all of their lettering done in-house… 


As you can see, the list of target companies for submission can be whittled down quite quickly!


So… with all those caveats out of the way:


My sample pack consists of colour printouts of my most recent work. On an A4 sheet, a US comic page leaves some space, so I try to include a small amount of text, identifying that publisher and the title, and a single brief paragraph talking about any design decisions that were made for the project. I also put my e-mail address on every page.


I mention the extra text because a couple of editors have said that they found this added interest to the samples above a plain batch of sample pages. Artists are often advised to keep their portfolios for initial showing to the five or six strongest pages they have, and that's what I try to follow here. I additionally include an FAQ page at the back, with a brief run-down of my project history; telephone and postal contact details; and a couple of brief sound-bite testimonials.


Given that all this information is included in the sample pack, I try to keep the covering letter as short as possible, pretty much doing nothing more than introduce myself (if you're following up a contact you made at a convention, this is the place to remind the editor of that) and inviting them to contact me for further information if the sample pack doesn't answer all their questions.


There may, occasionally, be something specific to a submission that's worth also putting in the cover letter. Dark Horse specify, for example, that they prefer to see black and white lettering samples. I don't have any, so I thought it was worth putting a brief paragraph in the cover letter explaining this and apologizing, so they at least knew that I'd read the submission guidelines!


One seemingly trivial thing that's also worth mentioning: I always fasten my sample packs together with paperclips and not staples. If you're sending your samples to an office which recycles its paper, then removing the staples is a pain for the editor. Use a paperclip and, even if they throw your sample pack away, you've made their life a tiny fraction easier, plus they've gained a paperclip! It may not sound like much, but it might be enough to fix your name in their mind the next time one of your submissions comes across their desk, or if they see your work in print somewhere.


For what it's worth, that's the best advice I have.


Cheers!


Jim


PS: Belated Festive Best Wishes to all of you who celebrate Christmas. I hope you had a splendid day and I wish everyone a prosperous New Year into the bargain!

Sunday Surgery: Gizza Job, Go On, Giz It…

(Apologies for the post title which will be incomprehensible to the large chunk of this blog's readers who aren't familiar with blackly humorous BBC social dramas of the 1980s.)

This question popped up on another forum, and I thought it was worth a post here:

"Have you ever posted anything on finding work?"

Now, I will confess that if I had a magic formula for getting work, that's one thing I probably would keep close to my chest!

As it happens, however, I don't have any special insight! The bulk of my income is currently derived from two publishers, and my "in" with them was chiefly dumb luck: in both cases, they were looking for a fill-in letterer in a hurry and my samples were top of the pile. In both cases, the samples had been out for so long that I'd actually forgotten about them.

And this is the only key piece of advice I can offer: if you don't actually have any samples out there, then even dumb luck isn't going to work in your favour.

Also, you're going to want to those samples to represent your best work. I have a simple database (although a spreadsheet will work just as well) with the postal address of every US and UK publisher I can find details for. I record the date when I send a sample pack out to them, and what response -- if any -- I receive. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is no response at all.

Every three months or so, I try to find time to update the sample pack with current pieces of work, and send a new pack out to everyone who hasn't already commissioned me, or told me to never contact them again.

Be aware that raising your profile is largely a matter of doing a lot of free work and hoping that some of it turns into paying work. The first year I made any money from lettering, I'd say that about 75% of the work I did was actually free, or 'back end', the second year it was about 50/50 and I was able to pack in my day job; this year I think it'll be about 66% paying and I hope that next year it's going to be north of 75%.

(I should stress that I am very fortunate to live an area of the UK where housing prices are relatively reasonable, I have modest lifestyle expectations, and an understanding wife with professional qualifications and a good job. You will not get rich doing this!)

On the subject of back end deals (where you do all the work for no pay up front but in return for a percentage of the profits on publication), I should say that I am not --in principle-- as hostile towards these as many professionals. There is an argument that if the work is good enough to be published, it's good enough to get paid for, a sentiment with which I take no issue.

However, given that these deals do exist, then they are certainly a means, if nothing else, of getting some original material to work on! Your chances of making any money on these deals (excepting some of the big players, like Image) is pretty slim, but if you look on these projects as good practice that you might get paid for, then I would argue that they certainly have some value.

Beyond that, the only advice I can offer is about making sure that even a small break turns into a bigger one: always do your best work, regardless of the page rate; always deliver on time; try very hard not to be a dick.

That's all I've that been doing. So far, so good…!

Cheers

Jim

Sunday Surgery: (Not Quite) New Year's Resolution

A couple of days ago, Kyle Jones raised some excellent -- chiefly Manga Studio related -- questions that I thought were worth a Surgery session. I should stress that I don't use MS professionally (yet) but am more of an enthusiastic amateur. As such, I would unreservedly recommend Doug Hills' excellent book Manga Studio for Dummies as, effectively, the missing manual for this package.


Nonetheless, much of what Kyle is asking breaks down to a matter of resolution, about which I do know something.


Counter-intuitively, I'd like to deal with Kyle's last question first, since the answer informs much everything else.


"in Photoshop on my computer it was very difficult to digitally draw and ink anything much bigger than 300 dpi, but since Manga Studio handles larger dpi projects much better (and can easily handle 1200 dpi without slowing down), is there any point of overkill (or is bigger always better)? If one's computer can breeze through the 1200 dpi setting in Manga Studio, is there any reason to go less? (assuming it will ultimately be colored in Photoshop at a lower dpi)?"


This actually hits on something very important. There is an extraordinary amount of rubbish talked about resolution, and Kyle is exactly right when he refers to higher resolution as "overkill". As computers have become faster and hard drive space has become cheaper, there has been an automatic assumption that more is better. The last time I worked on pre-press, I was routinely being sent graphics files from agencies that were 3600dpi and higher.


This is crazy.


There's a very good reason why scanners offer very high resolution options: if you intend to scan an image and then digitally adjust it or scale it, then it makes sense to scan it at actual size but at high resolution, since making adjustments through the preview on a scanner's software interface is so imprecise as to be useless. Better to bring it into Photoshop at high resolution, adjust, scale, make other fine-tuned alterations and then reduce the dpi to the setting you need.


For this reason, comic line art is generally scanned at 600dpi and is (I suspect) the reason why 600dpi is the default resolution for Manga Studio layers.


But, as Kyle notes, the first thing most colourists will do is drop the resolution to 300dpi.


So… what is the ideal resolution for your documents? 


The answer is defined by the quality of the printed product. All printed material that has any kind of variation in colour or tone is made up of dots of ink on paper. The fineness of those dots in printing terms is defined by the screen frequency, which is measured in lines per inch or lpi.


There is a very complicated formula to enable conversion from dpi to lpi in order to work out optimum resolution, but I worked in newspaper and magazine production for ten years, and the rule of thumb which always worked in my experience is that, for an image that is 100% of printed size, optimum dpi = 2x printed lpi.


Old style B&W newsprint was anything from 45-75lpi


Most magazines are 100-120lpi


Really glossy brochures, art books and some high-end magazines might be as high as 150-175lpi.


I would be astonished if there is any comic on the market printing at higher than 150lpi on internal pages, and 175lpi on the front cover, so anything higher 350dpi (call it 400 if you think the artwork might be need to be scaled up at some point) at actual size is nothing more than a waste of hard drive space and CPU clock cycles. 


In almost all instances where the printed product will be colour or grayscale, 300dpi will be more than sufficient. If in serious doubt, find out what the lpi of the printed pages will be, but I'm prepared to bet cold, hard cash on the upper limit being 150lpi.


If you're creating aliased linework (with hard edges, of the kind that Manga Studio produces, for reasons explained in my previous post here) then you should do that at 600dpi -- if you were submitting traditional pen-and-ink work, that's what you'd be expected to scan it at, so it's as well to respect that as a convention. It's also important to note that the lpi to dpi conversion is only applicable to colour and grayscale documents. Absolute black and white is imaged in much more detail and 300dpi is insufficient in these circumstances.


(The two paragraphs above have been revised in line with some sage and timely advice from Mr Todd Klein, for whose input I am most grateful.) 


 "The brushes I had made in Photoshop were modeled after Freddie Williams' suggestions in his book "Digitally Drawing Comics". For instance, he suggested working in a 300 dpi project 11 x 17 inches and doing contour lines at 6 or 8 pixels as a starting point."


I will confess to being mystified as to why anyone would advise creating digital art from scratch on an oversized document -- the only difference it makes is to the Zoom percentages you have to use. In the layout, "pencilling" and "inking" stages, certainly in Manga Studio, I'd work at 600dpi and actual, printed size.


"What would be the millimeters of an 8 pixel or 3 pixel Photoshop brush in Manga Studio (if page size and resolution affects the brushes at all - which touches upon my next questions - then please assume the page size and dpi would be the same in both programs)?"


The resolution absolutely affects this. Pixels are the "d" (dots) in dpi, so the higher the dpi, the more tightly packed the dots and thus the smaller the pixels. Double the resolution and a brush measured in pixels shrinks to a quarter the size:

For reference, that 24px brush at 300dpi measures 2mm across, and 1mm across at 600dpi.


Manga Studio advises a very old-school way of determining "actual print size" on your monitor, which is to create a document and then adjust the zoom percentage on screen until the ruler at the top of the document matches an actual ruler that you hold against the screen. Once you've determined the zoom percentage that matches the real print dimensions, you can set this as the default value the application preferences and zoom to it with CMD-SHIFT-0 (zero):

Note that, dependent upon your own screen size and default resolution, the print size zoom percentage on your monitor is unlikely to be 16.4% -- you need to measure it yourself!


Manga Studio is much better at maintaining live updates of the same document in multiple windows than Photoshop, so it's worth creating two windows for your working document, one that you leave at Actual Print Size and the other that you do all the zooming in and out of, that way you can always quickly refer to how your linework will look on the finished page and ensure that your lines aren't becoming over-fiddly or insanely detailed. If you have a Cintiq or a dual monitor set up, you can keep the print size window for reference on the monitor that you don't use for the main drawing.


(This last hint shamelessly stolen wholesale from Mr Dave Gibbons' Manga Studio 'webinar' which you can see here, and which is well worth 90 minutes of your time.)


Because Manga Studio uses millimetres rather than pixels, MS brushes are the same size regardless of document resolution: 2mm is 2mm, resolution only changes how many pixels are squeezed into those 2mm.


I would genuinely advise trying to let go of the actual measurements of your pens and brushes, and simply worry about whether you're happy with the stroke weights they give at Actual Print Size.


Obviously, if you change the size of your document, then this will affect the size of your brushes and thus your strokes, which is why I recommend working at high resolution and actual size, rather than on an oversize document at lower resolution.


However, if you are determined to work on documents that are larger than printed size, the key thing to remember is that you are dealing with areas and not lengths. If you take a normal comic page and double the side lengths, you have increased the area by a factor of four.


Consequently, if you want to create a document that is twice the final, printed size of a comic page, you need to multiply the side lengths by the square root of two which, as near as makes no difference, is 1.4


Thus, if a comic page (including bleed) is 178mm x 269mm (sorry, US readers, the rest of the world is metric!) and you want to work on a page that is double that, you need to multiply each side by 1.4, to give 249mm x 377mm.


The same is true for brushes -- a 48px brush at actual size would need to be 48x1.4= 67px on a document scaled to two-up.


It's important to stress, though, that the whole point of artists working on oversize pages was originally to enable the artist to create finer strokes than they would be able to if they worked at actual size. The only reason for drawing at half or two up was so that the linework would appear finer when camera-ed down to actual size (and a certain amount of unevenness of line would also be eliminated). If you're going to scale up your brushes, you might as well not bother!


And that -- I think -- pretty much covers it. If any of this is unclear, or raises additional questions, then please use the Comments section to leave feedback and we'll come back to this in a future surgery session.


Cheers!


Jim

Sunday Surgery: RANT!

Question: Script Convention

First of all, let's get the perfectly reasonable question from Matthew McLaughlin out of the way before we get to the rant that developed as I pursued the train of thought…


Of breakout balloons, Matthew asks:


"…Would you mind in future posts explaining what you see in a script or what indication a script might use to prompt an effect such as this? Does the writer indicate specifically "breakout balloon"in his script or is this something a letterer makes as an artistic choice?"


The short version is that this is something you should leave to the letterer. You can certainly indicate an escalation in drama and the required emphasis in a line of dialogue with an instruction like this:


FRANK (shouts): Get DOWN!


But the fact is, until you have the page of finished artwork in front of you, there's no real way of knowing what's going to work in terms of the mood of the art and the amount of physical space. If your letterer's good, you're going to get the most suitable shouting effect for the artwork; if they're not then no amount of instruction in the script will remedy that fact!


(And then, I don't mind admitting, I think I must have suffered some kind of aneurysm or minor stroke because my train of thought rather got away from me at this point! Matthew -- beyond the fact that your question got me thinking about the roles of the various contributors to the process that ends up creating a comic, what follows has nothing to do with you, and is not a comment on the way you write scripts, several of which I've had the pleasure of working on.)

Rant: It's A Question Of Trust

When did the trust start to break down in comics? When did everyone start trying to do everyone else's jobs? When did we collectively start to forget that this is a collaborative medium and that, although it was necessity that divided the creative process up between several contributors, sometimes a team can be greater than the sum of its parts?


If you're the writer, I don't expect you to care about the lettering. Beyond an understandable desire for it to not suck, I don't want you to care! All I want is for you to understand that I care about the lettering and will do the best job I can for you.


I've seen examples of lettering guides from a couple of artists (not ones I've worked with, I hasten to add) that have essentially lettered the entire page; all the dialogue from the script rendered into captions and balloons.


But here's the thing: unless I copy your font choice and size/leading settings, my balloons aren't going to take up the same amount of space. I can understand why you wouldn't want your art covered by lousy balloon placements but, dude, if you're that bothered, then letter the thing yourself and get paid for it!


Otherwise, all you've done is make the letterer's job incredibly boring and waste a whole load of time that you could have been spending drawing the pages, which is the thing you are getting paid for. If you're not happy with the lettering, give feedback to the editor -- sorting this stuff out is their job.


Here's a crazy idea: leave a quarter to a third of each panel as dead space, draw the first speaker on the left, and let me do my job. There you go -- I've just saved you hours of non-billable time. No need to thank me, it's what I'm getting paid for.


It's about trust. It's about understanding that you --wherever you are in the creative chain-- are one pair of hands out of several through which this strip is going to pass. You don't have to be able to do everything and, to an extent, you have to be prepared to fall backwards and expect the person behind you to catch you.


Writers: camera angles? Lighting instructions? Detailed notes on frame composition? Screenwriters don't give that level of instruction to the director, and comic book script writers don't need to spoonfeed the artist every tiny element of the scene.


Pencillers: when did you guys start rendering every last stroke of the artwork in pencil? Seriously? You want to know why you struggle to hit that deadline? Because you have a perfectly capable inker, whose job it is to worry about texture and feathering and cross-hatching, and you've reduced them to tracing all that lovingly rendered detail. Sometimes, you've put them out of a job entirely, because your pencils can just be darkened off in Photoshop. Except that you know that's not as nice as having them inked.


Concentrate on the composition, the storytelling, anatomy and perspective. The writer hasn't included notes on figure drawing in the script, because it's a given that you know what you're doing.


The inker knows that the objects in the foreground have a heavier line than the objects in the background; the inker knows that this line needs to taper thin-to-thick down the page to create weight, because they're the inker. Let them do their job. They've just saved you days. No need to thank them, it's what they're getting paid for.


Maybe, just maybe, if we all tried to worry a little less about what kind of job the next person in the process is going to do, and a little more on playing to the strengths we're expected to bring to our part of the process, our comics would all be a little bit better. 


And they might even come out on time.


Cheers!


Jim


PS: Just adding some extra material into Part Six of the Illustrator Guide. Look out for it tomorrow or Tuesday.