To do your panels, there is just one prerequisite: high quality paper! Pencil drawing, inking, correcting and adding screens… it needs to be sturdy enough to take all the punishment.
1. High grammage…
Grammage is the weight of a square metre in grammes (g/m²) of paper. To draw your mangas, make sure to use high grammage paper, that is, paper that is at least 120 g/m².
- If you work with a pencil or a felt-tip, paper with grammage ranging between 120 and 180 g/m² will do very well.
- If you work with pen or a paint brush, you need paper with a grammage of almost 250 g/m²: it absorbs ink better.
2. … and a fine grain
Fine grain paper has the advantage of working with every drawing technique (pen, felt-tip, pencil) used for manga. Also, screens adhere to it well.
- A smooth surface is ideal for clean, precise pen, felt-tip and ball-point pen lines.
- A rougher grain paper is recommended for pencil enthusiasts: stump and hatching renderings will be all the better!
3. A3, A4, B4: what formats should you use?
Did we lose you? This alphabet soup describes the traditional paper formats.
- The A3 format (29.7 cm wide by 42 cm long) makes a double page: you can insert two panels on it.
- The A4 format (21 cm wide by 29.7 cm long) corresponds to a single page.
- And what about B4? This is a Japanese format that's a little bigger that the A4 format (25.4 cm wide by 36 cm long).
In practice: Margins
Before getting started, make sure to draw the margins defining the drawing area. Some kinds of paper are labeled "With layout" and already have graduated margins. They are blue light so they don't show when printing!
Recommended product:
XL® Bristol
See also :
Manga
Manga: Placing screens
