Story Creation

When I have a story in my head, the first thing I do is to stake out the beginning and the ending in my head - I don’t brainstorm or script. The middle part is not as important - the beginning is usually the most important, followed by the resolution. This may not be true for longer stories, but it’s definitely true for shorter ones (ones shorter than 40 pages). If you have a short story with a bad or rushed ending, the reader ends up feeling short-changed (there are exceptions). Because of this, I find short manga stories much, much more difficult to write than longer ones; and more difficult to write than fictional short stories. If you can write good, self-contained short stories, then longer ones should be no problem. However, the reverse isn’t necessarily true.

Materials I Use

I draw and ink all my pages by hand, and tone by computer. I usually pencil, ink and tone each page at a time, once I have the entire story in my head.

Paper: A4 Deleter Doujinshi paper (B5 paper) 110 ~ 135 gsm. This is much smaller than the professional 10” x 15” paper, but I find that the quality isn’t very different once shrunk on the computer.

Pencils: 2B pencil to do rough drafts, and an HB to do more detailed parts. Inks: Windsor and Newton black ink. I tried using Deleter Black Ink once, but before I even dipped my pen in I accidently knocked the whole bottle over. I took it as a bad omen and stuck to W&N.

Nibs: Almost exclusively a Nikko maru-pen (sometimes G-pen), and felt-tip pens 0.1 ~ 0.8 for drawing panel borders and other straight-lines.

Toning: Much is toned via Corel Photo-Paint, since it doesn’t take as much memory as Photoshop as has easier functions. However, since I’m beginning to have to produce printable material, I have switched over to Deleter Comicworks.

Most Valuable Asset: Deleter White Ink. I’m actually a careless and sloppy inker; I don’t believe I’ve ever drawn a page without making a mistake. Thank god for the computer. Hurrah for the computer age.