Answers to FAQs
Q:
What size paper do you do your work on, and what kind of paper is it?
A:
I use A4 Deleter Comic paper, which can be bought from Akadot Retail for a reasonable price. The quality of the paper is excellent for inking and sketching, and while you can buy the ones with blue lines to help rule the margins, I buy the blank ones since the mechanical guide required by TOKYOPOP are of a different dimension. A4 is not the normal size used by professional manga artists or even professional Western comic artists, but since I have to do everything myself, there’s no reason why I have to draw on A3 paper when I have neither the time nor resources to do so.
The dimensions of A4 paper are 210mm × 297mm. This is slightly larger than the mechanical guidelines required by TOKYOPOP, which has a print size of 5” × 7.4375”. This requires the A4 art to be shrunk to 66% of its actual size, in which the table here outlines:
| A4 Bleed | A4 Trim | A4 Safety | Print Bleed | Print Trim | Print Safety | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Width × Height | 7.875” × 11.531” | 7.5” × 11.156” | 6.75” × 10.406” | 5.25” × 7.6875” | 5” × 7.4375” | 4.5” × 6.9375” |
For a clearer explanation of the terms “bleed”, “trim” and “safety”, please refer here. Note that if you live in any other country besides America, you’ll find this “inches” thing incredibly annoying, so for that purpose I provide a converter tool.
NB. If you ink on paper and scans your work into the computer to be toned, then always make sure you clean up your scans. Most people scan in greyscale, but you must always convert your scanned pages into black and white linework before you start toning. This is because if you don’t, the lines will look fuzzy in print, and if you tone in greyscale, will cause a whole lot of white bits and pieces to be shown next to the lines. In terms of conversion to black and white linework, most programs including Photoshop and Corel Photopaint have these functions.
