Exercise P2: Comic Paper for Paneling!

In our previous lesson Exercise P1: Paneling a Page you learned about different shots you can put into the panels on a page. This lesson will help kickstart your panels!

Manga Start met up with Calvin Wong, a local Oakland & San Francisco Bay Area zine artist, who loves to write super creative zines about zombies, monsters, maidens, and music. He shared his printable zine/comic template with us, and it’s great for getting your manga started!

(”Zine” means a mini comic magazine, which is how Calvin prints his stories! More on this later ^_^)

The zine template has a spot for you to write your comic name, and comes with guidelines which cut the page into halves, quarters, and thirds. You can start your panels by drawing just inside the guidelines… Here are some samples:

halves!                —>       thirds!                 —>       jambalaya!!!

We recommend that you use a pencil and ruler to rough in your panels, then ink them with a pen. When you’re done penciling and inking your comic, you erase the pencil lines over the whole page. The blue lines from the template can easily be edited out by photocopier or photoshop!

In the next update, we’ll show you a few one page comics we’ve done with the template.

Til then, please download the template for your self by clicking here.

If you email it to us at mangastartpro@gmail.com, we’ll put it up on Manga Start!

Like these by the BAAU folks, and Ian: http://mangastart.com/blog/2009/10/30/exercise-p2-followup-baau/
Or, these by the SCCG group in Sacramento! http://mangastart.com/blog/2009/11/13/exercise-p2-followup-by-sccg-plus-plus