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Step 3: Planning Your Manga Pages

Supplies Required: Pencil and a sketchbook for design doodles.

Now with a clear story line and character designs, you are ready to move into the real world of manga drawings. The most important part of this step is page design. This determines the flow of your story. Poor page design will quickly lose the interest of your readers.

There are a few common pitfalls with page designing:

1. Too many windows on the same page. A busy and crowd page will get readers confused. Usually 5~8 windows per page is ideal.


2. Confusing order of windows on your page. The normal order of Japanese manga is from right to left, up to down.


3. Too much text on the page. If the manga needs more text than graphics to explain the story line, then probably it’s better for make the story a novel instead. Too many dialog boxes on the page make the manga look boring. To be honest, I never have the patience to read every word of a manga book.


4. Identical designs on every window. Imagine you were watching a movie, and all the screen shoots are character’s faces, can you still stand it after 15 minuses? Comic page design is a lot like movie making, which you have to be the director and choose the right angle and distance for the image. If you know someone who does video shooting or photography, get some tips from them. ^^


5. Too many windows with empty backgrounds. Making background is annoying, really annoying. When I try to move my story along, in most cases the process gets slowed down because the background takes so-long to finish. Unfortunately, there is no way you can avoid dealing with backgrounds, because it is a important part of the story, as readers needs to know whether the story is happening.



Tips for beginners:

Plan your page deign before start drawing live. For short stories, have all the pages planed out all at once. Have a small sketchbook on the site for design doodles. By doing so you can easily make corrections before you put the drawings on real paper.

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Step 4: Start your manga drawings.

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Step 2: Design Your Characters

A lot of good advice you have in these so far. It is quite useful and I know I'll be using it. More, more!

Thanks~ Glad you found it useful
Any suggestions let me know. This is my first tutorial, just try to make it fun for everyone >o<

The use of creative angles and setting up panels is a great tip. I wish I had done that (and avoided excessive text on the page) earlier in my comic.

Great tutorial.