#comic layout

Then I take the thumbnails and scale them down and start constructing pages out of them. There's a LOT of ways you can format a comic, but I stick to a rough 3x3 grid layout as, like, the most busy I'm willing to make a page. This is what I mean;

I can use UP TO 3 horizontal frames interrupted UP TO 3 times vertically for a total of 9 frames per page. For hanahaki, it was a 2x2 grid for simplicity. Really, cannot recommend enough, if comic layout intimidates you, throw it away. Limit yourself to a simple grid and don't deviate. Your story only needs complicated layouts if you decide it does. Anyway, with that template in mind, I start plugging in thumbnails and giving them frames.

here I stopped at 5 pages bc who knows, my brain might implode and this project may die, so we're starting small.

The next step is to copy over the thumbnails and resize them for a full page. The last step of layout is putting in my rough estimates of where the dialogue/narration will go;

bc if there's one thing that will fuck up a perfectly good frame composition, its realizing you have to put a fucking speech bubble in there. I try to be generous bc I prefer fairly large text for my comics--as I myself am Fucking Blind--and it can be a hell of a tightrope, esp when you intend to do a chatty, floaty head comics like me. This is another reason I prefer to keep that 9 frames limit on my layouts bc there's only so much space for those talky bits.

For hanahaki, I tended to cheat a lot so you'd get a lot of pages where the speech bubbles were way outside the bounds of the page, which has made formatting later a huge pain and I'm trying to be better.

Ultimately, you just don't want to cover ppls faces. Unless you do, for the storytelling of it all.