I went to Fall Con last week and found that most of the artists there draw on large sheets of paper for their comics. I've been sticking to 8x11 paper cause of my scanner size.
I know the effect of larger drawings make room for more detail.

What size do you draw in? Should I invest in a bigger scanner so I can draw larger pages?

If you have a small scanner and draw big how do you get around it?

JillyFoo
I went to Fall Con last week and found that most of the artists there draw on large sheets of paper for their comics. I've been sticking to 8x11 paper cause of my scanner size.
I know the effect of larger drawings make room for more detail.

What size do you draw in? Should I invest in a bigger scanner so I can draw larger pages?

If you have a small scanner and draw big how do you get around it?

Traditionally, standard comics are drawn on 11x17 (aka A3) bristol. I think the working dimensions on there are 10 3/4" x 15 3/8" (including trim area, someone correct me if I'm wrong). The reason being is that its easer to get the detail in on a larger image vs drawing at actual size. Also, little mistakes and imperfections in your line work tend to be less noticable when scaled down. Really, though, what size you draw on is more a matter of personal preference, and as everything heads in a digital direction, the relevancy of this stuff changes too. If you're interested in pre made art boards check out www.bluelinepro.com-- they're the main brand for that sort of stuff, though I have seen Canson come out with their more commercial consumer friendly "Fanboy" line. Blue Line uses Strathmore bristol (good stuff), i believe.

As far as scanning, most A3 sized scanners will ding you over a grand. There is a brand, that i hear off and on makes A3 scanners on the cheap, that brand is Mustek. I haven't ever owned one, but it seems like people either love em or hate em (the hate em category has to do with a percentage of them breaking down-- i hear the scanning is good across the board). Also the ones I have seen, top out at 300dpi... which should be more than good for scanning in pages that will eventually be scaled down, not so good for anything else you might want to scan at over 300 dpi. You local copy shop could probably scan the pages for you, but in my experience, this is not cheap, and you will have paid for a scanner in no time. What I've done in the past is scan the pages in parts and photoshopped them together. This works really well, the only downside being that its time consuming. My last few traditional jobs, I actually worked on a dimension that fit on a 11x14 page so I could do each page in 2 scans rather than 3.

Personally, I've pretty much given up traditional in favor of doing everything digitally. First, with a small Wacom Graphire, and now with a Wacom penabled tablet. It saves me about 80 steps, and, frankly, I turn out the same end product. I typically work on a traditional sized comic page at 300dpi (print res), which is small, most people will recommend 600, in case I should ever have to scale something up. I might venture into that territory soon. But for now this is working for me. The only problem is... no original art to sell!

I still draw 8.5 x 11 but I can scan to 300 dpi or better. I do the pencils and inks first then scan and do the rest on my laptop. I may start leaving it at the higher resolution until I'm ready to letter, as I always blow it up to do the coloring. I have to letter it at the final size to make it look right.

Mustek is a good brand btw. Mine lasted 11 years before I replaced it for a Canon all-in-one.

I used to work one margin smaller than 9x11, but I've been experimenting with smaller sizes 'cause they fill up faster than big ones do. I'm not sure I can deal with the relative lack of detail, but the speed is nice.

The other thing I've done a time or two, is draw each panel separately, scan and reassemble in the computer. I've been moderately successful with it, because it allows for all your cropping/edge-straightening to be done digitally. And it allows you to work as large as you want for each panel, but still get things on the scanner. But it requires pretty strict thumbnailing, at least, it did for me. (On second thought, maybe I should do a few pages of the comic I'm working of for here this way ... just for variety... lol! )

Guess you could stick to drawing-the-shape-of-the-finished-result then scan only the panels you can fit on the scanner at once. Straight-edged panels would let you line things up pretty easily. Then you'd only have to worry about splash pages and covers. (Either scanning them at a copy store or trying to realign halves after scanning.) I have had reasonably good luck realigning halves of non-comic style pages, but that's something each artist would have to figure out if they can do on their own I guess.

So I guess in answer to your question, I've worked 9x11, 6x9, 7x7 and random sizes on scraps of everything I can get my hands on. :D

I used to work 10x15 before I switched onto digital. which is still 10x15.

I work on A4 sheets of paper. Don't ask me how much is that in inches, I don't remember, haha. I leave off roughly 1cm on sides (and have to remember that the bottom 1-3mm will be cut off by the scanner) and this after resizing used to roughly fit into my old comic book template (until I found out it's a little bit off).

The reasons? First: I can't find a ruler long enough to draw a line across the entire page. Second: I don't have enough space anywhere in my room to put vertically an A3 sized page anywhere. Third: Since I can put it horizontally, I could still do a spread... there's no way I could cut and stick two sheets together and expect myself to do it straightenough :P Fourth: I like drawing on cheap printer paper (500 sheets for 3-4$). Fifth: the larger the page, the harder it is for me to keep the proportions. I tend to skewer the graphics, squish the images or focus too much on a part of the page and end up drawing things at different sizes. And finally sixth: Large pages scare me. Took me couple of years to get used to A4 format :)

Anyway, pencils are scanned, edited in photoshop and then I scale the page down to my template and add panel borders :)

i draw huge. I mean, HUGE. lol. I bought bristol board that was something like 20x27 or something. I pin the pages up on my wall and draw and ink standing up. Thats how I draw in my sketchbook and thats the size I drew my batman story at. I took pics of the pages in a well-lit area with a digital camera *thus why some of the pages looks so tilted* it was alot of work and alot of fun, and i still draw on it, but for KFK I ran out of bristol, and on top of that this is supposed to be a cheap manga feel to it, so i draw it on regular typing paper. and it sucks because i cant use brush or it will curl the paper! :(

I work on 8.5 x 11 too. :3 The bigger paper will certainly allow for more detail... but I don't really get too far into details anyway, so it works just fine for me. I usually map out my panels on the page to be about 3.5" tall - so my drawings usually aren't really big. :)

I draw on A4 paper, and previously on 8.5x11 paper. I don't think I'll ever draw larger, because it's harder to have a grasp on "the big picture" when the working area is too large. I like to know what my page will look like at 1 glance, and I like to know when starting exactly what a reader will end up seeing.

If I need more drawing space, I can always cut/paste more panels together.

nickguy
i draw huge. I mean, HUGE. lol. I bought bristol board that was something like 20x27 or something. I pin the pages up on my wall and draw and ink standing up. Thats how I draw in my sketchbook and thats the size I drew my batman story at. I took pics of the pages in a well-lit area with a digital camera *thus why some of the pages looks so tilted* it was alot of work and alot of fun

Thats both amazing and completely insane. You are hard core. I respect the crap out of you. I'm gonna have to go back and re-read Batman knowing this.

mlai
I draw on A4 paper, and previously on 8.5x11 paper. I don't think I'll ever draw larger, because it's harder to have a grasp on "the big picture" when the working area is too large. I like to know what my page will look like at 1 glance, and I like to know when starting exactly what a reader will end up seeing.

A lot of artists draw out a rough of the page at actual size to address the issues that you're talking about. But then they blow it up to the 10x15-ish size and transfer it to an A3 sheet (or whatever proportions the comic would call for I suppose) with a light box.

I used to do something similar when I worked traditional, even with 8.5x11 pages... Particularly if i was doing something involving 3 point perspective where I had points that would have run WAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY off the page, I do it little and blow it up and transfer it with a light box.

Those are the kinds of steps I eliminated by going digital. I used to draw a rough, transfer, pencil, ink, scan, touch up.... Now i just rough in digitally and ink over it. Boom. Done.

It depends on the size of the paper I use... If I use a big piece of paper, then it's big. If it's small, it's small.

A page in Half-Half is one-fourth of an 8.5x11" piece of bond paper, so I fit four pages in one sheet. In KinTori, I draw a page on the whole piece, but not really whole since I put margins in order to prevent the page from being cut out when scanned (I go to a comp shop since I don't have a scanner). Cat and the Comp is done digitally, so I can't say anything about that. Hahaha.

I'm not really good with details, so I opt for smaller sizes, unless I'm doing a full body pic of a character. =^_^=

I usually draw on 11"x14" bristol or watercolor paper with an 8.5"x12" scanner. I try to divide each page in half for webcomics so I can fit one whole 800 px width page on the screen at a time. If I use a whole page, I have to scan it in two pieces and piece them together in Photoshop. I can fit one extended comic, two standard comics, four Pie & Guy strips, and four Fantastic Science Stories on one page.

I (now) draw all my comics on a digital canvas of 3600x2400 pixels at 300 dpi. This size works for me and I have been using it for almost a year now. It is a large enough size that I can print stuff on T-shirts, but small enough that my computer doesn't twitch and groan under the memory strain. It resizes down nicely to 800x600 and that is close enough to physical page dimensions that I don't mind the extra border on the top and bottom. (I'm in the process of converting the old stuff into the right dimensional format)

the paper I currently use for webcomics is 9x12, I define a live area that will fit on a fairly average size scanner. When I do minicomics I draw tiny, around 5.5x8.5, sometimes even smaller (the one with the pirate and aliens was 1/3 letter.) I probably could draw larger and scale it down in Photoshop or photocopy it at 65% or something but that's an extra step, more toner and copies that I'd have to deal with. Plus I'm lazy.

8.5 X 11. I did so to help me simplify my style, and because time is money, and it takes me a heckuvalot less time to draw a page on an 8.5 X 11 page than the traditional 11 X 17.

If my work were more detailed, I would likely rethink my choice. Since it's not, no rethinking is required.

I would draw on A3 if i could, but i just don't have the scanner for it, so A4 will have to do.

I tend to try and squeeze as much detail as i can by using different sized pens and adding a few details in the computer. It works but i really should looking into either a tablet or a A3 scanner.

JillyFoo
I went to Fall Con last week and found that most of the artists there draw on large sheets of paper for their comics. I've been sticking to 8x11 paper cause of my scanner size.
I know the effect of larger drawings make room for more detail.

What size do you draw in? Should I invest in a bigger scanner so I can draw larger pages?

If you have a small scanner and draw big how do you get around it?

You scan panels more than once and paste them into a new page.

I don't draw large format. I used to when I was pencilling print comics in the indies years ago, but that was because I was required to---plus I didn't have to ink the darn things.

Bigger art is great for organic detailing--if I was hired to do a webcomic of Conan the Barbarian or Xenozoic Tales, published at 900 pixels width or wider, I would definitely want to work full size. But for anything inorganic (like a superhero book in a city full of shiny glass buildings)it's better just to draw and ink small, and add fine architectural detailing in the computer.

or just do impressionistic buildings, a la sin city.

Traditional 11X17 for me. I have a normal scanner. I used to shrink my pages with a photocopier but now I just scan them in halves. It's easy to splice them together and you can't tell they were ever seperate if it's done right.

My paper size is 12x7, but the size of the comic is 10x5. My other comic I'm working on is, if I remember is 10x7.

It needs to be a fairly small size considering I have a small scanner. I would probably prefer a larger size, but that's the best I can do.

mattchee
A lot of artists draw out a rough of the page at actual size to address the issues that you're talking about. But then they blow it up to the 10x15-ish size and transfer it to an A3 sheet (or whatever proportions the comic would call for I suppose) with a light box.

this is kind of what I do. I draw at about 5x8, scan it on fix what ever needs to be fixed and then enlarged and printed onto legal size paper (A3 if the final page size is large) and ink over them.

If I start drawing on too large a paper I end up with bad composition and lots of weird negative space.

Reva draws on A4.

my comic is entirely digital, but I draw the panels twice the size they end up as so I can fit more detail in. I have a tendency to have thick outlines and sketchy coloring, so by drawing bigger and shrinking it when I'm done, it appears much smoother and easier to look at.