Panelmaking tips needed

[Brickwall]

As none of you have known up until now, I draw comics occasionally as a hobby. *I'd like to do it more, but I have a teensy weensy problem.

Panels.

I just can't get those damn boxes looking good at all. *It's hard enough making them uniform, and making them non-uniform is just overwhelmingly painful.

I see so many hand-drawn comics with nice, regular, neat panels. *How do you do that without going insane?! *Tell me!

And don't just tell me to give up good panel shape, because that isn't an option.

[BelkarsDagger]

What medium do you use? That can change the whole thing.

[Brickwall]

Mechanical pencil, although I have amateur-grade inks at my disposal if ever needed.

[BelkarsDagger]

Use way thicker lines for the borders, then. Do you want them to be all perfectly box-sized or the same, or not? If so, then use a ruler. If not, use a ruler for the straight lines and then size them however.

[Brickwall]

I use a ruler, but the angles and exact measurements are giving me pains. That's the problem.

[BelkarsDagger]

Oh, okay. Exact measurements... have you thought about doing the frames on a program where you can copy/paste, then printing it out and drawing the comic from there?

[Brickwall]

My computer hates me. If I draw something in, say, Fireworks at "2 inches", it does not print it out at 2 inches.

[BelkarsDagger]

That sucks. It seems you've backed yourself into a corner, and I have no further advice at this time. Sorry. :(

[DArKandEViL]

Fireworks, eh? Have you tried printing borderless?

[Brickwall]

Actually, I solved this by using Paint. Apparently, it behaves well. I made a panel stencil, so I can have fun with smaller panels now. If I ever need a big one, I'll make a new one.

[DArKandEViL]

I have a lot of problems using paint to print anything, it allways spreads to a 2 or more pages.

But, I can print with Fireworks just fine. ^.^

[Brickwall]

It puts the top left of the image at the center of the page. If the image is small enough, you will have no problem.

Fireworks hates me though. You're lucky the better program likes you.

[Picasso007]

Re: printing images at certain sizes.

After working in a copy shop for over a year, the best quick-and-easy way I've found to get an image to print out the size you want it to is to copy it into Microsoft Word. You can set the view to show the layout of the entire page, can resize the image however you need, can adjust the print margins as desired, and the program handily displays rulers scaled to the page so that you can print boxes the exact size you need to. Note that I'd recommend that you draw the box in another program (Paint, for example), then paste that image into Word and scale it there. Word's drawing toolbar I find is more trouble than it's worth.