Today we received the following question:

can you teach us the right way to make a page and panel like professionals?? what paper do i use? and how big do my panels have to be??? what are the measurement to make a page??  <COMFY GRIMMZ >

Since round 5 of Silent Manga Audition has already started, this is a great time for a bit of review.   For making good page and panel layout, professional manga artists usually create a “name” flowchart before they begin work on the actual “name”. This makes it easier to plan the pages, and speeds up the “name” creation process. But making this “name” flowchart is also difficult, so many artist first write up the plot in text form. This is how you create a simple plot summary. First ask yourself: What do I want to show the readers? What is my manga’s selling point? Then, try to answer the following:

When? (the period) Where? (the place) Who? (the protagonist) Why? (their motivation) What do they do? (their goal) What is the obstacle or enemy? (A problem or villain) How do they overcome the obstacle? How does the manga start? (opening scene) What is the result? (last scene)

  Once you’ve written those, use your answers to fill this in:

 First Scene

Chapter 1 – Event 1

Chapter 2 – Event 2

Chapter 3 – Event3

Last Scene

Now you have a basic summary for your 30 page one-shot.   After creating this plot summary, you can create a name flowchart which includes each scene. This will help you to plan the panel sizes and page layout for your NAME. GOT IT!?   Then there’s the question of the paper size. Professional manga artists in Japan use whatever paper size matches their needs. You can buy many different types of drawing paper, one of the most popular ones being called “Kent paper”, but they’re generally more or less this standard size. In general, artists use paper that is larger than the magazine or comic themselves. When the manga is printed, the ink tends to blot, so you need to draw your lines accurately enough that they’ll still look good when shrunk down. If the paper you use is smaller than a magazine or comic, then everything will be enlarged when it’s printed. Unless you’ve drawn everything incredibly accurately, your mistakes will stand out! In Japan, artists usually use a B4 size paper to draw, including the trim marks. To fit manga magazines which are B5 size, original artwork is shrunk down by 83%, to fit the magazine size. You can download manga manuscript template, from our website too! I hope that helped! See you next time!