drawing comics in adobe illustrator - part two

earlier i described my process for drawing my comic "ang maskot". you can read that here.

so now i have all 48 pages done in individual adobe illustrator .ai files, and the next step is to get them ready for the photocopying shop.

not having any desktop publishing software (and not knowing how to use 'em anyways), i did some common-sense improvisation: taking fourteen pieces of scratch paper, i folded them together in the middle to make a mock-up pamphlet, numbered the pages using a ballpen, and then took the pamphlet apart gain. now all i have to do is replicate the ordering of the pages on the sheets using the same program i started with, adobe illustrator.

i open a new document 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high in illustrator.


based on the mockup's page numbering, i paste the two appropriate illustrator files onto the new document. here it's the front and back cover-- the outer face of the first sheet.

i then arrange them by hand, leaving a bit of margin along the outer sides and also in the middle. because i gauged eveything by eye, i screwed up the margins. but i only learned this when when the comics had been printed and cut.

repeat the process for each side of all fourteen sheets, and then save. i used pdf because doing sample printouts on my inkjet at home, i thought the tones looked more accurate. i was wrong. when i took the files to get printed (laser print, P5 per page at UP shopping mall) the tones looked washed out. i don't know if it was the printer's fault or mine. oh all right, it's mine.


last step: photocopying. above are samples of the P0.75 copy, P0.60 copy and P0.50 copy. i went with the best one. each sheet is photocopied back-to-back and then folded and stapled in the middle, and finally the edge opposite the spine is cut to make it nice and even (i paid an extra P1 per book for all this). i felt quite flattered when i discovered that they'd printed out an extra copy and was passing it around. when i came by to pick up my stuff, one xerox machine operator was reading the comic with one hand while flipping a textbook on his machine with the other. he read it twice while i was waiting.

it's interesting how the photocopying added texture to my flat vector graphics. some of the night scenes actually looked better on paper than oncreen; too bad a lot of the very light tones practically disappeared. lesson learned.

well, that's it for this quasi-tutorial. i have a hundred copies of the finished comics for sale at this saturday's komikon. hope to see you there!