Doin' a Daily Strip

An Unofficial Guide - Part One
(Use at Your Own Risk!)

Believe it or not, more than one person expressed interest in pages devoted to a "backstage" look at how the daily TMNT strip is created. (Okay... so it was only 2 people, but that is more than one!) The following is my attempt to show you how I do it, for better or worse and for what it's worth. Doing comics is a personal sort of thing, so my approach will be different from most everyone else's, but the basics are here and they're fairly universal. Hopefully you'll find something of value in this series of pages!

STEP 1: PAPER

See that white space below? Pretend it's a sheet of bristol board that you picked up from your local art supply shop and cut to the size of 6" high by 18 1/2" long and drew a pencil border of 4 7/8" by 16 1/4" (better yet, pretend that it's six sheets of that bristol board. Now you're looking at your first week of strips.) You'll be working inside of that pencil border, and you cannot break out of it in any way! What you do inside of that border is entirely up to you, however! Notice how that space below there is empty? That's how your week usually begins... the challenge is on!

PAPER: The paper that I use is Strathmore 400 Bristol. I think that it is cold press (rougher surface than hot press) but I'm not too sure as it has a fairly slick feel. It comes in sheets that are 22" X 30" and I chop it down and get 5 daily strips per sheet. It costs about $3 a sheet, I think, but I haven't bought any for a year, so that may not be accurate. It's very durable and holds ink well. Any paper that you're comfortable with is fine. Experiment until you find the brand that you like.

PAPER SIZE: As I wrote above, my strips are done on a cut sheet of bristol that's 6" X 18 1/2" with an image area (the art's border) of 4 7/8" X 16 1/4". You can use this size or any size that fits that same ratio. Don't ask me how to do ratios, cuz I stink at math. I arrived at the size that I use by cutting an actual daily strip out of the paper and enlarging it on a copier until it looked like a size that I could be comfortable working within. You could work larger than this, but be aware (be very aware!) that strips are drastically reduced, and all those nice details that you spent hours rendering are likely to be lost in the printing process.

Part Two

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