For books layout, this is normally a job left for the publisher who have to send then the PDF file to the printer. For doujinshi I will guess that it’s the artists themselves who are doing the job. For such job, publisher normally use DTP softwhare ( Desktop Publishing ) like Adobe inDesign, or Quark Xpress, depending of their computer environment. Layout in artbook can be quite different between them, but I will distinguish two cases, one where they put the illustration as large as possible, and then another with small illustrations.

Illustrations taking whole pages, were from the beginning prepared for printing; they can be on one page, or spread on 2 pages. The later case must have certainly annoyed a lot of people. Why can’t they just rotate the image to put it sideway. I’m not sure myself, but I will guess that turning a book is a taboo. Nevertheless, they should normally take into account the thickness of the artbook especially for glue binding which usually eat a part of the image; but in most case I have seen they will print on the full page.

Here is a normal page layout. As you can see, there are plenty of margin; as a normal book will look bad without them. The best layout would have even more margin than this but artbooks usually doesn’t waste that much space. Most of them remove the margin, even the outside one for thumbs and notes. This margin is convenient so as to to not put fingers on the illustration, but I guess everyone are careful with their artbooks and flip the pages with just the border. The inside margin is here to take into account the eaten part but artbooks spread the illustration in there. In fact in the DTP software it’s pretty simple, you put the illustration in the middle of the double page layout and you get your 2 page spread illustration with the binding in the middle. I will admit that margin would certainly kill the illustration, but it seems that some people do take this into account, and in fact make overlapping pages. While there is still a part of the illustration eaten, visually it will be less apparent as the binding is compensated by the overlapping.

Now we can get onto the printing, and sadly, there are still color problem there. Getting an image in CMYK will not guarantee the quality of the color. The problem here lies in the different ink used. First of all, it’s normal for an artist to preview their art on paper, and they have a very good inkjet printer for that job. Inkjet printer aren’t for intensive printing, so they use liquid ink, which have a very good color restitution. It will be rather faithful to the screen. However, the ink used by professional printer are different. It’s a paste ink, used for offset printing ( most common printing method as it’s cheap for mass good quality printing ). The difference of the ink can change how an artwork looks.

Here are sample of Noizi Ito’s first and second artbook, GU-RE-N, and KA-E-N. GU-RE-N has always been a deceiving artbook for me compared to KA-E-N. The difference are in the color; GU-RE-N just looks bland, compared to KA-E-N which has the nice and vivid color of Noizi Ito’s style. The problem here is not between the RGB and CMYK space, since the illustration of Shana were for printing already, and actually looks good in the light novel. This is just a problem of quality check on the printing, but the one who signed the “Good to Print”, mustn’t have checked the quality of the color. These sort of issue needs to discussed with the printer so as to solve them.

On the photo provided by Tinkle for their C77 sets, you can see stripes in cyan, magenta, yellow and black, meaning that the sheet here is just for checking purpose. It’s not cut yet in small cards as well. Printers will always provide such sample to their client so as to check the quality of the printing before mass printing them. I will also note that since C75, Tinkle, with a few other artist, has the best printing quality I have ever seen in all my doujinshi, but I should cover this in the last article.

Second step on the road, color space. Short article, and this time it’s not easy to illustrate with examples. To do this, you would need both the digital version and printed version. At least, I can provide a page from one booklet I got from Tinkle.
After sketching and inking, there is the coloring, in SAI, openCanvas, CG-illust, or Photoshop. What will interest us here, is not the software, but the screen on which the artist are drawing.

The screen, is in my opinion, the weak link on the road to printing.
On the one hand, screens are light emitting devices, which means they are using a RGB ( Red, Green, Blue ) color system. All color are obtained then by mixing these 3 lights. On the other hand, printed material are light absorbing like more of our surrounding. As such, the color space is CMYK ( Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black ). They all are the complementary colors of the RGB space, but they have to add one ink, black, because the quality of a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow aren’t as good as indian ink; it looks brown.

The one big problem is that RGB, and CMYK doesn’t cover the same color, meaning that the screen can’t display some color possible in printing, and some color possible on screen aren’t possible when printing. Here I’m not sure how artist are choosing their color space. For web, obviously they can use RGB, but if they print it, it might looks different. For printing, they just can’t have the full CMYK gamut on screen, which is my opinion, limiting for them.

It seems that it’s possible to work on an artwork after it’s printed, but since I cant’t read Japanese, I will not comment on it; I would rather not spread misinformation.

The road start from the white paper, and I will go until it get digitalized. Second article will be about colors on screen, then colors in printing, and finally paper and screening. I’m also introducing the Shadowbox on the blog since the Lightbox didn’t work. To get the full size of an image, you will have first to click on it, then save the image on your computer.

Computer has changed how most manga and anime are drawn today. They used to be on celluloid, on Deleter’s paper, with different tools to draw. Now, a good part of the process is on computer. One things can still be done on paper, the sketches. As far as I have seen, some artist still does it, others just sketch directly in their favorite drawing software.

Sketches are fascinating; it’s the idea of an artist as rough as it can be. I also like looking at the tool they use. Judging by the strokes, Aoi Nishimata seems to use a ballpen, Tanihara Natsuki use a pen, maybe the famous G one, or a marker but I guess the majority use a pencil, not necessarily a black one though; blue pencil are not scannable for instance.

The next step is inking, and can be done either on computer or still on paper, with pens, marker, or brushes. But be it at the end of the inking, or of the sketches, one important step is the scanning if the artist started on paper.
Scanning takes the drawing from the analog space to the digital space. From here, is set in stone the resolution of the drawing.

Let’s try to explain it briefly; one characteristic of a scanner is the resolution, expressed in DPI, Dots Per Inch. In short, a line of one inch is sampled to a certain number of dot. The more dot, the more precise and detailed it’s.
From what I have seen, artists usually either prepare their illustration for Internet or for printing. I think it’s the most visible in the Pixiv Artist Book 2009 which is full of small illustration. If the image were prepared for Internet, the resolution need to be high, but on paper, at a 300 DPI printing resolution, it will look small. I think some artist just didn’t have high resolution image. Here is a list of example of image resolution needed for a full page print at certain DPI:

• B5 page, 300 DPI, 2079×2953
• A4 page, 300 DPI, 2480×3508
• B5 page, 600 DPI, 4157×5906
• A4 page, 600 DPI, 4961×7016

And to illustrate, here are some original digital file, from Izumi Sakurazawa‘s doujin CD, Chronological, and Goto-P‘s Peeping-P doujin CD. It’s rare to get such file, but here are files which could be used for nice printing.
These, insane resolution requires, aside of the usual Intuos 3/4 tablet and the scanner, a very good computer who can handle these images. Kantoku for instance has a Intel Core2 Quad Q9550, with 8GB of RAM, 5 GB are used as a Ram Disk, a GeForce 9600GT/512MB, and 1TB of hardrive. This is a professional computer which is really scaled for high resolution images, as the most important part is the RAM.

So, what should be remembered is the resolution of an image for a decent printing; it’s freaking huge.