One of the most frustrating things about making comics is finding a proper artboard template. As an artist, you just want to create your art without worrying about the size of the layout or technical terms like bleed line and trim line. I don’t have a graphic arts background so it’s twice as frustrating when people talk about this stuff to me.
Lucky for me, my buddy Rob, who is a graphic artist, gave me a package containing comic art board templates. The package contains a solid full sized (11″ x 17″) comic book board template as well as a double-spread comic page template. So, far these templates work for me and are as close to industry standard as I could find. The following are blank Graphic Novel (comic book) Templates that can be used for either digital artwork or print artwork. Included are a 1-page template as well as a 2-page template for those amazing 2-page spreads.
US Comic art board (spread)
Whenever you get these templates, there are always a lot printer jargon thrown at you to describe the various lines. So what do the various lines mean? Well, I am not an expert of print and hate all that mumbo jumbo. So I got Rob to explain it to me in plain English:
- The Small dotted line is the Trim Area: That’s where the page cut is made. so if you want your art to cover the full page, you have to make sure that your art passes this line. In fact, you should extend your art pass the trim line and all the way to the solid line to be safe.
- The dash line is your Live Area : Anything inside the dash lines is considered safe. So all your texts and squares should be inside this dash line. It is also known a is your drawing page surface (10” × 15”). You you can safely draw your squares up to that edge of this dash line and they will not be cut by a printer.
- The solid line is your Bleed Line: When doing full-page art, you should extend the art all the way to the bleed line. The bleed area often gets cut off but you draw all the way to the bleed line if you want full page, so there is no white lines on the edges in the final crop
So there you go. You are setup with standard US comic book art boards, both single and double page spreads. These templates should fit well in printer templates, and match up to the big publishers like, Marvel, DC and Image. These comic book board templates are also what I used to create all the pages of MIFT.
So how do you go about using these templates? All you need to do is:
- Create a PSD file (photoshop)
- Make sure that the File size is 11×17 inches at 300 dpi
- Place the template on a layer and lock the layer
- And you are good to go
Both template board files are PNG files that you can download here. Download and start drawing your own comic right now! Feel free to download and use it but please let me know how it works for you