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I’m glad you all find the process interesting. I’m more than happy to share.

Jade:

I made “Normprint” in a program called Fontlab.

To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what the process for creating color separations for newspapers is, but essentially they print the black lines of a strip onto the newsprint first, then lay the color down on top of it. This two part process is why you sometimes see coloring that doesn’t quite match up on the comics page.

To create the separate color file for a Sunday strip, first I save a second version of the black line work. Then, I create a separate layer in Photoshop and place it beneath the black layer. I select areas to fill on the “black layer”, but lay the colors down on the “color layer”. When I’m done, I delete the black layer and I’m left with a file that has just color. I send both files to King Features and they do their magic.

All my artwork is scanned at 600dpi. The Sunday color file doesn’t need to be as high, so it’s reduced to 300dpi. All my BW files have to be submitted as bitmaps and all my color files have to be submitted as CMYK tif files. I scan my artwork into Photshop as a BW photo, then adjust the threshold to remove any anti aliasing before converting it to a bitmap image. Since most newspapers can only print black and “not black”, my line files can’t have any gray in them.

Hope that answers your question

Man, wish I can use Kuratake like that. I actually have that, I keep drawing the lines too thick.