papernoise blackbook

As I had promised, I will start today with this little series of tutorials that show a bit of how I worked on Gietz!. In this first part I will focus on how I do the pencils of a comic page. Of course this is not intended to be the definitive guide on how to draw a comic, it’s just how I do it, but nonetheless I hope you can find something useful for your work in it.

1) Digital pencils

Since some time I stopped using real pencils to draw comics, instead I work directly in photoshop (with a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet). Usually I duplicate the document I’m working on, keeping a zoomed in version on one side, to work on the details, and the other one to keep an eye on the big picture.

To work in a digital fashion has several advantages, I can move, rotate, scale and duplicate panels or single elements. I can also do the lettering directly on the page and so have more control on the composition and use the page real estate in a more efficient way.

2) The right brush

Of course you could just use one of the standard round brushes Photoshop offers, and choose some grey colour. Personally I like to give it a bit of an “analogue” feeling, so I made my own brush. As a starting point I used one of the sampled brushes Photoshop has to choose from (I took one with a nice texture) and tweaked the settings.

First of all I set the size to 3px, which gives you a quite thin line, good for precise drawing. To be more flexible I tweaked both the size and opacity jitter and linked it with the pen pressure. For the Size I limited the jitter to 10%, but for the opacity it goes up to 50%. This is quite handy because it lets you start by drawing really light lines and adding darker ones while refining the drawing. I set the mode to “linear burn” and the opacity to 70% , this makes the lines become darker the more you draw on them.

Of course this is all very subjective, the best thing to do is to experiment until you find something that fits your taste and workflow. There’s also plenty of free brushes you can download from the web, some really nice ones you can find here: creativemac.digitalmedianet.com

3) Print the pencils

Although I find working with the tablet really great for pencils, I prefer to do the inking the old-fashioned way: with a brush on real paper. For this reason, once I’m done with this first step, I tint the lines to 100% cyan and print them out (the cyan makes the inking process and the scanning a lot easier).

To get the cyan lines I start off by checking that the background colour is white, then I open the “channels” panel. Here I select all the channels except the cyan one. I hit Control+A (Command+A on Mac OS)  to select all of the canvas, then I hit CANC to delete the content of the selected channels.

IMPORTANT: if you use this tecnique, don’t delete the channels, only the content must be erased. The result in the panel should look somthing like here below (the thumbnails are all white):

After I’ve done this, the page looks more or less like this and I can print it. Usually I have to lighten it all up a bit, or it will print too dark. This depends a lot on the printer you will use though.

So, this is it for today! See you next week with the second instalment of this series: inking the page!