papernoise blackbook

I don’t know how many times, in my short carreer as a comic artist, I have heard the question: “are you making these yourself, or are you using the computer?”, where using a computer means that the computer does all the work, and I just stand there and watch. I guess the cause of this assumption is to be traced back to the movies of the fifties, where somebody enters random data into a giant metal wardrobe with many buttons, glowing lamps and magnetic tape spools (also called the computer) which, after an incredibly short time returns the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything.

In real life things are bit more complicated.

In my case it all starts with me preparing the pencils for the inking (as we have seen in the previous installment), and continues with the scanning and pre-print process.

Usually I scan the drawings at 1200 dpi, grayscale. The cyan tint of the pencils turns into a pale grey, which is easily eliminated. The end product will be a page with a resolution of 600dpi, the ink drawing should be clear and clean. Scanning it at such a high resolution I can clean it up and then reduce it to 600dpi without causing unwanted artifacts.

Usually after scanning the page I end up with something like this:

As you can see (or not see, depending of your monitor) the inks are greyish and dirty, and you can see the texture of the paper and the pencils underneath. The next step is to use the “levels” function of the image editing software to get rid of all that unwanted stuff, by “cutting” away most of the luminance spectrum.

I use some pretty agressice settings here to reduce everything to just black and white. I don’t care if the lines look jagged at this stage, that’s why I’m working at 1200dpi!

The end result is some clean and sharp inks. The next step is to reduce them to 600dpi, which will soften the edges a bit, but not make them blurred.

Once I have the page at the desired format and resolution, I add some shadows. I draw these directly on the computer using a tablet.

For Giètz! we didn’t print using black ink. Instead we used a brown Pantone ink. The final effect is that the inks are dark brown and the shadows a lighter tint of the same colour.

This was the last episode of this tutorial series. But don’t worry, I have a lot more to tell you about this project!

Im my last post I have been talking about pencils, now I’ll procede with the second stage: inking.

Since a couple of years I’ve been using, with great satisfaction, a Pentel Pocket Brush, which is like a fountain-pen (with cartridge!), but with a nylong brush tip instead. The ink it uses isn’t perfect, in fact it’s not pigment based, so you can have some hue shifts in time and it’s not water-proof. On the other hand these issues are largely balanced by the great ease of use! It’s like using a tip felt pen but with the added possibilities (in terms of modulation) of a real brush.

Before I was using the good old Windsor&Newton brush, but I had a lot of problems. Apart from forcing me to a much slower workflow, the brushes wouldn’t last more than a week, then I had to replace them.

My approach to inking is quite simple, depending on the light situation it ranges from near-ligne-claire to chiaroscuro with lots of black. I always keep in ming that I will add a halftone later, so I don’t define everything at this stage. Sometimes I test the light setting on a separate sheet (see: from the storyboard to the final page). I use the brushstrokes in many different ways, as little, thin lines to add texture and detail, in their thicker form to create gradient effects. Thick strokes are really great to draw hair, trees and other plants as well.

Depending on the type of paper, the Pentel can prove to be quite tricky. Sometimes the tip can get too loaded and start to spill a bit, or the strokes become too thick. This happens a lot while drawing details, when you need precision the most! For this reason it’s better to use a paper that absorbs a lot, otherwise you’ll have to keep on “discharging” the brush on a towel.

So here we are at the end of this second installment, if everything goes according to plan, I should be able to post the last part, halftone and finalization, next week on friday!

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!

I always find it very interesting to see how other artists get from the first drawings to the final piece. So I decided to show this process in my works.