March Madness into April Insanity


Text:
And finally I place a flattened .tif version of the artwork in illustrator and add text. Word balloons are drawn using the elipse tool, and the pen tool, then the tail and the bubble are joined together using the union command (found under the pathfinder menu). I use Blambot Pro as my font of choice for the dialogue. Sound effects varry, but many of the ones I use can also be found through Blambot. What can I say, the man makes great comic fonts.
--------------------------

Shading:
This is possibly the most fun part of the whole comicing process. Though it kinda ties with the actual drawing. The first thing I do is lock my color layer, duplicate it, and change the lock to transparancy lock.

This is so that you have one layer to work on, and another copy to fall back on if you screw up, or to make whole color selections. It's quite handy. And then I turn on the lights. To do so, we make a selection with the polygon select tool of the area we want to highlight (basically the color area minus the shadows. Then I take the gradient tool and pull a gradient through the area on the transparency locked layer. After a base highlight I make a nother selection of the brighter highlights and repeat the process as necessary.

I mostly use a white color, and the gradient tool set to color dodge and about 50% opacity or so. I'll change it up as necessary. I use the gradient tool set to screen and 100% and the Light Red Orange from the standard color pallet to shade skin tones. The opacities and whether I use color dodge or screen kinda change depending on exactly what I'm coloring. Color dodge give a much shinier highlight and screen a softer look. Occassionally I'll touch things up with the paint brush or color dodge tool, with color and setting as necessary.

---------------------

Flats:
Possibly the most boring part of the whole process is laying in the basecolors. On a new layer underneath my inks, I just go in and select and fill. That's it. It's the polygon laso tool and the paint bucket. Occassionally a hard round brush to fill in little details. I fill using the darkest version of whatever color the end object is supposed to be. I do this because I only add highlights, and it simplifies my job somewhat. So, if things look a little dark at this stage, it's ok, cause I'm gonna turn the lights on in the next one. The important part is to make sure that all the colors work well together. If they clash now, they're going to be horrific later. Also, color references. Don't be afraid to use that eye dropper. Especially for skin tones. There are dozens of skin tone pallets available, and a quick google search will find them with out too much difficulty. It'll save you a lot of hastle in making sure your characters actually look human in color.

---------------------

Inking:
I ink using the scratchboard tool in Painter IX. In this case it's a size 6. I drop the opacity of the pencil layer down, to make them lighter, and ink on a layer above. You'll notice that I don't necessarily pay attention to the pencils. In the 8th pannel, I moved the dog tags, for instance. I try to pay attention to line weight, keeping heavier lines on the "darker" side of the figure. This helps give depth to the image. Not a lot to it really, certainly no real secret techniques. It just takes some practice, and getting used to the stroke of the pen.

----------------------

First and foremost: TMNT is great fun. Perfect? No, but what is? But it isn't a total fuck up like that 3rd turtles movie was. My God.

Many of you might be wondering "My God Garth, what levels of laziness have you dropped to that you would post only the pencils?" To this I have only to reply, that I'm actually updating every day this week (but no weekend). For this week, I declair to be a tutorial week. Many people have asked me how I "do it." And the answer is "with models." But regardless of how artists do it, I'm breaking down the process this week. Today we have the pencils, tomorrow I'll show you the inks, and so on down the list of steps until I get to the finished product. I hope you'll learn something from this, so stay tuned and check back for more news.

Pencils:
As you can clearly see, my pencils are kinda rough and slopy. Several editors have told me they look for tight pencils, as it can save them having to pay an inker. Cheep shmucks, but I see their point. But I also say "to hell with that!" I'm inking in, I can have as loose pencils as I want! In truth, the pencils really are more guidelines for me. I'm blocking in where things go, and roughing out the details. If someone else was doing my inks, I'd tighten things up for 'em, but since it's just me, I can decide the exactness later. Right now, I'm more concerned with placement, layout, how characters fill the space, and making sure there's enough room for dialogue later on. Also, I'm working at 600dpi, though zoomed out so that I'm mostly looking at the end-result size. This gives me a better judgement of how big something'll look in the end, and helps prevent drawing too small. I draw digitally these days, using Painter IX and my cintiq. Here I'm using the 2b pencil tool set to size 6. It's a lightish blue color so that later when I ink, I can visually separate my inks from the pencils beneath. You can use any color, but I like blue. In the 7th pannel on the pilots chairs you may notice some x's just floating in space. Those are spotted blacks. It's a standard tagging that an artist makes in his pencils that tell the inker "fill this area in with black."

In other news, I have recieved enough re-orders to make another run of Shirt 47s. The re-orders should go out hopefully in the first week of april, depending on when that week they come in. If they come in late... orders will go out just before anime boston. Also, the new penguin shirt will be available then as well.

Welcome to the Comedity. Don't step on the Penguin.
Garth(Wednesday - March 26th, 2007) -03:15:32