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How I Ink my graphic novel.
I’ve been told my Inks look great. Really? Because I don’t Ink anything.
The End.
Adjusting Levels in Photoshop.
No, but really. I tried to Ink my comic pages back in the mid 90′s but whenever I’d go to a convention and show an editor my work they would scratch their head and ask why I was ruining my pencils with screwed up inks. Later I started to focus only on my pencils, my strength, since I could control the lines better then my chicken scratch, blotted, messed up Ink lines.
Years passed and I decided to make a graphic novel and I contemplated inking all over again. I chose not to. To help you understand why I chose not to ink, I need to side step a bit to explain my conclusions.
You see, I work in animation. Back when I started animating for a living, I had a crash course on-the-job training session with a fast approaching deadline. We had to bring on a bunch of experienced Ex-Disney animators to get the job done right and I took the opportunity to ask a bunch of dumb questions. One question was more of a dumb statement that went something like, “Your final drawings are all with pencil and paper? I though you inked on top of transparent cells and painted on the back!”. Chris Sonnenburg, the guy I was talking to, looked at me crazy and said, “What are you crazy? They stopped doing that in the 90′s when computers took over.”
It was a no-brainer after animating for a day with these guys why they don’t use ink anymore. There is just so much more control and flexibility with pencils and it can all be adjusted to look like ink in the computer.
When I started working on my graphic novel it just seemed obvious. Plus my inks suck. Plus it’s another step that takes hours every page. Plus It’s hard for me to make it look anywhere as good as my pencils.
The argument of Inking for the sake of printing is also obsolete in my opinion. Printing gray tones or full color paintings is just as easy as black and white now days. Printing in solid back and white is still cheaper but you can still adjust clean pencils to be black and white by boosting the contrast.
So for example, here’s one of my panels scanned from paper. This is a lower quality jpg so the image is a bit more blurry then my files but it should be good enough for this simple tutorial.
Here’s a closer look to see that it really is pencil. Number 2 pencil, to be exact.
If you select Levels in Photoshop by pressing Command+L (Mac) and whatever for Windows, then you will get this box. It might look different depending on what version of Photoshop you have.
Now pull in the sides until your lines get nice and black without screwing up the edges. If you want to go solid black & white then make sure your lines are nice and sharp as well as making a very high resolution scan.
I keep lots of grays to keep the subtile pencil marks in some places and there you have it.
Now I just need to clean up this crappy drawing. Sometimes my problem with this method is knowing I can fix any pencil lines I don’t like in Photoshop. I end up flying through my final pencils with a bunch of little mistakes to correct later.
The other option is digital inking with a Cintiq or Wacom Tablet. I do this with an old comic that I’m slowly redrawing. It’s so easy it makes me question if I should even be drawing with pencils anymore. I just scan my thumbnail into photoshop and then lower the opacity of that layer. Then I make a new layer and with a black round brush tip, I draw my final lines. Instant Pencils and Inks in one easy step. It’s as easy to control as a pencil (especially with a Cintiq) and you can erase it as many times as needed before getting it right.
In the end, I guess it all depends on you. If you like traditional inking or if you’re a rock star inker then go for it. I just needed to eliminate unnecessary steps (and weaknesses) to speed up my output without sacrificing quality.
Here are pages 56 and 57. Click to enlarge. Right-Click to open in a new window full size.
I’d like to say these pages were easy but… well, I’m still not sure if they are finished. In fact all these back story pages have gone through so many revisions that it’s a wonder I’m even able to post anything. This blog has been one of the key motivations for locking things down so I’m grateful to all of you for reading and coming back expecting more. It keeps me on schedule.
So for example with these pages, at first Victuals was suppose to be a peasant at this part and so I gave him a hand woven bed and nothing special in his room. There was no crab claws in the right side at first either. Originally Victuals woke up to the dog’s warning and then noticed his room was trashed. The following pages were him running to the palace to see if the king was alright but that never made much sense to me and I kept coming back to it wondering how to make it work. I wasn’t planning on revealing a giant crab again until later but hey. So with the changes, I was planning on adding decorative decor to his room much like Cyrene’s room but somehow I imagine Victuals still being humble in his personal life. Plus, hand woven organic mattresses are the most comfortable. It makes enough sense to me anyway.
Now on the left side, I’m still a bit unsure. It seems to me like the SMASH sound should be above the crab hands so you read it first then move down to the crab hands and then to the broken door. I could always move the crab hands down a little to make this work. Let me know if I’m thinking too much about this. Or maybe I not thinking enough. I just like the composition like this with the middle of the panel a bit empty. Any thoughts would be well received.
Coloring Tutorials Finally!
The most common question I am asked is how I color my pages. I’ve been holding off for a while because it’s just too complicated to talk about in one post. Don’t worry though, I’ve been listening and I’ve been writing an 8 part series where I show my full process from the final line art to a finished colored page. There are going to be plenty screen grabs and videos of each stage of the process. I’ll even break down making your own textures and how to best prepare and use them.
I’m hoping to start the series in June on Thursdays if I can get it together in time.
The Lizard Man.
A few weeks ago I got a nice comment from someone named Jenny saying, “I can’t believe you’re writing about the Lizard Man. I’m from South Carolina (origin of one of the tales) and I knew people who took part in the Lizard Man hunt!” I commented back explaining that I made this all up before I ever heard of the Lizard People Conspiracy but now I realize I was talking about a completely different Lizard Man.
You see, there is a conspiracy theory that shapeshifting lizards rule the Earth and take the form of Presidents and high powers and you might catch one of them transforming into a lizard if you look close enough to bad quality video. Just look up Lizard People in Google and you will see how amazing some people are. This is what I thought Jenny was talking about at first but then I decided to do a Google search for Lizard Man and I was completely floored.
There is a whole other set of stories on the Lizard Man and parts are surprisingly similar to reMIND. There’s drawings and images of sightings and 3D models of a Lizard Man head. It’s like Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster but not as popular. Here’s a Wikipedia page about it. Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp.On the Wiki page it even talks about missing cats. That’s so cool! There’s plenty of other old sci-fi shows and comics with lizard type people that must have inspired the early thoughts of reMIND but this one was too similar to just ignore. I really need to plan a trip to Scape Ore Swamp when I finish reMIND. Maybe some specialty shops out there will buy a few copies of my book.
Then I really got to thinking. I need to make a tourist shirt for Cripple Peaks kinda like this one.
Hopefully it wont look as touristy. Thanks again, Jenny, for the comment!
Link Love!
I want to thank all the new webcomics who have taken the time to link to reMIND from their sites. You guys are really helping me out and I can’t thank you enough. Every new visitor you send me is pure gold! I have a few new comics I started reading while bored at work and I really need to add them to my links pages. Some I’ve already talked about in the past but recently I got an email from Travis Hanson who has a webcomic graphic novel called The Bean. I wasn’t expecting to spend much time on his site but it sucked me in and now I’m subscribed. Check it out if you have time. It reminds me of Bone by Jeff Smith but with more gritty art. Reading about Travis’ journey to make this book really hits home. Here is a page from his webcomic.
First of all, I highly recommend using Adobe Photoshop in which all the steps below are achieved. It’s an industry standard and will also come in handy for everything else creative you choose to do. I know it’s expensive but it’s worth every penny.
If you are new to coloring comics in Photoshop, here are the very first things you will want to learn. Later posts will get more advanced, so bare with me all you experts.
Adjusting the Levels
Pencil art is usually really washed out when you scan it so I suggest adjusting the levels before you try to flat or color. If you want to keep your line art looking like pencil then it’s totally fine but for flatting purposes you will need to save an adjusted version. If you have inked lines, you can still use the levels to adjust it just as you would with pencils. Everything that follows will still work. Here is a simple tutorial on adjusting your line art to look like ink HERE.
Now that your lines are nice and dark we need to set the layer with your lines to multiply.
Using Multiply
Multiply is one of the first things I ever learned in Photoshop. It’s also one of the most common layer modes I’ve seen used, and for good reason.
Multiply makes your line art act like a transparency on a white background. Any layers you put under your line art will be visible through your line art layer (unless your line art is solid black, in which no light can pass through) just like an overhead projector.
Here is a video showing how to use multiply and what it does.
Now that we understand multiply we can start making our flats or bring in flats if we had them outsourced.
I’ve talked about flatting before and I’ve found this to be one of the most important parts of the whole comic coloring process so I need to address it more before we can really get to the rest.
My definition of Flatting:
Flatting a comic page is the process of coloring different sections of your panels a unique color so they can easily be selected later. It’s not important what color each section is, only that they are unique colors and properly fitting to your artwork. For those of you who are old school, it’s like cutting out all the stencils for a drawing you’re going to airbrush.
To prepare the line art for my flatter to flat, I converted it to grayscale and played with the levels to make sure the lines are nice and black then I flattened (reduced it down to just one layer in PS) the file so it’s only one layer and removed any hidden alpha channels. This allows the file to be a decent size for emailing. I save the image as a grayscale .PSD file at 300 dpi.
A few days later after the file has been flatted, I get it back looking something like this. Notice the lines are gone and it’s just colors. Perfect!
Here you can see how the flat sections are divided right in the middle of the lines.
In this way it’s not just a matter of using your selection tool to make flats. You must split the lines right down the middle to ensure your color edge is hidden by the lines. For more specifics on flatting your own pages, check out Kazu’s flatting tutorial over at BoltCity.com.
Sloppy flats lead to wasted time. If you hire a flatter or do them yourself, you need to make sure they are perfect so you don’t have to keep repainting selections over and over.
Remember, if your making your own flats, don’t focus on the colors yet. Just focus on making them as accurate as possible, dividing up everything into as many seperate colors as you need. This will never be what people see when your page is finished. It’s just a bunch of colors that can easily be selected when we start coloring later. I’ll show you how I use flats in the next tutorial.
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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)
