To start things off I want to apologize for using the Comic Sans font in my pages as seen above.  I just learned a bunch of stuff lately about my lack of skill and understanding of lettering and now I'm kinda embarrassed with what I've posted.  I will be updating the lettering fonts really soon so worry not!  Because of this eye opening experience I have decided to do some posts specifically about this subject.

First of all I'd like to thank Jim Campbell for being the first person to point this out to me.  He re-lettered some of my pages to show me how much better it could look if executed correctly and helped me see many things I was overlooking. 

To list a few things that I was doing wrong:

• Using Comic Sans font. Apparently it's an incomplete font and very hated by letterers.
• Using an I with the cross bars in the middle of a word. (BIG NO NO)
• Words completely unvaried. Not showing any emphasis on key words.
• Not even thinking that anyone really cared about lettering.

First, here is a link that breaks down all the basics of comic lettering. It's very helpful just to understand strange symbols and to know what people are accustomed to.

Comic Book Lettering Grammar and Tradition – Nate Piekos

Second, here are two sites that sell comic lettering fonts and some are even free.

Blambot Fonts (comic lettering fonts and some free fonts)
Comicraft Fonts (these are really professional looking but cost money)

(Thanks to Ryan Christopher Lord for giving me these links.)

Third, here are some tutorials on Lettering:

Comicraft lettering tips and tricks
Jim Campbell's lettering guide using Illustrator (download link)

So now that I have discovered the basics of graphic novel lettering, I need to update my pages to cool the burning hatred fueled from frivolous overuse of Comic Sans.

Notice how the textures turn into flat colors in CMYK when they are adjusted with an overlay. The other thing that drove be crazy was towards the end of the video, turning plain texture to white and still having dark spots or turning it to black and having uneven blacks. It's not as clear in the compressed video but the CMYK file has blacks and dark blacks for some reason. I mainly wanted to show the basic differences with the modes and why it's just easier to use RGB and convert  your flattened file to CMYK when you are finished. Always save your master file with all the layers in RGB though.

Hope this helps!

Please vote for reMIND to keep it in the top 100 webcomics at TopWebComics!

I already talked a bit about Fonts, Lettering and Creating Your Own Comic Font so now I’m going to try to walk through my process of making speech bubbles. I made a video. Not just any video. A video I made really late at night after drinking to much coffee and wondering what I should post. I tried to make a better one but every version kept getting sloppier until all forms of helpfulness went out to door to make way for muttered grumblings and miss-clicks. Don’t even ask why my word balloon points to both Victuals AND Sonja. I guess I was just showing off how abstract my story telling ability could get.

Anyway, when I started making this video I thought it was a great idea. Now that it’s time to post, I am wondering if it’s clear enough. I guess I’ll leave it up to you to tell me. I can always make another one to replace this if I have to. Below the video is also an explanation of what I do to make my word balloons for reMIND.

It wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally found this method of making word balloons for reMIND. I went through all my pages and recreated them from the ground up and here’s how I do it.

First I create a folder in my layers called “Text”. I keep all my text and bubbles in this folder so I can easily turn it all on or off. Next I create a new layer that I call “bubbles”.

Then I double click on the new “bubbles” layer that I made in Photoshop even though nothing is in it yet. A “Layer Style” window will appear. On the left side at the very bottom of the list of  layer styles is a filter called “Stroke”. Click on “Stoke”. Make sure it’s highlighted so that the adjustment window will change. If you just click the check box it will turn on the feature but adjusters will not be visible.

Once the “Stoke” property box is open, I change the size to “4″ and the position to “inside” and hit “OK”. A line, 4 pixels thick, will appear over the edge of anything I create in the balloons layer from now on. This line will be drawn on the inside 4 pixels of any shape with an alpha. (a transparent background)

Now I start drawing in bubbles with the “lasso” tool. I love doing these by hand so that I can have an organic hand drawn look. You can even use a solid pencil or hard edge paintbrush if you prefer but the lasso is nice for getting crisp lines easily.

If you are looking for really perfect bubble lines then I suggest using “Paths”. Nate has a great tutorial about using Paths to create word balloons. Check out his blog if you haven’t already. His project is AMAZING!

Now all you have to do is use Comic Sans MS to letter the stupid thing! (I’m going to milk this as long as I can)

This was a fun spread not only to show off the crazy ideas in my head but also because it has a interesting composition. I really wanted to push the way the panels were laid out in an open book. If you divide the two pages exactly in half you will notice that the fold is going to be cutting through the large left image. I’m not sure if this is done a lot in comics or graphic novels but I’ve been consciously doing it every now and then in reMIND just to make an interesting looking book. There’s also something about all that empty space in the bottom of the last frame that really makes me happy.  I wish I could give a more in depth analysis of these pages but its Mother’s Day (the day I wrote this) and my wife needs more attention then this blog so I gotta get to the point and cut this short.

I’ve got some cool tutorials in the works on how I color this graphic novel. I’ll have more info soon once I get it all together but from the looks of it, it will be a 7 week set of tutorials to cover the whole process.

T-Shirts and Post Cards

The T-shirts are in and looking sweet. Here are some pics of my personal collection after they were washed. The second picture is the back which says “reMIND a graphic novel”.

One thing I realized while printing up this first batch is how much I don’t know about T-shirt sizes. For instance, I only printed a few sizes in XL and this is about the second most popular size request. That’s what I get for assuming everyone is a weak little wimp like me. From now on the shirts will go for the fairly standard price of $15 plus shipping($4.00 for US residence). So the new total is $19 for a shirt. No more gorilla packs for $10. Sorry. That was just a pre-order deal but I might offer something like that again for the next shirt whenever I get around to making another.

I also printed up 100 high quality postcards to hand out at comic stores and pin up on bulletin boards. I’m putting a few in each gorilla pack too. The cards are getting here on Wednesday so it looks like the Gorilla Packs will be sent a few days later then I thought. Sorry about that. Here’s what they look like.

Only a few more shirts are in stock which are:

Small – Sold Out

Medium – 6

Large – 5

[EDIT] My paypal button isn’t working again so instead just use the donation box to the left. Make sure to make it for $19 (this includes shipping) and include your address and shirt size. If you want a shirt sent outside of the US then add whatever amount you think will cover the extra shipping costs. ONLY MEDIUM AND LARGE SHIRTS LEFT.

I’m going to be selling some of these to friends at work so grab them while you can. I’m not sure when I’m going to print more but I guarantee I will make some XL and XXL next time. Thanks for all your support in buying the Gorilla Pack pre-orders and being willing to hang up fliers and cards for reMIND in your little hubs.

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)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting (You are here)

Part 2 – How I use Flats

Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel

Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library

Part 5 – Adding Textures to your Flatted Page

Part 6 – Masking and Applying Gradients

Part 7 – Light Source and Shadows

Part 8 – Dialing it all Together

When I first started making comics I was clueless about the coloring process. I would paint under my line art that was set to multiply but that was the extent of my knowledge. It always seemed like such mindless work to paint between the lines, to fill in the shapes, like I was doing what any kid could do in grade school. It took up so much precious time, but it had to be done before I could start adjusting the colors to my liking.

After learning about flatting, coloring a page became a quick and fun process. I can cut right to the part I enjoy and the part that needs my special attention.

If you goto GutterZombie.com, you can find all kinds of threads on how to color comics. That’s the forum where I learned about how to use flats. There are MANY ways to approach it and most of them involve putting your flats into channels. I’m not going to say that’s the right or wrong way but it’s not the way that works best for me. Here’s what I do.

First, I bring my flats layer into my file with my line art. I have my line art set to multiply and I put my flats below the lines so it looks like this.

HINT: If you are dragging in flats with the same dimensions as your line art, hold down the shift key as you drag in your file and it should automatically snap to your canvas and line up perfectly with your line art.

To make these colors easy to select, we need to select the magic wand tool.

Now that we have selected the magic wand, we need to adjust the tolerance down to between 3 and 5. This makes it only select the colors that are extremely close in range to the color we click on. If the tolerance is higher, more colors will be selected when we click on something, so keep it really low when using flats.

The second thing we need to look at is the box that says Anti-Alias. Anti-alias blends the edges of your selection to make it look nicer to the eye and less like an old video game. In most cases this is good to have checked, but for flats we need to turn it off so it doesn’t feather our selections. Every time you select something with Anti-alias, it slowly eats away more of your selections, so make sure it’s off.

Third, we need to look at the Contiguous check box. You might be switching this one back and forth as you work because it changes your selection from just selecting the same colors that are touching each other, to the same colors that aren’t. So with contiguous unchecked, if you select a skin color in one panel, it will also select the same skin colors in other panels even though they are not touching.

Now our magic wand settings are ready for using our flats.

The first thing I do with my new flats is adjust some of the colors if I know it will work better one way or another. For instance, I know that Sonja’s skin will always be the same color on the whole page so I’m going to select all the skin colors and make sure they are all the same. Or perhaps I want to darken one of the Victuals layers becasue I know he will be a different color in one panel. This is the time I do that.

Remember, we are still not coloring, only adjusting the flats for easy selection.

Now that we have our flats the way we want, duplicate it.

I rename the duplicate, Colors, and move it below the flats layer.

Now select the flats layer again and slide the opacity to “0″ so that the layer is completely invisible.

Now lock it so you can’t accidentally start painting on it.

Now the fun begins, but it takes some getting use to.

Before I adjust individual parts, I first click on the color layer and hit Apple+U(Mac) or Ctrl+U(PC) for Hue/Saturation.

I usually pull down the saturation to start with so everything is not so colorful. Just a personal preference. It will look something like this.

Now we can start adjusting specific parts. Start with the big, obvious colors, like the sky. So lets click on our flats layer and with the magic wand, click on the sky. You will notice that even though the flats are invisible and locked, we can still select from it. (Isn’t that cool!)

All the sky should have been selected and nothing else. Now click on your color layer and hit Apple+L(Mac) or Ctrl+L(PC) to bring up Levels. Adjust the sky to white and hit OK.

Congratulations! You have officially painted your sky white with very little effort.

Now go back to the flats layer and select something else. Go back to the color layer and use Hue/Saturation or Levels again to adjust it to your desired color. Slide around the Hue sliders until you are happy with the color and hit OK. If you can’t get the color you are looking for then click the colorize check box in Hue/Saturation and try it again.

Another command that I use quite a bit is Apple+B(Mac) or Ctrl+B(PC) for color balance. This makes it easy to add just a little more red or blue or whatever to a selection.

You are well on your way to coloring your page using flats and guess what, if you were simply coloring these pages without textures in a style like “Hell Boy”, imagine how fast you could do it. Here is a little recap of the Hot Keys and what they are best for with this kind of technique.

Keep selecting colors from the flats layer and adjust the color layer. Repeat until you are satisfied with all your colors. Now you’re all done! You can also airbrush inside your selection as I did below with Sonja’s hand in the last frame.

Here’s what my page is starting to look like. I know you’re impressed.

I usually don’t go to far without adding some textures which affect how the final color looks, but I’ll get into that later, along with lighting and shadows.

So you thought coloring a comic was all about using the paint brush to fill in between the lines, eh? Well, I’m sorry to destroy your childhood dreams. Of course you could still do it that way after you select from your flats, but for me this approach is super easy, quick and fun.

Here are the upcoming topics I’ll be breaking down in future posts so make sure to bookmark or subscribe to reMINDblog so you don’t miss out on the good stuff.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting

Part 2 – How I use Flats (You are here)

Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel

Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library

Part 5 – Adding Textures to your Flatted Page

Part 6 – Masking and Applying Gradients

Part 7 – Light Source and Shadows

Part 8 – Dialing it all Together

For those of you who just want a bunch of quick links to get free textures, here are a few I’ve used before.

CGTextures.com
mayang.com/textures
bittbox.com

But for those of you who want your project to be truly you own, it’s not as hard as it seems and the end result will be something unique to you. The textures you use are just as much your art as the pencil lines, character design and dialogue.  I encourage you to take it seriously and put in the extra day to make your own texture library that nobody else will be able to easily download and use. I use the above sites all the time for work related projects, but the texture library that has been the most invaluable to me is the one I created myself.

When you make your own textures, you can really art direct your graphic novel exactly the style you want. For instance, when I was trying to figure out what kind of coloring I should do for reMIND, I was walking around the San Diego Comic Con back in 2006 looking for inspiration.

It was hard because everything looked the same. Every book was bright, smooth, flashy and Photoshopped. Sure, back in the 90′s when comic coloring started going digital it stood out on the shelf and was unique and impressive. But now EVERY colorist uses Photoshop, throwing lens flares, motion blur and bright blue rim lighting over everything accentuating every bulbous orifice in all it’s shiny and clean glory. It’s so common now that it’s boring to look at.

There’s a great quote I just heard, “If everybody’s thinking the same thing, than nobody’s thinking very much.” – David Morgan of Silver-Investor.com.

That quote is about investing, but it applies to much more than that. In fact, I’m going to change it a bit for the sake of artists to go something like this:

If everybody’s doing the same creative things, than nobody’s being very creative.

This is the biggest reason I suggest making your own textures and art direct your colors AND textures. Don’t just copy what the majority is doing (unless you really love that style). Find something unique and inspiring and try to imitate that instead. We are in charge of creating the next stylistic wave.

After scouring the convention, the three books I found back in 2006 that inspired my decisions were Youngblood, WildC.A.T.S. and Spawn. Haha! Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Seriously, I loved the coloring of Spawn and WildC.A.T.S. back in THE NINETIES WHEN IT WAS UNIQUE AND HARD TO GET A COPY OF PHOTOSHOP. Notice I didn’t say I loved Youngblood. That’s another story. Check out this blog.

The three books I found back in 2006 that inspired my coloring decisions for reMIND were:

Mouse Guard by David Petersen – This little comic totally shook up the world of comics as far as I’m concerned. It’s totally unique in content, color, characters and even size. David was a no name artist when he started it.  It blew up. How awesome is that!

Sky Between Branches by Joshua Middleton - These are some of the most beautiful comic pages I’ve seen in a LONG time. Joshua is now one of my top favorite artists of all time. I can’t get enough of his sketches and he’s the one who gave me the idea to not ink reMIND. From what I can tell, he either uses pencils as his final lines or just draws on a Cintiq. Anyway, the coloring of Sky Between Branches really stood out to me as the level of quality I wanted to produce with my colors.

LA/SF by Christian Schellewald – This is not a comic but I came across it at the convention. It’s an amazing art book full of quick sketches and gauche paintings of places in California. This is the single biggest influence of how I wanted the textures to look in reMIND. I studied these pages over and over to try to understand why it looked and felt so nice. The details were so sloppy but it didn’t matter because the paints had such energy. My decision to make all the sky color a solid white in reMIND is also because of this book. Christian has a genius approach to compositions as well as negative space.

Orange / Koji Morimoto / Scrapbook – I found this one earlier in the year, but it also inspired a lot of the decisions I made. It’s the best sketchbook I’ve ever seen! I absolutely love this book.

With these four books I found my key inspiration for coloring, compositions, pencils lines, textures and negative space. I had officially figured out the art direction of my book. Now I needed to deconstruct what made it tick.

I scanned some textures from LA/SF and used them in an experiment to see if this kind of painting worked with my line art. At the time, I wasn’t planning on coloring it myself so I asked a designer friend, Jonathan Kim, to take a stab at coloring a page with these scanned textures to see what would happen. Here’s what he came up with.

This got me really excited and I realized I was onto something. Now I just needed to create my own high resolution textures to convey this mood and feel.

Obviously I’m not suggesting you scan other peoples work to use in your own art. It was merely a test for myself to see what it might look like if I were to go through with it for my book.

I had a bunch of Acrylic and Gauche paints from a long time ago, so I decided to have a painting party with my friends. I brought my paint and some large sheets of watercolor paper into a studio where I was freelancing at the time and we all (3 of us) just spent the morning creating a giant texture library. I had my books open in front of me and I tried to recreate some of the same colors and paint strokes. Between the three of us, we must have created 50 painted textures, which I spent the rest of the day scanning and cleaning up for digital use.

I narrowed it down to about 10 quintessential textures that work best for reMIND and it only took a day. I’ve been using these same textures for 4 years now and people still don’t know how I do it.

Until now.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting

Part 2 – How I use Flats

Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel (You are here)

Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library

Part 5 – Adding Textures to your Flatted Page

Part 6 – Masking and Applying Gradients

Part 7 – Light Source and Shadows

Part 8 – Dialing it all Together

Here’s what I suggest doing if you want to make your own sweet, coveted textures to use in Photoshop.

First, find the ideal style you are trying to achieve like we talked about in the last section. I suggest looking outside of comics, otherwise you will just rehash the same old thing. Look at your ideal style as reference while you are creating your own.

What surface should you use?

Figure out what surface your ideal style was created on. This all plays into the final look more than people think. Is it on canvas, wood, glass, watercolor paper, tracing paper, art board, or just pain old photocopy paper. It all affects the end result. If you don’t know, then experiment. It’s fun.

What medium should you use?

Figure out your medium.  There’s oils, acrylics, watercolors, Ad markers, Prismacolor markers, color pencils, pastels, Gouache, charcoal, spray paint, airbrush, ballpoint pen or something more abstract like wood textures or fabrics. It’s all there to experiment with and they all create different textures. There are countless options.

What I used for reMIND.

For reMIND, I used watercolor paper and Gouache and Acrylic paints applied pretty thick.

Edges are important to make  an organic look.

Okay, now that you know what style you want, there are a few simple things to remember when making texture swatches to use in Photoshop. Remember that these need to be versatile so you can use them over and over. I’ve found it helpful to make the edges of your textures one of two ways. Either fade out the edge or have an organic edge that matches the texture itself. The main thing to avoid is the edge of the paper or making a hard edge. This always creates lines in your art that you constantly have to remove. You don’t need your textures to be massive in size. I’ll show you how to blend them together in Photoshop really easily as long as you make the edges organic in some way like I suggest.

Here are good and bad examples of edges.

You could fill up a whole 11 x 17 sheet to the edges thinking it’s going to be big enough, but I guarantee you will move it around and want to use one of the parts near the edge of your paper and then you’ll remember this tutorial and be mad at me for not USING CAPITALS TO EMPHASIZE THE IMPORTANCE! Okay, there’s the caps. Lets move on.

What size should you make your textures?

Try to create your textures at the same size that your finished product will be. So if you have a manga sized comic in mind, make textures that don’t need to be enlarged or shrunk down to fit your page. I suggest creating them at around 12 x 12, personally. You want to avoid enlarging them more than they need to be when applying, otherwise it will look like you used a 5 inch paint brush to goop house paint on your comic. You definitely don’t want your beautiful textures to be all blurry from zooming in too much either, unless that’s what you want. Another thing I’d avoid is stretching your textures. I never stretch mine for reMIND because it becomes more and more clear that you are just hacking it up in Photoshop when you do this. Brush strokes are never stretched in traditional paintings, so why stretch them digitally? Stretching textures is another thing that immediately screams, PHOTOSHOPPED!

A good rule of thumb for if you need to enlarge a texture more than it’s scanned size is don’t enlarge it more than 110%. I’ve worked with lots of high end studios in print and media and most agree to not blow up any art more than 110%. In some cases I’ve heard people say 120%, but more than that and you start to see it get blurry. Not very professional looking.

Choose one or two colors per texture.

You want to be able to adjust them in Photoshop and if you have to many colors in one texture then you will have a harder time dialing it to the hue you want. I’d even go as far to say to only use two very similar colors or one color and black or white.

Scan and Clean your textures.

Now that you’ve made a batch of 10 or so textures in various colors it’s time to scan. Scan everything at 600 dpi to start with. You can shrink everything later but it’s a good idea to make your master files plenty big. Here is a coffee texture that I never cleaned up so I’ll use it as an example.

Adjust the Levels only if needed.

It’s time to use the levels again in Photoshop to adjust out the white of the canvas to be completely white.

Clean up specks and document edges.

Any specks or blemishes can be painted out with a solid white paint brush.

Now take a white fuzzy airbrush and go over the edges of the canvas. Try to avoid painting over your textures though. Just paint out the paper only. Make the edges as clean as possible with no junk around the corners of your documents. You don’t want to be cleaning the same file every time you use it.

Believe it or not, even though this texture is really sloppy and has crazy hard edges, it’s still organic and can easily be used. I’m not sure if it would fit into the world of reMIND though so I’ll save it for another project.

As an example of how well these organic hard edges blend together, I’ll duplicate this texture and set the top layer to Darken.

I rotated the top layer and slid it to the right and look at how nicely it blends together to look like one nice big texture. The only problem I see is the darker shapes within being easily spotted as repeating objects. Other than that, it looks pretty good.

I’ll go into the Darken mode more in the next tutorial in case you are not familiar with it.

Croping your file.

Crop your paper only; don’t crop the actual texture. Here’s another example. This is one of the textures I use all the time in reMIND. (Of course it’s much bigger than you see here)

Inverted Textures or painting on black paper.

It’s a good idea to make light textures on black paper as well. This is one thing I never did and I’m really in need of some now that I’m getting to my darker scenes. What I’ve been doing lately is hitting Apple+I (MAC) or Ctrl+I (PC) to Invert my texture so the white background turns black. It also creates some crazy new colors I never thought to paint. Too much of this and you will start getting a totally different style so I use it sparingly. That’s why I want to make a new set of light colors on black paper.

It’s important that your textures be on a completely white or black background for the method I use. This will become clear why, later in this series. Here are more examples of good texture files that I use throughout reMIND. Sorry they are so small, I want you to make your own instead of just taking these.

Next we’ll talk about how to use these in your pages with your line art.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting

Part 2 – How I use Flats

Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel

Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library (You are here)

Part 5 – Adding Textures to your Flatted Page

Part 6 – Masking and Applying Gradients

Part 7 – Light Source and Shadows

Part 8 – Dialing it all Together

Before we jump head first into this tutorial I suggest skimming Part 2 – How I use Flats, because this goes hand in hand with it.

Also some of the things I do require Photoshop CS2 or greater (I think).

Okay, so lets look at where we left off. We have our “lines” layer on the top of everything and set to Multiply. Under the lines we have our “flats” layer with the opacity turned down to zero so that it’s invisible and it’s locked. We can still select from it though. Then we have our “colors” layer that is adjusted to our liking. Below that I always put a solid white layer. This is what it looks like.

Now lets pick one of our textures that we made back in Part 4 – Creating Your Own Texture Library and drag it into our file. It will look something like this. Make sure your texture layer is above the colors layer.

Rename the texture layer by double clicking on the layer name. I just name all my textures “texture”. Call me crazy.

While you have your texture layer highlighted, hit Apple+G (mac) or Ctrl+G (pc) to create a group/folder and whatever layers you have selected will automatically be moved into your new group/folder.

This may seem trivial but it really makes it easier later on when you have a bunch of textures. Now, lets rename the group “Textures”.

Now the magic starts to happen. Click back on your texture layer (not the group) and change the layer mode to Darken.

Now click on your Textures FOLDER and change the folder mode to Overlay.

Now things are starting to take shape. Notice how anything that was white stays white even though there is a texture over it. Any of our painted colors suddenly have textures affecting the color. If you don’t want your texture color changing any of the colors you adjusted, then try turning your texture to black and white. I like keeping most of the color from the texture intact though because it adds to the hand painted look and sometimes it creates strange subtile color combinations that look really great.

Now take some time to slide around your texture so that it works with your art. I’ve used the edge of the texture with the edge of the lighthouse to give it the impression that it’s hit by light on the left side. This is where you need to start designing how your page will look and feel.

You can also duplicate your texture and slide the duplicate to fill another part of your image. Since your first texture mode was on Darken already, your duplicate will also be on Darken. This is perfect for making these texture blend together so you don’t see where one ends and another begins. But since all these textures are inside your folder that is set to Overlay, Overlay is the only thing that is affecting the rest of your image. (I believe this is only possible with some of the newer versions of Photoshop like CS2 and above.)

Transform. Rotate and scale.

By hitting Apple+T (Mac) or Ctrl+T (pc) while on a texture layer, you can freely transform it however you please. I would avoid streaching or skewing textures. Try to keep it mainly to rotation and scale to avoid it looking “photoshopped”.

If your textures are too saturated or full of contrast you can always adjust the Hue/Saturation of each texture. On this page I decided to use colorize to convert my texture to a monotone texture so I could control it a bit more. I usually don’t do this because you loose lots of good color information when you hit “colorize.”  Once again, Apple+U or Ctrl+U for Hue/Saturation.

After Colorizing my textures (very rare), I duplicated the texture again to finish filling in the gaps. Now I have three texture layers all on Darken inside a folder set to Overlay.

NOTE: If you have an older version of Photoshop that doesn’t allow this then you can always cover your page with textures set to Darken without them being in a folder. Once you have all your textures positioned then merge them all together and change the mode to Overlay for your flattened texture layer. To merge your layers together, hit Apple+E (Mac) or Ctrl+E (PC).

Now we can close our texture folder to keep it all out of the way.

From here on, we just continue to do the same process that we did in Part 2 by selecting from our flats and adjusting our color layers until we get the color we like. But now that we have textures affecting our colors, we might need to push the color layers even further to get the colors we want. I try to avoid adjusting the textures themselves unless they are really bright and affecting my color layer too much.

Keep adjusting your color layer while selecting from your flats layer until you are happy with it. If you don’t like the texture anymore then drag a new one in and see what happens.

Here’s what my page looks like after adjusting.

The only thing left is to add some shadows and lighting.

But we can save that for another time.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting

Part 2 – How I use Flats

Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel

Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library

Part 5 – Adding Textures to your Flatted Page (You are here)

Part 6 – Masking and Applying Gradients

Part 7 – Light Source and Shadows

Part 8 – Dialing it all Together