How To Make Comics Part 2 - Chaotic Tortoise

How to Make Comics Part 2

Using Photoshop or another piece of image manipulation software to colour or letter your comics is an entirely optional step.

At some point, you will probably benefit from getting your drawings into a digital format if you want to reproduce them at some point, but this can be a straight forward case of scanning them in and sending them on.

I’ve met plenty of comic creators who still use inks and paints to colour their comics and they produce some beautiful work.

On the other hand, I’m a digital junkie and also use my cartoons on this site, so I need mine uploaded to a web-publishable format and so it makes sense for me to colour them in Photoshop.

In this post, I am going to take you through the steps that I go through to get my tortoises coloured in.

First of all, it’s worth noting what you need in order to do this. Unlike part 1, where I said you don’t really need anything special in order to draw comics, this time you do. You will need:

A computer
A scanner
A copy of Photoshop (I have the CS3 version)
Patience

If you don’t have Photoshop, there are other alternatives. For a very long time I used Paint Shop Pro, and I also used GIMP for a short period of time, which is free and incredibly powerful once you get used to it. Almost everything you can do in Photoshop you can do in GIMP, so it is a good alternative, just not one that I’m any good at using.

I’ll also note that you need a lot less patience once you get used to the process. I am now very much able to operate on auto pilot in colouring my images, but when I first went through the method I made frequent mistakes and it took me the better part of an afternoon to do even a very small image.

It is worth noting at this point that I am not a Photoshop expert. A lot of what I do, I don’t fully understand, but I know it works. I have botched together my method by following other more in-depth free online tutorials of which there are literally thousands of out there. If you have a specific question about something I might have glossed over, feel free to drop me a comment and I might be able to answer it or refer you to somewhere else that can.

A tortoise fresh from the scanner

Once you have scanned in your image and opened it up into Photoshop, there are a series of steps you need to take to prepare it for colouring.

1. Make sure the lines are black and the background is white. Do this by adjusting levels and dragging the little arrow on the far left to the centre as demonstrated in the images. Dropping your image into two colours will make for cleaner lines and allow you to easily select large areas which will make your life easier in the long run.

2. Convert the background to a layer by right clicking and selecting “create layer from background”

3. On the channels tab, near the layers box, with all the channels selected, click the little dotted circle icon and all of the white background will be selected.

4. Hit delete to get rid of this. This will give you a layer with just your line art on.

5. Select the layer tab again and create a new layer (I always use Ctrl+Alt+N to the point that I can’t remember where the non-shortcut way of doing it is but there is one). I’ve called mine background, but this is the layer that will have all your colours on it.

6. Drag the layer underneath the layer with the outline on, select the whole layer and fill it with a background colour, in this case white.

7. Make sure that both layers have the “Multiply” option selected from the drop down. Without this, your outline layer might leave ugly looking marks over your colour when you come to adding it.

8. Finally, have a look on your outline layer and see if there’s anything you want to tidy up. As you can see in this original tortoise, I messed up the nose when I was drawing him, so I’m going to remove a chunk using the lasso tool and the delete button.

Now you are ready to start with the colouring. What you’ve done is created a clean image with separate layers that will make the colouring process much easier. I used to do everything on one layer when I started trying to colour comics, but with multiple layers, you have many more options relating to tweaking your work so that it looks tidier.

To colour, take the following steps.

1. Ensure you have the background layer selected.

2. Select the magic wand tool and set the attributes to 25 tolerance, Contiguous and Sample All Layers. I also select Anti-alias but I’m not 100% sure this is necessary. Use this tool to select an area that needs to be coloured.

3. Along the menu bar, go to Select, Modify and Expand, expanding the selection by three pixels (Alt, S, M, E if you want to be fancy using shortcuts). This will mean that some of the colour will actually be going under the lines, giving an overall cleaner look when you’re finished.

4. Use the fill bucket tool, select the colour that you want and fill in the selected areas.

That is the basic method to follow. I’m not going to do it for the whole tortoise but you get the idea. If you want to polish the image a little more, you can add lighting and shade by doing the following.

1. Make another layer for the shadows and make sure it’s between the background and the outline. Set this to 25% opacity.

2. Select an area you want to add shadow to using the magic wand tool.

3. Use the brush tool with a black or dark colour selected and manually draw in the area you want to shade. You can experiment with the size and hardness of brush that you find works best. For my tortoises I use a 39 pixel brush with 14% hardness.

4. Repeat the previous three steps for any lighting, but substitute the black for a white. I tend to use much less lighting than shade.

Once you’ve finished the whole thing you’ll end up with something that looks fairly decent. You will definitely find there are better methods that work for you and once you get better at the process, you’ll find extra touches that you can add to your cartoons to make it look better.

If you want to have a look at a couple of really good Photoshop tutorials to see just how far you can take this sort of thing, I would really recommend the following from some real digital art pros.

Digital Painting Lesson: Monkey Island’s LeChuck – Absolutely staggering step by step guide 0n how really really elaborate and effective digital painting is done. “Not for beginners” is quite an understatement, but this is still an inspirational example of exactly what you can do.

How to Create an Anime Artwork in Photoshop – Very similar to the method used above because this is the first tutorial I found that made sense, with a few extra neat tricks.

Hopefully that might give you an idea of what is possible with your computers. Chalk this one up to the amazing technology at our fingertips that we take for granted!