Paper Snips

Comic process

Some people suggested I do a tutorial about my coloring of the Beardfluff comics. I thought I’d make it a walktrough of the whole comic process and split it into chapters. The coloring is part 6 if you want to skip the rest. This is by no means an absolute way of doing things, it’s just the way I’ve been working lately and it’s still evolving.

1. Thumbnails

I usually sit down with my A4-sized sketchbook in the weekend and list some ideas I’ve gathered during the week. (I have a smaller pocket sized notbook for that) Then I start making thumbnails, a couple of inches big. That allows me to work out panel layout and position of the balloons without thinking about detail too much.  At the same time, I’m also writing out the dialogue somewhere else on the page. I try to keep the amount of words at a minimum so the balloons can stay as small as possible. I hate it when panels are too full of text. It’s one of the hardest things to do I think.

As you can see here, I’m sketching everything in red pencil. For some reason I feel more comfortable drawing with this than I do with regular graphite leads. My notes are a mix of Dutch, English and insanity.

2. Panels and balloons

At this point I’ll take an empty Photoshop document and mark the panels, add balloons and text. I made a couple of template files with dummy text and shapes to start from so I can do this very fast. I’ll print the template at 10% opacity on some Bristol or Steinbach drawing paper to draw the final pencil art on.

I could just break out my old ruler to draw panels directly on the paper and eyeball the text layout but it’s a lot faster and more accurate doing it on the computer.
Also, if there’s anything that I’ve learned about drawing comics, it’s that drawing your art to flow around the text is easier than trying to paste your text into a finished drawing. So be sure to always define where your text will be before making the finished artwork. The panels will look less cramped this way.

3. Pencils

Time to take my trusty 0.5 and 0.9 mechanical pencils (still using red leads) and start drawing the final pencil art. Some things I’ll just draw like I imagine them, but usually I’ll have some reference photos and make some sketches in my sketchbook first. 

4. Scan

When I scan the drawing, the panel borders and text get lost because they’re too light.  That’s okay because I can still use the credits at the bottom of the page to align my drawing. I scan the drawing in greyscale, dump it into my photoshop template, bump up the contrast and set the opacity to about 40%. Sometimes I’ll also move and scale elements to make them fit better. Now it’s ready to be drawn in ink.

5. Ink

This is the fun stage: I get to use my Wacom tablet (an A5 widescreen Intuos). I lock my drawing and start inking on seperate layers: foreground, background and areas filled with black.  I draw the inks using a pressure sensitive brush.
I should probably mention that I’m drawing at a very high resolution. I’m using an A5 document at 600dpi, and that’ll be shrunk to 300dpi for print and even smaller for use online. Even when you’re not making finished artwork on a computer, you should make it at at least 1.5 times bigger that it’ll be printed. That way, a lot of imperfections will become less visible when shrunk. 

6. Color and texture

a.  I start with a layer filled with grey (the mid-tone) and throw a texture on top of that to make it more interesting. Here I’m using some paint out of a texture pack from kuschelirmel-stock on Deviant Art. I turned it to grayscale and bumped up the contrast. After importing it into my document, I set it to multiply and change the opacity a bit. Sometimes I throw out the gray layer below and use only the texture as a mid-tone.

b. Now I mask the panel gutters and throw away my default shapes (the balloons and panel borders). With the textured grey as a backdrop, I paint the text balloons the way I want them (again, a new layer) and place them into their final position. Like you can see in panel 6, I do some final text editing, sometimes even cutting text completely.

c. Next I start coloring in the panels one by one, using different layers for every panel (see picture below).
I fill selections with gradients, using masks and selections. Then I mess around with opacity, opacity styles (like overlay, multiply, screen, …) and adjust saturation where needed.

d. Above these colors, I add light. With a hard, thin brush I’ll draw white highlights, and with a big soft brush (set to a very low opacity) I’ll lighten up bigger areas. Recently I also started adding layers for the shadows.

By now you will have noticed I’m completely neurotic and obsessed with layer order. I like to keep things organised and as editable as possible.)

For example, in the first panel, I drew a gradient going from dark blue to a very light blue to build the sky. I wanted the pigeons to stand out, so I added some white highlights. I then set the gradient layer to ‘Overlay’ and the light layers to ‘screen’.
Sometimes it’s that simple, other times (like in panels 5 and 6 of this comic) I’ll combine 2 or more layers of gradients with different opacity effects and masking parts of the panel. There’s no set rules about this, just experimentation and a lot of layering. 

And that’s it: when all the panels are done, I copy the file, flatten it, resize it and export as a JPG. I hope you enjoyed the walkthrough and if you want to see more, check out the Beardfluff comic.
If you want to see more textured artwork, be sure to check out any comic by Brian Wood or some fine webcomics such as Red Moon Rising, Nerf This, LAWLS and Journalin Comix.

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