Back in this here post, I detailed all the things I use to create comic books like VARULV, in the traditional sense. Of course, I left out a significant portion of my little bag of art tricks in that entry, and that is all the wild and wacky crap I do with the computer to get the book out every other month! And it's such a big part of how I create art in general these days, as well as something I seem to get the most questions about, that I can't ignore it for long...
If you take a gander at the image I've posted at the top of this entry, you'll see two comic pages. Actually, you'll see one comic page in two states: before Photoshop and after.
This page, from VARULV #3 ([shameless plug] available this Friday! [/shameless plug]) is a good representation of some of the things I do to a comic page before it makes it into the final book. The process goes something like this:
- Draw comic page
- Scan comic page
- Adjust levels
- Make alterations to artwork as needed
- Add page and panel borders
- Add tones
- Add lettering and typography
- Import pages into layout
From there it's just export as a PDF and off it goes to the printer/distributor. But what if we were to break some of those steps down? Obviously drawing and scanning are pretty self-explanatory, but what about the levels and lettering and the other digital stuff?
Back in the day, when the internet was a baby, all the cool kids who posted their art online were using Adobe Photoshop. As a kid with limited experience and success with things like using the computer to color artwork, seeing what could be done in Photoshop inspired the first criminal act of my illustrious career, and I quickly downloaded a bootleg copy and crack of this miracle software so I could make beautiful artwork as well!
But of course, there was a problem with my plan... After getting the thing loaded onto my computer, I couldn't figure out where the "color the picture perfectly" button was hiding. In fact, Photoshop didn't appear to be set-up for ease of use to those of us who wanted to color simple sketches at all! It almost looked like it would require effort to use! I had to be mistaken -- so many people made beautiful artwork on the computer using this exact program. It was done all the time, and Photoshop was what made the pictures super-zazzy -- it had all the bells and whistles built-in, how could it be that Photoshopping a picture wasn't as easy as pressing a button???
My mistake was a classic one, as many people to this day still make it (and usually, it's people who are clients of mine, who pay me to "play on Photoshop all day") and I like them had no idea it was wrong to think otherwise... My mistake was thinking the computer is meant to do the work for you, instead of realizing the computer, Photoshop, and all that comes with it are one thing. They are tools.
That's right, Photoshop is a tool. I don't have magic buttons that automatically draw borders around my comic pages, I don't have a "create dialogue and word balloons" button, and I certainly don't have a magic wand which, with one click, tones a full page in grays for me... But with enough practice and clever template creation, I can make it seem that way...
Working digitally is the same as working traditionally. You have to find the right tools that work the way you want them to, to create a desired effect. If you want your picture to look one way, there are ten thousand ways to make that happen, and all are correct.
As it stands, I add borders around my pictures in Photoshop, as well as adding tones and creating alterations (in fact, if you look at the above image, you can see just how many alterations on this single page of the book I made... The Vicar and the bars around Stig's cage aren't even in the original image for a full panel and a half, and were duplicated entirely in Photoshop). I'd say for the average page, about 50% of the work is digital...
And then you have instances like the above image, where the WHOLE PAGE was pieced together in Photoshop, from several different drawings. Is this cheating? I'd say not... it sometimes, very truthfully, takes more effort to compose a page this way than it does to draw it by hand (which is another reason I tend to prefer working by hand) but that's me...
And I'm just happy I get to save money on comic boards.
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