Tutorial: The Digital Workflow
I’ve been practicing and preaching about the digital workflow for presenting comics for quite some time. It is perfectly fine to draw and ink and color by hand, but if you are on a time-sensitive schedule, or you want to simply speed up the process, you may want to consider making the jump to digital for a number of reasons. This post will discuss the benefits of learning how to draw comics using a purely digital workflow.
Many seasoned artists have a set routine when it comes to their workflow. They sit at their desk for a set number of hours per day, have certain tools at their disposal, set a certain amount of days to achieve production goals, and are quite comfortable in their approach. While it sounds like the ideal situation, it may not be the best method for everyone. The traditional workflow for a comic artist generally looks like this:
Rough sketches > Pencils > Inks > Color > Final tweaks
Now, if you’re working for an editor who has a number of specific changes, this can be extremely time consuming. Drawing out your panel roughs and presenting them, then going back and erasing, redrawing and presenting again can be a serious hassle and eat up valuable time. Especially if you have to scan in these changes, convert them to a JPEG file and e-mail them on for review.
Using a fully digital workflow for creating comics saves a lot of time you would spend erasing planning lines, tracing from a lightbox, photocopying and resizing, and scanning. All of these physical actions are virtually eliminated, giving you more time to come up with quick concepts and sketches, then refinements to those sketches.
Instead of lugging around a sketchbook, full sheets of bristol, your pencils, inks, brushes and other miscellaneous tools, everything you need is in a file or two and on one (or maybe two) programs on your computer. If you use Photoshop, you can set up various layers for your ideas and concepts and use them as reference. You won’t have to keep multiple sheets and layout pages and cut pieces from all over in order to make something complete – you’ll have the ability to do all of that in one spot! Here’s how to draw comics using the digital process.
From Roughs to Pencils: Once you’ve sketched out your rough plan, you can simply create a new layer above it, and proceed to trace and refine your artwork. This eliminates the lightbox step.
Pencils and Revisions: When the pencils have been set and it is time to make modifications to perspective, proportions or the overall look of your panels, you can easily distort, copy, move and adjust your artwork without having to draw/erase/draw like you would with traditional pencils and paper.
From Pencils to Inks: At this stage, you can create a new layer above your pencils, and simply retrace and modify them – or you can duplicate your pencils, darken the linework and add in your ink details. There are no faint pencil lines you need to erase after inking in order to clean up your image – you’ve already created a clean, inked page with a few button clicks and WACOM stylus strokes. The digitally inked page is also more precise and has cleaner edges – traditional inks can bleed on the page and cause the edges to look fuzzy.
From Inks to Color: Once your final solid inks have been created, you can proceed to color your work using numerous digital effects and techniques – airbrushing, metallics, smooth gradients, light effects – can all be achieved in less time. The bonus to this is, if you don’t like the result, you can simply undo it and try it again. This eliminates any guesswork and failures after experimentation. You wouldn’t be able to get away with that if you rendered your colour by hand. Also, your colors will have been chosen specifically using the printed color gamut, so you won’t have any surprises when the final piece is created. There is no conversion necessary from a scanned image.
Adding Dialogue and Sound Effects: With a wide variety of comic book styled fonts and lettering, you can set your dialogue and sound effects in place in minutes. Instead of trying to determine where these items will be placed in relation to the drawn page, and hand rendering letters, you can easily type them on to your screen, then resize and distort them to fit.
The Finished Piece: Now that your page has been drawn, inked, colored and lettered, there is no need for a final scan in order to prepare the file for printing (since modern print-shops create rips from digital files). Your file is already 100% digital, and is print ready.
Another benefit to the digital workflow include the ability to use and obtain reference material. You may have a folder or a file that contains various poses, landmarks, color inspiration etc. that you can view at a moments notice. You can drag these elements into your working file and use them as reference from a spot on your desktop – it is almost like having a digital drawing table with all of your photographed resource material laid out in front of you.
The real benefit comes from being able to make all of those items disappear by turning the visibility of a layer on or off in your Photoshop file.
Scott Kurtz of PvP fame - hard at work.
There is my basic plug for using the digital workflow method when you are learning how to draw comics. These techniques are extremely effective in saving you time, and I highly recommend them. It may take some time to find a comfortable routine, and it may be a big expense initially (if you do not have all of the tools and software first) – but the end result pays huge dividends. You can start out slowly – replace one of your traditional steps (pencils, inks or color) with a digital method, and eventually you will be confident enough to replace a number of the steps until you are using a fully digital workflow for your comics.
Experiment and practice – you’ll be more efficient with time!
November 26th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
[...] the feeling of drawing. If you master the use of a tablet, you are well on your way to a fully digital workflow. For more information on using your WACOM tablet, check out this [...]
May 8th, 2011 at 1:52 am
Great post , I am going to spend more time learning about this topic