Drawing Digital Comics – Action Pose Tutorial #2
And now, for your viewing pleasure… here is the second part of the tutorial on drawing action poses. If you recall, in the first part of the tutorial, we talked about starting with a gesture drawing/mannequin and developing the scene into roughed forms. Now that we have our characters blocked in, I will be focusing on drawing and inking the character details of our scene. So let’s get back at it!
Where we left off…
Starting off with the Details
I suggest using a calligraphic brush in order to create some variable line widths with your stylus from the WACOM tablet. With some pressure adjustments, you can achieve some interesting effects as you draw.
Create a new drawing layer above your Mannequin / Wireframe layer. Turn down the opacity of your Mannequin layer so the artwork is very faint - just enough for you to make out where the skeleton form of your character is.
Begin drawing your characters – faces, expressions, clothing and accessories. In this example, I’m going to draw a wildly curly haired karate guy. I gave him a look of angered exertion.
I drew in a headband and a mop of untamed medusa-like hair. I’m aware that he looks like a bowl of cole slaw, but its the look I’m after. He may be tough by kicking a guy in the face, but deep down inside, he’s a goof.
Following the basic forms we’ve created, build your clothing around them accordingly. I’m currently drawing a modified karate gi, which is generally loose fitting and baggy. We’re not drawing spandex here, so the linework for the costume shouldn’t follow the basic body form below. There should be room for folds and excess material. Also, you won’t see any muscles due to the thickness of the cloth.
Continue filling out your character – belts, pants, cuffs and folds. Make sure your linework resembles the structure on the layer below – only modified to accommodate for the clothing.
Add in details like toes, creases and ridges in the skin, etc. Draw out both of your characters in an outline form.
Finish the basic linework for both of your characters. The next step will be to thicken the outline of your characters and add in additional details.
Outlines and Bolder Forms
With a thicker brush, proceed to place a larger outline around your characters. This will increase the depth of the subject and draw more attention to the form.
By placing more emphasis on the outer linework, you can see our character stands out over his victim. Now we’ll make our victim have a bit more prominence with an outline of his own – except with lines that are not as thick.
With a brush that is slightly smaller than the first brush you used to outline your charcater, repeat the same technique with the guy getting his face rearranged.
Notice the difference in the forms, now that the outlines have been applied. Also, with different line weights between the two characters, you can see there is more emphasis placed on the figure kicking – who is slightly in front of the poor sap receiving the kick. These outlines contain your contour-type line work within the characters and create more of a comic-book type look.
Preparing your Line Art for Inking
Now that the outlines have been completed, we can begin to indicate areas of shadow for the inker. Pay attention to your forms, and determine where there will be areas of shadow. Folds and creases, overlapping items, the back sides of objects away from the light source, etc. These are all areas that need to be addressed with a shadow area. Draw your solid shadows or pools and mark them with an X, so your inker understands this area is meant to be filled.
Take this opportunity to add some more embellishments - sweat and blood, action lines from a gasp of air…. anything to exaggerate the force of the kick. This is comics, after all – make the most out of your action, for impact!
Separate your Characters
In the Batman tutorial, I instructed you to create a cutout layer for the important elements on your layers. This will make selections and additions to your artwork much easier to accomplish. Create a new layer below your drawing layer. This will act as your cutout layer.
Now with your Magic Wand tool on the Drawing layer, select all the space around your characters. It should look something like the above image.
Under the Select menu, choose Modify > Expand. When the dialog box appears, type in 2 or 3 pixels for expansion (depending on the resolution and the thckness of your lines.)
Choose the Inverse command to make your selection focused on your characters and not your background.
You’ll notice the selection should be a few pixels into your artwork. This will ensure that your under fill doesn’t creep past the edges of your linework, but is not too far inward that you can see a gap between your fill and your linework.
Select your Cutout layer, and choose a bright color for your fill. Fill in the area selected.
Duplicate your Cutout layer. We are going to make a cutout for each character.
Erase away any of the fill that doesn`t belong to the character you are creating the cutout for.
Now CTRL-Click (or Cmd – Click for Mac) the cutout layer you have just finished separating.
Select the duplicate layer you created, and erase the selected figure. You should now have two separate cutouts on two separate layers.
This is the quickest way to create background cutouts from two engaged characters like this. Now you can begin the task of cleaning up the cutout area from the spots that the wand did not reach.
One completed background cutout. You can quickly turn that red colour to a flat white in a few different ways.
1) In the Layers Palette, select the Effects menu (looks like an fx) and choose Color Overlay (pick white from the color chooser)
2) Under the Image menu – Adjustments > Hue/Saturation, and turn the Lightness to 100%
Inking the Action Poses
We’ve now completed the drawing phase, and we are now going to add shadows and other details to our posed characters.
Create a new layer – INK.
Remember the X spots we placed on our Drawing layer? Now we know what areas to fill with solid black. Grab your brush and start painting in the X locations on your INK layer.
You can now see your forms beginning to take more shape and have more depth with these shadow pools.
Fill out all your X spots, and take a look at the image once its done. Take this opportunity to add more pools if you feel there are areas with insufficient contrast or depth.
Now, we can add even more details. I added some small shadows under the hair that overlaps our kicker’s headband, more furrows in the brow and strained muscles in the neck. I also began to use a series of lines complementing the solid pools to create a different visual tone.
In order to create the illusion of depth in the fabric, I extended the lines on certain areas of the clothing on our character. They may not be contoured lines, but the spaced out linework creates an overall grey tone when viewed all at once, and doesn’t have as much harsh contrast as the solid dark pools of black. I continued this technique in areas where I wanted more subtle shadows.
Here’s the entire piece done with that technique. Note the slightly darker tone on the victim’s clothing. It isn’t quite black, but your eye reads the linework as shadow. By adding these strokes, the leg hovering above stands out much more prominently as it has a bold outline, and a solid white interior with no shading – creating the illusion of the leg being in front, and adding emphasis to its position.
If you wanted to give your image more of a grittier, rougher look, you could ink in lines going the other way to create more contrast, and in a rougher hatch pattern. You can see the shades developing into darker areas on the right side compared to the lighter single linework to the left of the image.
Another technique you could try is to double up on the single direction linework. But instead of making lines that span the full length of the shaded area (like in the first pass) you stop approximately half way to darken only half of the line work. This creates an additional level of shading.
Now that you’ve done all this, you can add much more detail to your characters if you wish. Since this is merely a basic tutorial covering fundamentals, I’m going to stop right here for now. But there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from going all out and adding multiple layers of shading and details on your own. Experiment with this drawing. Try new techniques or polish up your current ones.
If you’ve reached this point, congratulations! You’ve successfully drawn and inked your action pose. In the next tutorials, we’ll add a background, color techniques and dialogue to fully develop this scene. See you next time!
February 4th, 2010 at 6:27 pm
[...] part of the action pose tutorial. In Part One we drew our characters and roughed in their forms. In Part Two, we drew in our rough pencils, drew in the details and inked our fighters. Now, we move on to [...]