Drawing Digital Comics – How to Draw Spiderman Part 2
When we last left off in the previous tutorial, we penciled and inked ourselves a pretty rad looking Spider-Man slinging his webs. This time around, I’m going to show you a few quick techniques to make a background and color your work. I have shown a few different ways to create backgrounds, and to flat and develop your colors. This time around, we’re going to use two different methods to do these things. It’s always nice to know several different methods to complete the digital drawing process – that way, you can find the one you’re most comfortable with, and adapt it to your own personal workflow.
This is the end result we want to achieve.
Let’s get started! First step, open your Spider-Man Photoshop file from the last tutorial, and create a new layer. We’re going to make ourselves a city background from scratch.
Creating a Background Using Perspective
Create a new Layer and Label it Background.
Select a bright color. We’re going to paint some guidelines for our perspective drawing, so we want them to be highly visible.
Create a horizontal guideline for your horizon, and start by creating your closest building.
Somewhere along your horizon line, create a focal point. All of your perspective lines will vanish to this point. We will be drawing extending lines that radiate from this point, in order to ensure the proper perspective for our buildings.
Draw the front face of your first foreground building. Since this is 1 point perspective, it will be fairly easy to develop your cityscape.
From the edges of your front face, extend lines from the corner to the focal point we made on the horizon line.
Draw another vertical line to create your 3-Dimensional box. You’ve created the first building. Now develop more front faces and extend the lines towards your focal point and create the illusion of depth.
Draw faces on both sides of the focal point, and extend the lines. Fill out your city with these rectangular boxes. Don’t be afraid to stack boxes on top of one another.
Create buildings that extend above the horizon line as well.
Feel free to make buildings with different designs. They don’t all have to be boxes, you know…
You can slowly see your city take shape!
As you add more buildings, you’ll notice the depth in all different directions beginning to emerge – by seeing some of the rooftops of the buildings, you get a sense of being high above the streets and people below. You can alter this perception based on the location of your horizon line and your focal point.
Penciling your Buildings
Now that we’ve created our base forms for our buildings, we can now construct the actual shapes and move on to rendering them for final details. Create a new layer for your background pencils. Start with the closest building, and ensure that it has the thickest, most defined outline. We don’t want the linework to blend together because it is all the same weight. We want to differentiate between the size and location of the buildings on your plane of vision.
Outline the exterior forms of your buildings. This building is a bit further away than the first, so make the line weight a bit thinner.
Continue this method for the rest of the buildings. Thinner lines for the buildings receding into the distance.
Just draw your outlines at this point. We’ll add details afterwards.
Now that the outlines are complete, we will finish off the building shapes, and add details like rooftop vents, windows and facade treatments.
Your first pass should look something like this. Now we’ll add details.
Giving your Buildings Personality
Draw a window. Make it as fancy or as simple as you like. For this building, I opted for a two pane window with multiple frames.
Copy this window, and paste it in a new layer (Photoshop will make a new layer for you automatically.) Line up your window tops and establish a good distance between the windows.
Repeat this step a few times, and make a number of floors. This is the quickest way to create windows that look consistent throughout. You may choose to draw each one by hand if you want to add that extra element of personality.
Your first building is complete. Not bad! That was easy! Now let’s try a different method to create windows on another building.
We are going to create windows on the closest building (on the left.) Since the side of the building recedes into the distance, we’ll need to establish out perspective lines in order for the windows to be drawn properly. Turn on your background layer that has your focal point.
Using the background layer as your guide, draw lines extending from your building to the point. Just like the buildings, draw the windows in on your pencils layer. You should have something similar to the above drawing.
Complete the windows with outer trim and vertical linework. This is seamless glass, so there’s no need for additional frames in between the panes of glass. This method of window is very quick and easy to pull off, but generally only used for modern buildings.
Now, we’ll try a different method for creating windows. Start with an outline of the entire window area on the face of the building.
Determine your window widths with vertical lines evenly distributed.
Determine the length of the window by bisecting your lines with a horizontal line.
Draw another horizontal line below the first. This line basically determines where the window ends, and the masonry begins.
Repeat this step a few times to make your windows and spaces.
You should have a pattern on the front face of your building that looks like this.
Zoom in to the space between your windows and the masonry of the building.
Using your Marquee tool, highlight the area between your windows like the above sample.
Hit the delete key, and voila. You’ve created a floor of seamless glass windows. This is a different style of window that you can use to add a bit of originality to your buildings. Not all buildings are made the same, so don’t make all of your windows the same way.
Here’s what it looks like when you’ve finished all the floors. That looks pretty good! That would pass for an office building, easily.
Here’s another method for creating single windows. This works well for buildings that are further away and don’t require a lot of detail. Start by creating a rectangle shape with your Marquee tool. Select Stroke from the Edit menu, and determine the width of the stroke and the position of the line in relation to the selection (Inside, Outside or Centered.)
There’s your single window. Now, we’ll duplicate the windows a number of times and line them up in rows and columns.
There’s the first row, evenly space. Now lets make a few more.
As you add more floors, you can see the building take shape.
Delete any additional linework, in order to show the building is further in the distance.
So now, we’ll use what we learned and make different styles of windows for the remaining buildings. Here’s some seamless for our modern looking building way in the background.
Here is a variety of other styles for some other buildings. Now it’s starting to look like a real city!
Add more details to your city by drawing roof access housings, vents, a/c units, pipes, stacks, etc. It looks great! You’ve established the drawn background, and now we’ll do some minor tweaks to the composition.
Reveal the layers of your drawn Spider-Man, and create your Cutout layer.
- select the outside area of your solid outline (Ink layer).
- Invert the selection
- Fill with white.
This will help to separate the linework of the city background layer from your Spider-Man layer.
Select your penciled city background layer, and use the Free Transform option. We want to create more of a dynamic composition, so we’ll turn the city slightly on an angle.
And here’s the linework of the full composition. (In your cutout layer, you could include the webbing in order to eliminate any confusion with the lines below.)
This is what your finished city background looks like in pencil. Now we’ll add colour to really make our image come alive.
Adding Colour to the Background
This scene is going to take place later in the evening, so we are going to use a blue-grey tone for our buildings. Select an appropriate colour from the picker.
Create a new layer and make sure it sits below the pencil linework layer. Fill it with your blue-grey color.
On your filled layer, using your Lasso tool, select an area that will be in shadow. In the image above, the side of the building will be shaded.
Select the Levels option from the Image > Adjustments menu. Alter the values similar to what you see above. Feel free to modify them to different values. In this case, I only modified the dark ranges.
Continue this same shading method on other buildings. Remember that objects in the distance become darker as they recede into space.
This building rests further back than the two buildings you previously shaded, so it should be darker in value.
You can do the opposite of this technique for buildings in the foreground, by making them lighter than the overall tone. Just pull the light values higher (to the left in the dialog box.)
You can see the depth created by tonal differences. Now we’ll add some overall tone with a gradient overlay.
Create a new layer above your background flats layer you’ve been working on, and at the bottom of the Layers palette, select the Layer Adjustment option. Select Gradient… from the drop down menu.
Select a gradient (or create one yourself), alter the angle, scale and position of the gradient scale.
Set your Layer to Overlay, and adjust your Opacity/Fill to a percentage you feel works best.
You’ve made the background appear deeper in colour with that Gradient adjustment. You can alter the settings at ay time by clicking on the layer and changing the settings.
Coloring the Main Character – Spider-Man
Now that we’ve painted the base colors for our background, we can get to work on our main man – Spider-Man! Reveal the artwork + cutout layers for our hero, and make a new layer for his color flats. Make sure it resides above the cutout and background layers, but not above your inked layer.
Color in your solids. Remember the costume colors. Blue under the arms and pants. Red for the main part.
Fill in your flats layer with colored areas. It will be easier to separate and select particular areas when necessary.
Color your webs, and the soles of the feet…
Add your first level of depth with shading. Use tones slightly darker than your base tone, and cover a larger area.
For the second level of shading, choose a tone that is slightly darker than your first shadow color. Paint in darker areas in a smaller area than your first pass of shading. this will increase the depth of your forms. Repeat this same step as many times as you’d like. You can add shadow layering as much as possible. The same applies for highlights. Pick a brighter tone of the base colour, and layer it to increase the form. Start with the broadest area with the least brightest highlight and work your way into smaller “hot spots” with brighter tones.
Finishing Details
Now that our colors have been placed, we can finish off our image with final details and effects. Since this image is set in the evening, we need to add things like the warm glow of building lights. Create a new layer directly above your background color layer. Using your Magic Wand tool, on the city background layer, select the windows you want lit. Select windows at random, or if you have a particular lighting effect in mind, select specific windows.
Fill your windows with a solid white, yellow, or cream colour to replicate the lights inside.
Duplicate the layer, and place it at the top of the Layer Palette order. The color should overlap the inked lines below.
Apply a Gaussian Blur to create a glowing effect from the ambient light.
You’ll notice the blur effect overlaps certain areas of the inked outlines. In order to make the effect work as realistically as possible, you will have to manually erase certain areas where the glow doesn’t apply. For instance, where the glow overlaps the main object in the foreground (Spider-Man), you will have to erase away any of the glow. You will have t do the same thing to the webs, the corner of the closest building, and any other overlapping buildings.
Now that the rooms have been lit, we have to color the rooms that are not. On your background flats layer, color in the window areas with a dark colour to indicate the darkened room. Adding dark rooms adds to the realism of the piece. In a city, not every single light is turned on during the evening hours. Knocking out a few lights here and there is much more realistic looking.
Now, we’ll add an overall colour wash to amplify the darkness and create a moodier looking piece. Select a dark blue colour that isn’t too saturated. Create a new layer and place it directly below the glowing light effect layer you made for the office buildings.
Your layers should look like this.
Set your Layer to Multiply, and adjust the Opacity in order to saturate the dark areas with the blue color of the layer. You can apply a little bit or a lot.
In order to finish off the image, you can add in extra details like stars or clouds in the sky, additional background shading or lighting effects, colored neon signs, etc. If you’ve reached this point, you’ve learned how to plan, sketch, draw, ink, color and complete a drawing of Spider-Man from scratch. Nice job. You can apply the same techniques for any superhero or comic book character – all these tips apply.
I hope this tutorial helped you learn more about drawing digital comics of your own. For more tutorials and techniques, check out the Tutorials section on the site – there’s plenty of great lessons in the archives! See you next time.
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Tags: backgrounds, Color, comics, Composition, Drawing, tutorial
