Drawing Digital Comics – Action Pose Tutorial #3
Here we go! The third and final 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 background, color and text. Follow along closely, and you’ll be cranking out your own digital comics right away!
Creating a Quick Background
The first step is to create a new layer entitled BG for your background.
This is a quick and dirty method of creating a background, and there are numerous webcomics artists who employ this technique in order to save time. Depending on your art style, this can really add a different element to your drawn work.
Go to Google Images, type in the background subject you want, and select an image. If you are planning on selling your artwork later, you’ll have to contact the photographer for the right to use their image in your work – so be smart about using this kind of imagery. At the very least, you should contact the photographer and let them know you’ve used their photo as a basis for your background.
Drop your image on to your workspace. Determine a horizon line and adjust your image accordingly.
Seeing as the background isn’t large enough to cover your image area, you’ll have to do some cloning and stamping in order to fake in the details and fill out the white space. Don’t worry, we don’t need to be very precise – we’re not after fine detail, just a rough approximation – you’ll see why in a moment.
Adjust your Levels (Image > Adjustments > Levels) to increase the contrast in your image. This will help for the later steps.
Next, adjust your Hue/Saturation (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation) and increase the saturation of your color. You can also adjust the Hue if you want to alter the color slightly – or warp it way out of whack for an interesting effect.
Now comes the stylish effect – since the background is supposed to be distant, we’ll apply a Gaussian Blur to the image. We want to blur the details so they’re hazy, but not so much that all the colours blend into one mess.
Go into your Filters and select the Paint Daubs effect. This will flatten and spread your blurred image at random intervals, as if it was created using splots of paint.
Your background should look something like this - a painterly, blurry, hazy backdrop. This blurriness will draw more emphasis to the sharper images you drew earlier, but add more depth to your composition – its better than having your Karate boys floating in mid air.
Drop your BG layer under your drawn images, and you should see your inked drawing on top.
Now, we’re ready to begin adding the flats to our characters.
Flats and Colors
Just like previous tutorials, the flats layer is used for a couple of purposes – to separate your colored areas, and to add your first base coat of color. Once the flats are done, it is much easier to select specific areas of colour to apply light and shadow afterwards.
Create a new layer for your flats.
With your cutout layer activated (so you can see where you’re adding flats) begin to lay your areas of color on your characters. I generally start with skin tones then move into clothing. If you don’t want to color outside of the lines, select the outline of your character cutout layer. You wont be able to color outside of that selection.
Paint in your flats for your clothing. Start with a solid base coat, then layer other colors after.
I chose darker greys for the trim and the pants.
Keep adding in your colors. You’ll see your drawings quickly take shape.
Some darker grey for the trims…
Since my whitey Karate master has a big mop of hair, I decided to make him a blondie to round out the look. I chose a canary yellow to make it as blatantly obvious as possible.
That’s loud. Our retro Karate kid is coming alive now.
It’s time to color in our adversary. I made his skin tone a bit lighter and with less red to denote his ethnicity. I also gave him darker robes to make him appear further behind our blond kicker in the front.
Add some detail color to the trim of the robe – in this case a gold colour works well.
Our first pass of flats is complete. Now we’ll add some shading for depth.
Shadows in Layers
Basic coloring includes flatting, shading and lighting. You can go even further with multiple levels of shading, blending, light effects, etc. The most classic form of creating depth is cel shading, which uses sharp edged areas to denote areas of shadow and light. It’s also the easiest form to pull off quickly and still look great. This style has been in use in comics for decades.
Create a new layer, and label it ‘Shading.’
Select a grey tone that is in the medium range.
Alter the layer blending style to Color Burn, and turn down the opacity to 40%. Wherever this grey tone is painted, the existing color in the layer underneath will be ‘burned‘ at 40% of the tone of the color you’re placing.
Start painting in your areas of shadow. You’ll notice the effect greatly on some dark/neutral surfaces more than lighter ones. We’ll add another layer to bring those out after.
By adding this Burn layer, you are building up your shadows in transparent layers.
Continue this all throughout your drawing in your shadow areas. Don’t be afraid to add more shading beyond the areas where your inked shadow resides. It will add even more depth to your form.
You’ve completed the first pass of the shading process. Let’s add an additional layer!
Create a new layer above your existing Shading layer, and label it Shading (multiply). Adjust the layer settings to Multiply, and lower the opacity to 70%.
Using the same grey tone, begin to shade in areas closer to your inked shading. This will increase the color darkness below. On lighter areas, you’ll notice the burn layer will appear more distinctly in the areas you’ve colored in.
Repeat the same technique on your other character. You’ve created two levels of shadow depth. Feel free to add more as you see fit. Be sure to play around with the Layer blending for different effects.
Adding lights
Create a new layer called Highlights.
As we did in previous tutorials, this simplified method of highlights works well in a jiffy. Using white and a decent sized brush, paint in areas which would reflect light, and/or be the highest point on the form (ie clothing folds at the peak). These highlights will add more depth to the shadows you’ve created.
Do the same on both characters. Add in your whites in areas of light.
Apply a Gaussian Blur – just enough to fuzz and spread the white areas so they appear soft and diffused.
It should look something like this.
Make your Highlights layer a Color Dodge layer, and reduce the opacity to 60%.
Using your smudge tool, extend the diffused light slightly and spread it out. We’re building a base lighting layer.
Create a secondary Highlights layer.
Create a new set of thinner highlights over top of your existing highlight areas.
Apply a Gaussian Blur to these highlights, at approximately half of the value you used for the first set.
Adjust the opacity of the layer to 40%. That’s it for the lighting. You can go back and make more adjustments if you find there aren’t enough highlights.
Finer Details
We’re in the home stretch. A few additional items, and our image will be complete. We will now color in a few details like eyes, teeth and sweat.
Create a new layer and call it details. Make sure it rests above your Flats layer.
Fill in the remaining details you have left. Our eyes and teeth need to be whitened.
The sweat flying off the face of our victim needs to be colored in as well. We could also make this blood for a more violent scene, but we’ll stick with sweat this time around.
The finished color. Lookin’ good so far. All we have left is to add some narrative text and we’re done.
Adding in the Narrative Text
Narrative appears in most comic books. Instead of speech or thought bubbles, this exercise will make use of narrative boxes. Here’s a quick way of creating them in Photoshop.
Select your Rectangle Shape Tool. Make sure the tool is set to create a Shape Layer and not a path.
Draw your narrative block on the screen. The Shape will automatically create it’s own layer, complete with its own fill color.
Most narrative blocks are yellow, but you can change it to whatever color you wish. Just click on the colored square on the Shape Layer and you will receive the Color Picker dialog Box. Pick a color that will make your text appear legible. If it’s a dark color, use white text. If it’s a light color, use dark text.
There we are. Now we can add some text and a border.
In the Layer style dialog box for the Shape Layer, choose Stroke, then pick your stroke color. Set the stroke size to something that will enclose your shape nicely. Not too thick, but not too thin, either.
You should get something similar to this. Now let’s add some text.
Depending on the instructions given in your script, this is where you would layout your text. In this case, there are going to be two small pieces of narrative, so we have to position them accordingly, so they work with the overall composition of the panel. As we type in the text, you’ll notice the shape layer is too small for the text. have no fear – since the Shape Layer is technically a vector, we can easily scale the size of it without any degradation in quality.
Use the Free Transform tool to simply adjust the box to fit the text, and that’s it. Very easy!
We’ll duplicate our text and shape layer, and modify them with the proper text and re-sized narrative block.
Position the new narrative block in a position that draws the readers attention towards it. Since the two characters are fighting, placing the second block down below ‘blondie’s’ foot to complete the narrative thought.
You’ll see how the viewer reads the first narrative block on the left, follows the kick through the panel down to the second block of narrative text. Always remember to lead your viewer’s eyes to where you want them to focus their attention. Otherwise, they’ll go off on their own and yank themselves rght out of your story. We don’t want them to disconnect!
Add a black border around your panel, and you’re done. Here’s the finished piece.
You could add more to the scene like sound effects and motion lines and blur effects too! Experiment and see if you can mimic some of the cool effects done by comics artists!
And that concludes the action pose tutorial. Piece of cake, right? Of course.
With more practice you’ll be cranking out digital comics in no time. These tutorials will help sharpen your skills if you’re a novice, or help remind veterans of some key fundamentals they may have forgotten along the way. The purpose is to make this super-easy and efficient so you can get the most out of your comics production. Check idrawdigital for more tutorials and tips to help you become more creative and more efficient at drawing digital comics.
See you next week!
February 9th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
[...] the Action Pose Tutorial, I showed you all how to take a sample image from Google Images (provided you have consent!) and [...]