Drawing Digital Comics – How to Draw Wolverine Tutorial Part 2
With a few loose ends to tie up, idrawdigital presents the second part of the How to Draw Wolverine tutorial. Today, we’re going to apply background and color techniques to bring our crazy Canuck to life. When we last left off, we had an inked drawing of our man Logan that looked like this:
Let’s get started on coloring this bad boy!
Setting up our Cutout
First, use the crop tool to eliminate any unnecessary white space. Make a selection around Wolverine, and commit to the crop.
Now that we’ve cropped down our figure, we can begin to create our cutout for Wolverine.
Select the white space outside of the inked character, using the Magic Wand.
Invert your selection – Select > Inverse
Then modify that selection by Contracting it – Select > Modify > Contract
Contract your selection by 2 pixels to keep it within the bounds of the solid black outline.
Create a new layer for your Cutout. Place it under your Ink layer.
Fill the selection you made on the Cutout layer. I like to use a bright color like red, so when I am doing my flats, it is easier to see what has not been filled in.
Your cutout layer is complete. Now, we’ll add a background and add some effects to it in order to make the image appear more like a comic book panel.
Another Easy Background Method
In the Action Pose Tutorial, I showed you all how to take a sample image from Google Images (provided you have consent!) and modify it to make a quick background for your comic book character images. For this Wolverine tutorial, I happened to have an image of the Canadian wilderness, and I will modify this for the purpose of this lesson. You can use this effect to your advantage if you have many interesting photos of textures and landscapes that you may have taken yourself.
Again, if you are using an image found on the internet, chances are, its not public domain. Do some research and find out who the photographer is, or look into a free stock image catalogue to use an image for your background. Especially if you are creating comics and planning on selling them later! You won’t easily get away with stealing other people’s work and profiting from it. There’s your warning!
You’ll have to stretch and modify the image in order to fit the drawing. Using the Free Transform tool, distort, stretch and adjust your image so that it appears somewhat believable as a background reference.
Using your clone tool, extend your background by cloning in parts of the original photo to fill in gaps, eliminate unwanted parts of the photo, and extend your image so it fills the canvas.
Once your background image has been developed enough to cover its intended area, its time to make some color modifications to it, in order to get the best result from the effects panel.
Adjust your contrast through the Levels function (Image > Adjustments > Levels).
Next, adjust your Hue/Saturation levels (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation)
Your image should appear much more vibrant now. Let’s apply some painterly effects to make this image appear more like a comic book drawing, and less like a photograph.
Apply a slight Gaussian Blur to eliminate any harsh edges.
Next, Select the Paint Daubs effect from the Filter menu (under Artistic). Adjust your settings to a desired range.
Immediately after the Paint Daubs effect, apply the Watercolor effect to create a contrasty effect to the shadows you’ve smeared with the previous two filters. This will make the shadows appear as if they’ve been inked in a grungy style.
Now we have a background that looks pretty cool, and isn’t extremely detailed or distracting.
Coloring your Figure
Create a new layer for your flats – call it Flats or Color, or whatever you wish. Make sure it sits below your ink layer.
Select a skin tone for your character, and begin the flatting process. Color in your areas.
This should take you back to pre-school. Except now, you have better coordination and can stay in the lines (I hope!)
Once your skin areas have been colored in, you can start on your costume.
Instead of a bright yellow, I chose a deeper yellow, similar to the one used in the Brown/Yellow combination. Since this costume is purely custom, I could have made it any color I wanted, but I’m going to stick with the familiar yellow & blue combination, but with a twist.
The side areas of the costume are full blue, instead of the typical striping, or the claw pattern on the flanks you usually see. Artistic license allows you to make mods sometimes. Seeing as the X-Men artists change costumes every so often, I decided I’d do the same.
It’s definitely different, but you can still tell its Wolverine.
Since I modified the epaulets on his costume, I decided I would make them look like metal, and colored them differently.
I used the same silver/blue in the highlights of Logan’s hair. He is pretty old, after all.
I used the steel blue-gray on the belt, and the adamantium claws.
Here is the first pass on the colored flats. Now we’ll add a few more layers for shadows and highlights.
Adding Shadows to the Image
Create a new layer and label it Shadows.
Select a medium grey for your shadows.
Set your layer to Color Burn, with an opacity of 30%.
As you begin to paint areas where there is color underneath, you will see the color ‘burn‘ and make the tone deeper. Create your first pass of shadows with wide areas. Don’t worry about being detailed and fine with your painting, we’re going to soften these edges with a different technique.
Select your Smudge tool and gently rub out the hard edges your burn painting made. This softening of the shadow creates an interesting coloring technique.
Continue this technique across all the shaded areas of your drawing.
The face appears a bit softer using this technique, rather than the typical cel-shaded work we’ve used in other tutorials.
Continue ‘burning‘ your colors to create shadows.
Here is the Wolverine color job with the first shaded pass…
… and here he is with the shadow softening technique applied. Lets enhance the forms by adding another level of shadow!
Create a new layer, but this time, make it a Multiply layer. Set the opacity a bit lower as well. We don’t want these shadows too dark.
This layer of paint will appear more greyish, and closer to an actual shadow. Don’t overdo the application on this layer. Simply stick close to the inked areas and don’t go beyond the first layer of shading you burned in. This extra darkened area will look like it has more depth.
Paint in your Multiplied shadow layer in areas where you’d like to increase depth in your figure.
Once you’ve completed that, apply a slight Gaussian blur, so the edges of your shadows aren’t as sharp, and blend nicely into the soft burn layer below. The shadows are done. Let’s move on to the Highlights and the home stretch.
Building your Highlights
Create a new layer and label it Highlight. Set this layer to Color Dodge and reduce the opacity to 30-40% This effect does the opposite of Color Burn, where it lightens the existing color beneath it.
Paint in areas where light would appear or reflect from surfaces. Using your Smudge tool, gently rub out the hard edges of your highlights for a soft light effect.
Now create a new layer directly above your Highlight Dodge layer. Call this layer Highlight – Screen, and set the layer to Screen. Reduce the opacity slightly. You can always adjust it later if you want your additional highlights to be brighter or softer.
Using a thin brush, paint in highlights at spots that are highly reflective or at the highest point of the form (where light would hit first.) Generally these spots are very small. We don’t want to overdo this, since you will wash out your color if it is too bright and too big.
Apply a slight Gaussian Blur to your new highlights, until the edges blend into the highlight layer below. You should have some really nice looking highlights developed. This final touch should really bring out the forms in your drawing.
Here’s the finished piece. We’ve successfully drawn, inked and colored our own custom Wolverine pinup pic. Try these same techniques on your own characters, or try drawing some other famous characters.
In the next few weeks, we’ll start forming our own pages with sequential panels using some of the techniques I’ve talked about in previous posts. Stay tuned for the second part of the Spider-Man tutorial as well. See you next time!
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Tags: backgrounds, Color, Drawing, how-to, tutorial
