A number of guests have e-mailed me about posting tutorials on drawing vehicles. Since there are a million of them available on the Internet, I’ve gone and selected a choice few that illustrate the proper techniques needed to render your cars, trucks and specialty vehicles for use in your own comics. By following the steps within the tutorials, you’ll be adding some amazing looking vehicles alongside your characters. Click here to continue…

Hi folks! Tutorial Tuesday is going to be a basic one – I’m a bit under the weather currently so this may not be the best post, but I want to give you something that I feel is important in the world of drawing – some pointers on foreshortening. Check this out. Click here to continue…

Going back through the archives, you’ve seen and read about ways to develop your own comics. In this post, I will be showing a group of videos on how other artists create their print and webcomics. Some have commentaries, others are tutorials. Many of the techniques I have mentioned in earlier posts apply, with the artists personal workflow methods injected into the core process.

Here are a few examples:

This first video is done by EXTRA LIFE webcomic creator Scott Johnson. He talks about how he developed this particular webcomic strip about the joys of late Christmas shopping. Scott offers a number of time-saving tips while he discusses certain aspects of his process during this time-lapse video.

In this three-part video series, Brett Lamb from LessonBucket decribes the process used in creating a Frank Miller “Sin City” noir-styled comic book. The process is very easy and effective for creating a comic book, using mainly photo reference and Photoshop techniques. There is no actual drawing involved, but this style works if you are looking to create something hand drawn and are wondering about the effects of light and shadows.

This quick tutorial by master illustrator Jay French shows you how to plan out a panel layout and sketch simple blocked in characters prior to creating a full blown comic.

The tutorial by Xia Taptara of idrawgirls is an advanced tutorial which requires a bit of drawing skill. This is more of a commentary while drawing rather than a step-by-step tutorial. Xia shows you some techniques using construction lines and poses.

From the DVD based on the best selling book “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way” Stan Lee and artist Jim Lee explain how to draw individual parts for characters in comics – foreshortening, perspective, musculature and process are all explained.

I hope you learn something new from this series of videos. I’ll be back with some written tutorials later on in the week to add to your knowledge base. Until then, check out some of these other tutorials from the archive.

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!

Hey folks!

Today we’re going to jump into a lesson on lettering in comics. Often seen as an afterthought by many rookie artists, the lettering component of comics can be the deal breaker that makes your comic look professional and well crafted, or poorly planned. If you are just learning how to draw comics, the very first step you should take is to carefully plan out where your dialogue and sound effects will be placed on the panel in relation to your artwork. Essentially, the speech bubbles and sound effects are artwork in their own right and should work alongside the figures and backgrounds to create a complete composition. Here’s a brief tutorial on proper lettering techniques, and how to use them to your advantage.

Expression and Tone

Lettering is more than placing word bubbles on a page and attempting to avoid characters heads or important focal points in the artwork. Lettering serves as an additional method of advancing the story, through direct eye movement and through narrative/dialogue. As you draw comics, there may be a message you are trying to convey within a panel – the formatting of the lettering can play an important part in expression. For example -

The example on the left is fine – the exclamation is there, and the tone appears serious. If you were to use the example on the right, it has tremendous impact – it is perceived to be a loud yell, a bold statement, an exclamation and an order coming from someone who is clearly showing force and authority. Now, if THAT is the message you’re trying to get across, the example on the right is how you should render your lettering. If the statement is subdued and serious in tone, the rendering on the left can be used to express a different type of emotion in speech.

Placement and Direction

Another important item in effective lettering is placement. Since speech and narrative balloons take up space on your panels, they should also lead your reader through your panels alongside the direction of your artwork. Visually leading a reader through the panels is vital in maintaining a comfortable storytelling pace. If the flow is broken up and the reader has to figure out which panel they should go to next, you have disrupted their concentration and pulled them away from the experience. The key is to keep the reader immersed in the story. The composition, the pencils, inks and colors can only do so much in leading the eye – if the viewer has to read dialogue, it MUST be placed in a logical area to limit confusion and distraction.

Here’s an example featuring Marvel’s ‘Deadpool‘ – take note of the direction of your eye…

If you managed to read the dialogue, your eye should have traveled in this path (more or less) -

Did you notice how the speech bubbles and thoughts propelled you in the right direction, in conjunction with the rendered artwork? If the lettering was merely ‘slapped on’ you could potentially be led off of the page, or lost in details that are unimportant to the story. In this example, the story is advanced through the actual dialogue and through the placement of the lettering. Also, note the various tones in Deadpool’s speech – he goes from being calm, to surprised, to angry, and then to evil – if the lettering was rendered in the same fashion throughout the page, the emotions would not be as clear.

Font Selection and Examples

The last lettering tip I’m going to share today deals with font selection. Back in the day, lettering was all done by hand, so the majority of the rendered words in comics were unique from issue to issue. A person used to letter a comic title was often used for an extended run, in order to keep the look consistent. With the advent of computers and technology, hand rendered lettering is slowly becoming obsolete. Custom lettering is still widely used, but the hand drawn letters are now scanned and converted into fonts that can be used over and over again. By applying the right font style, weight and color, you can add more impact and meaning to the spoken dialogue, thought or narrative. Here are some examples of hand rendered lettering from comics of years past:

Note the artistic nature of the lettering – it doesn’t have to be plain words on a page. By giving them life and dynamic action, you can heighten the intensity of the mood of your comic page. Remember, the lettering is also part of your artwork – so make sure it interacts well with the drawn images on your page! Determine where you’ll need emphasis in your lettering, and decide what style of font will express the emotion effectively.

Comic Book Font Downloads

If you run a search online for comic book lettering and fonts, there is a wide array of free examples to download and use as you learn how to draw comics.  One of the best resources for comic book lettering comes from BlamBot. Check out these font examples from the site:

In addition to fonts, BlamBot also features an array of speech bubble styles and sound-effects in a vector format for scalability.

There’s the lesson for the day – there will be a future lesson on more advanced lettering techniques in the next little while. For now, these basic tips should push you forward in your quest to learn how to draw comics effectively. Don’t just slap your words on the page – integrate them into your artwork, and make them an important component in your composition. See you next time!

If you trace back the history of inking in comics, its sole purpose was to enhance the initial drawn lines by the penciller so they would reproduce properly when printed. Now, inking is an art form in itself – much more than simply tracing a penciller’s work. Inkers are required to take drawn panels and make them come to life with the use of dynamic lighting, depth with linework and shading, and add texture which may be lacking in the pencils. This important facet of comics is often overlooked and taken for granted.

The best inkers have the ability to determine how to make the important elements on the page ‘pop‘ and improve the linework. Inkers determine light sources, create convincing contrasts with shadow and light, and help separate visual planes to create a sense of depth. Without this step, comics may appear flat and lifeless – the right combination of ink can change the atmosphere of the story. Here are some examples of inked panels:

With the dark contrast areas in this Batman-Spiderman pinup, you can see the musculature and definition of both heroes, the folds and dynamic shape Batman’s cape takes on, and the rugged texture of the rooftops. The silhouettes of the city skyline also add to the dramatic nature of this panel. You wouldn’t achieve the same effect with pencils alone – therefore, inking serves as a key tool in developing scenes and defining shapes in your artwork. Even though they have been clearly laid out within the pencils, the ink gives the image a deeper, moodier appearance.

In order to be a successful inker, you must have a good working relationship with your penciller – as you are drawing overtop of their work and their vision. Make sure you’re on the same page (pardon the pun) when you’re working on a project together. There have been many documented occasions where a penciller will refuse to work with an inker over ruined work.

Secondly, make sure you know how to draw comics just as well as your penciller – if not, better. Understanding the physics and properties of light and shadow, anatomy and mastering the techniques of brush + ink, marker rendering, or pen work is abslutely vital in becoming a successful inker. You may also be called upon to fill in for a penciller who is behind on his work – where you are filling in details, adding texture and in some cases drawing complete panels from roughed in sketches. Trying to maintain a consistent style with your penciller is extremely important.

Here’s a few techniques to improve your inking when you’re learning how to draw comics:

1) Variable Line Width
This is the method of establishing form and creating some depth in your work.

Objects in the foreground should have thicker, darker outlines than ones in the distance. Your natural inclination is to look at the boldest, darkest item on the panel – so if your most important element is in the foreground, make sure it is outlined and detailed better than something behind it. A thicker line creates the perception of heavier weight and fuller form, whereas a thinner line recedes into the background.

2) Determine Light Source
Take a few seconds and create a point of reference for your light source.

It could be a simple symbol or a dot on your page (in the margin) to indicate where your light will be coming from. This will help you figure out which portions of your inked work will be cast in shadow. Remember to be consistent with your shadow placement in your panel, and from panel to panel as well.

3) Adding Washes and Hatching

A wash is a thin, diluted application of ink which creates a grey tone in the background. By building layers of wash, you can create different levels of contrasting greys, which do not detract from the solid black linework put into place.

Some artists use cross hatching as a method of creating shadows. A loose hatch appears more like a grey tone when viewed from afar, and also adds texture to your drawn elements. The downside of cross hatching is a rougher appearance – this may not be suitable for some artwork (superhero comics especially – which rely on clean, solid form). As you learn to draw comics, you’ll develop a signature style over time. Make sure your style works for your penciler.

4) Scratches, Dabs, and Erasing
To create some textural effects in your inked work, you can use an ex-acto knife or a dried out pen nib to scratch away and some of your solid pools of black to create some interesting scratchy textures, stone, masonry or woodgrains.

Using a molded putty style eraser creates soft, leathery textures by picking up dabs of ink and leaving behind some grey spatters. If you apply the eraser and different points by dabbing, you will create a blotchy, blobby texture that is an interesting effect for backgrounds or softer elements in your work. The dab technique also works with washes as well – use a brush with some watered down ink, and try blotting on the panel at different stages of wetness/dryness. You will create some cool looking patterns.

Once you’ve rendered your panels in pencil, try out some of these inking techniques (most of these can all be applied to digital work as well). Experiment and develop an inking style that suits your pencil work. Will it be slick and clean like the major houses (Marvel, DC, Image) or feature loose, scratchy effects with more grit, found in indie comics? If you’re working with a partner, make sure your styles complement one another, but don’t be afraid to offer your input – inking is not just tracing! For more tips, check out this previous post on simple digital inking techniques.

This concludes our latest installment on how to draw comics – stay tuned for more tips from idrawdigital.

It’s great to see the results of hours worth of painting/drawing work – the final rendered piece often draws a lot of praise and in a lot of cases, serves as inspiration for other artists to go off and do something similar. But what is equally as interesting as the finished piece is the method and workflow artists use to achieve these results.

I know we all don’t have the luxury of sitting for hours at a time while the artists makes their forms come to life – but with the help of time-lapse video, you can get the feeling of the artists method in a shorter period of time. With these video clips, you can see a blank canvas appear magically when these time-lapsed hours turn into minutes.

Absolutely incredible work – I hope some of these inspired you. I know I’m tempted to try some of this myself – I’ve always thought about it, but after seeing all this great work, I know I should do a few of these while I work on my comic book!

I’ve had a number of people inquire about the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator. Many people find the tool difficult to use at first glance, but trust me – once you get the hang of it, it can be one of the most versatile ways of creating realistic looking forms. Here are a few tutorials that explain how to use this tool.

Creating Drapery Folds

Magical Butterfly presents a tutorial on how to create drapery folds using Illustrator.

Gradient Mesh Portrait Tutorial

Check out this amazing potrait created with gradient mesh from Creative Bush.

Basic Gradient Mesh Tutorial

Kevin Hulsey gives an in-depth explanation of the facets of Gradient Mesh and how to apply them effectively in this basic tutorial.

Using the Gradient Mesh Tool in Illustrator

In this video tutorial, Bert Montroy from PixelPerfect shows you 2 different methods of applying the gradient mesh to your illustrations.

Going Bananas for the Gradient Mesh Tool

Sarah Froelich from Designorati goes bananas in this D-I-Y tutorial, and so will you!

Create Realistic Illustrations using the Gradient Mesh Tool

Veerle Pieters offers a PDF download tutorial on creating realistic illustrations with the gradient mesh tool. Don’t be fooled by the date – just because its from 2004 doesn’t mean its out of date! Veerle has been doing this successfully for a long time!

Crayons – A Study in Gradient Mesh

Leo Blanchette, a freelance illustrator and a regular contributor to istockphoto, has posted this in-depth tutorial on creating realistic looking crayons from a photo reference.

Basic Bag Tutorial

Create a cloth bag illustration in a few easy steps!

Create Scalable Clouds

Cheryl Graham offers this tutorial at AdobePress on scalable vector based Gradient Mesh clouds.

The World’s Most Photorealistic Vector Art

This link isn’t a tutorial; it’s more inspiration – check out the amazing work from some of the pros in the industry using advanced gradient mesh!

I hope this answers some of the burning questions you may have on how to apply gradient mesh effectively!