Scanning comic book art

by on March 31, 2017 at 17:00
Posted In: Tips

It seems a lot of beginners struggle with scanning. You’ve spent days working on the perfect page, but when you scan it your beautiful lines the result is not at all what you’d expect. While I barely do this anymore since I switch to a digital workflow, I’ve scanned my share of art. So, how exactly can you scan comic book art, whilst retaining the maximum amount of details.

1.Use quality cardboard

I suggest using Strathmore Bristol 300 Series. It’s a very robust board. Flimsy material will most likely get damaged or folded when erasing or manipulating the page.

2. Try and keep your pencils light

When doing pencils, try to use lighter graphite pens such as 4H or 2H. Also don’t press too hard, this will create indents in your board and make inking more difficult. Alternatively, you may like using blue pencils better.

3. Erase outstanding graphite

If you already used HB or darker instead of 2H or lighter, you will need to erase a bit to give a chance to your ink. You might even want to erase lightly before inking. Now, if your page is too messy it might be worth starting over. Don’t be afraid of redoing the pencilling of the page, it will be much faster and cleaner the second time around. And your inks will be cleaner too. A word of caution: Inks can be erased a bit. If you go to hard on the eraser, you’ll make little holes on your lines. Not very pretty, although if you only have a little bit, it can be fixed easily in photoshop.

4. Scan in high resolution

I recommend 1600dpi. It will make the next steps much easier. Don’t worry about file size, we will lower the resolution later. Scan in grayscale. Most scanner don’t do a really good job and will merge the graphite with your ink. If your using blue pencil, scan in color, obviously.

5. In  photoshop

Use the levels (cmd+m) to remove all gray left over. Basically you’ll see spikes around the middle the graph, only keep those. After that, use the Filter>noise>Dust and scratches. A little bit goes a long way, just experiment until you are satisfied with your line quality. Median filter works in a similar way I think. This should remove any leftover little scratches. Now with select>color range, choose black. And fill (alt+enter) on a new layer. Delete the old one. You can reduce your resolution at this point. I like to keep it at 600, but 300 should be good enough. Your lines will now be on a transparent layer and you can color under them or even color the lines themselves! Remember to lock the transparency of the layer so that you don’t color on it by mistake.

If you used a blue pencil, you can simply remove the blue channel. MAGIC!

If your drawing is too low resolution, you can color on top of the ink by using a layer in multiply mode.

 

Was this helpful? Any Questions? Let me know in the comments.

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On dynamic composition

by on March 24, 2017 at 09:34
Posted In: Tips

I really, really love drawing. So sometimes, when I work on a panel, I get overexcited and lose some of my judgment. Here’s a few dynamic composition tips I thought would be useful to keep in mind.

  1. I jumped straight into the drawing without really thinking about the composition.
  2. I was zoomed in super close to the monster and started adding details without seeing the picture as a whole. Chris Oatley wrote a great article about the “Texture Monster“. I highly recommend it. Sometimes, details can clog a picture and damages it’s ability to tell the story.
  3. Whatever you do, never be boring. This is something I heard  many times. But what sticks in my mind are the examples in “How to draw the Marvel Way“, where there are great examples of static vs Dynamic panels. You don’t have to be the greatest artist, but never settle for a boring composition. Of course the book is old so don’t take it to litterally but it does contain some good tips.
  4. On a sidenote, you might want to convey boredom. If for example your character is in a boring situation, a boring composition might just help to push that feeling. If your whole book is like that though, it won’t be very attractive to reader at a glance. Remember that when book browsing, people might only look at your book for a few seconds. If it looks boring, they will look elsewhere. I would much rather read a book full of anatomy mistake but with great energy and attitude than perfect anatomy but boring poses and composition. The early books of Naruto where full of mistakes but conveyed great energy.
  5. Try to avoid an obvious point of view. Young artists will often do the standard mug shot/passport photo composition over and over again. Do you always show your swords in profile? I know that’s one of my bad habits. Perspective can really jazz things up.

Here’s the panel that prompted this train of thought.

Example of what not to do for a dynamic composition

That’s about what I can think for the moment.

Questions? Comments? What are you mindful to avoid when drawing?

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Quick n’ easy guide to comics

by on March 24, 2017 at 08:00
Posted In: minicomics, Tips

I was recently asked to give a small workshop to elementary school kids. I prepared a little quick and easy guide to comics booklet that I gave away. Nice activity to do with kids on the weekend 🙂 Print yourself a copy and try it out too!

Quick and easy guide to comics booklet.

Detailed folding instructions

Transcript of the image:

Quick n’ easy guide to comics

or
How to cover way to fast a specially complicated topic.

1. What the who?

My name is Emmanuel Filteau aka “Ink Orporate”. I started to publish my strips in my high school newspaper and continued to do so for the duration of my school years. I self-published my first book in 1997 and I also maintained a webcomic, the H.O.T. Team for many years.

Recently I published a story in Zidara9 and I started a new weekly webcomic, Tales from the Interface (bit.ly/readtfti).

Why do I do this?

Because of the liberty that comics give an author. You can, with very little money, create a complete universe. As long as you put in the efforts and the hours.

2. Characters

  • Always try to make your characters dynamic. Symetry is your enemy.
  • Draw your family and friends in weird poses. (See how silly they can be…)
  • Avoid stereotypes. When creating characters, try and stay away from typical heroes.
  • Vary body shapes. Don’t draw all your characters like body builders or Barbies.
  • A perfect character who is all-powerfull and has nothing to lose is pretty boring. It would be more interesting to learn how he became so. That’s called a character arc.

3. Story structure

  • A typical story has a beginning a middle and an ending. Try to make something unexpected happen at the end.
  • For a longer story, character arcs become important. Ex : Peter Parker was a weak boy until the day he got bit by a radioactive spider! He then became Spiderman!
  • Always have a notebook handy. You never know when you might get inspired.

4. Supplies / My choices

5. Distribution

Make your own story! You can print out this book as a template and draw on the opposite side. Try different papers and paper sizes. You can make photocopies and give or sell them to your family and friends. Also feel free to make and give away copies of this guide!

6. The great secrets

  1. Have fun.
  2. Don’t give up.
  3. It shouldn’t be easy. If it is, try to challenge yourself more or you will stop learning.
  4. Draw every day, even if it’s only 15 minutes.
  5. Draw objects around you, in real life, not just Google images.
  6. Don’t worry too much about people’s opinions of your work.
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From my upcoming story, Trinket

Thoughts on making comics without words

by on March 17, 2017 at 17:00
Posted In: Tips

Silent or wordless comics is a subject that often comes up but cannot be answered easily. Ironic that figuring out how to stay silent would be the subject of so many conversations. I’ve always felt that words can quickly become a excuse. A panel should speak for itself and understandable without words. This is one of the reason why my newest stories are almost wordless. But of course, some concept are much harder to explain without words. Impossible maybe even, I don’t know. But I always thrive to reduce the amount of text when possible. Here’s a few thoughts on making comics without words:

On movement

As far as how to learn to represent movement clearly, a few things can be done.

  1. Watch silent movies and try to capture how they move without stopping the movie. They often have clever ways of “saying” things without words.
  2. It is much harder to represent kinetic energy when drawing realistically. This is one of those moments where it’s better to bend the rules otherwise your characters will look stiff. Cartoonists like John K (Ren & Stimpy) are masters of those distortions but i feel it’s a little easier when you have a cartoonish style. He has an amazing blog where he shares some of his tricks.
  3. Understand the concept of line of action by drawing people moving. Stick figures are enough for this exercise. The more you do the more comfortable you’ll be.

Establishing mood

If for example your goal is to create a horror story, then you should ask yourself what makes your skin crawl? Why? Explore this. Giger’s amazing paintings are a reflection of his nightmares. Another good thing to do is studies of classic horror movies with exceptional lighting. Newer horror movies typically don’t really do anything to me. It follows had interesting lightning. The Exorcist had some great scenes as well. Lighting is paramount in establishing mood.

Another thought for you. Sometimes it’s more scary not to see a scene. Think of the famous shower scene in Psycho. You don’t see the murder happen at all, but it’s much more powerful this way. Leveraging the imagination of your readers is key here.

 

Obviously much more could be said about silence 😉 Books have been written about it I’m sure. But I hope this small post will be useful to you.

Note: Featured picture is from my upcoming story Trinket. Learn more here.

Do you agree? Disagree? I’d love hear your comments and see what you come up with!

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Graphic tablets suggestions

by on February 22, 2017 at 01:27
Posted In: Reviews by Manu
I’ll try and keep this post updated from time to time. I started working seriously with graphic tablets about 10 years ago. I’ve owned tree of them since then. Around 2010, I made one of my dreams come true and bought a Cintiq 22HD. People frequently ask me if it’s worth the price. I love my tablet and for me, it’s a no-brainer. But here are a couple of cheaper, more reasonable options:

The new 13HD

  • Cintiq 13HD This a the new model just came out, haven’t had a chance to try it out… The old one was already very good. They improved resolution, color fidelity and apparently the distance between the pen and the actual “drawing” as been reduced. This is a small annoyance for me on my tablet, the tip of the pen does not touch exactly where you draw because of that distance.
  • Here are some details on the new tablet
  • I strongly recommend getting a glove to avoid smudging your whole screen.

Screenless tablet

Wacom recently reorganized its products, it’s a little confusing honestly. Intuos used to be pro models, but now they have an Intuos Pro. Bamboo used to be the consumer product but now it has become a paper “smarpad”  and the drawings get sent to your device… Haven’t tried it so I won’t comment.

  • Wacom Intuos Pro Paper Edition, Medium, Black (PTH660P) A much more reasonable option, but still used by many professionals. Medium is a good size. It’s a very good product but does require some adaptation. It’s certainly not as intuitive as a screen tablet. For me it was good for painting but I could not make use of it for inking.

  • Wacom Intuos Draw CTL490DW: For beginner, I suggest something like this. My first tablet was not even as good as that. Perhaps consider buying used. These are very durable products.

New tendency

So apparently these days every must be integrated together. Wacom came out with its Wacom Mobile Studio and so they are now competing with Apple and Microsoft for the screen tablet market.
Apple came out with its iPad Pro, tried it for a bit and the pen seemed to respond extremely well. I was not satisfied with the standard iPad for serious drawing.
Some famous people praise the surface pro for its quality/price.
Microsoft Surface Studio: Microsoft decided to get in the game with a very serious contender. People who tried it gave it much praise. These new products are certainly attractive but if you consider the cost of upgrading (you can’t just buy the computer and it’s not upgradable)
Info about the surface Pro:
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