Did I ever mention I love process posts? I really enjoy reading other cartoonist’s posts explaining their working methods so I thought I’d post one about mine. Frankly, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about how I draw or how I work on my computer, but it’s still fun to see the process. I’ll make sure I explain everything as carefully as I can just in case there is something here that you’d like to know more about.
For each episode of Sneaky Dragon, I create a title card that somehow relates to what Ian and I talked about on the show. While I’m doing the editing, I have one ear out for a topic that will make a good title card. During Episode 25, Ian and I talked about Spiderman and which villains should be in the movie. We talked about Electro and the Lizard. I was really hoping to do an Electro cover (which also fit in with a running gag through the show about my electric shock fetish), but, let’s be honest, have you ever seen that Electro cover? It’s not very good – graphically-speaking. So, in the end, I decided to do the Lizard cover.
Some of the title cards I do – okay, most of the title cards I do – are pretty simple montages where I simply paste a drawing of Sneaky D into a photo. It’s quick and easy, and since I’m already spending two evenings on the recording and editing of the show, I don’t want to devote a whole day to the title card too. (Hey, I’m not getting paid for this gig, you know. I can’t make it a full time job.)
This time though, the idea of recreating a Ditko Spider-Man cover was irresistible.
The first step is finding a picture of the cover using my own resources or good ol’ Google images. Once I do that, I copy the picture and paste it in as a new image in Photoshop. Easy-peasy! For this picture, because I was going to be tracing and inking it, I enlarged it in Photoshop and then printed it on four sheets of paper, which I then taped together to make one image.
Before I started tracing the cover, I needed to turn the Lizard into the Dragon, so I made a quick outline of the Lizard for reference. Like so:
Then, laying another piece of tracing paper over that image, I quickly sketch out Sneaky D in place of the Lizard:
I’d never drawn his head from that angle before so you can see how much I worked at it. Being a fussy fellow, I have to re-trace this roughed out image to tighten it up a bit. So, once again, I lay a piece of tracing paper over that initial sketch and re-draw the Dragon, tightening up some of the elements and re-working things I’m not happy with:
Here’s the final rough of the dragon. (You can see that fell off my table and I stepped on it!) I was still working away on the head. Plus I added the little fins. (I left off the wings though because I thought they’d obscure too much of the drawing.)
And then a traced that image to the final traced artwork, which you can see here taped to the back of the bristol board (so it’s reversed):
You can see that I’ve cleverly changed the lettering of the Lizard to the Dragon. That’s how I roll!
Inking time! First up, I inked all the lettering with a Hunt 512 Bowl Pointed nib and a couple of Micron pens. Here’s a quick shot of the bristol board on the light table:
You can see the pencil lines really well through the bristol board with my eye-scorching light table. And below is the finished lettering and panel borders. (I planned to add the rest of the lettering later on the computer.)
Then out comes the brush to ink the characters. I love inking with a brush. (Although I recently splurged and bought a Windsor Newton Series 7 No. 2 and it’s taking me some time to get used to it.) But first, our cat Reesa came in through the open studio window. Hi, Reesa-beesa!
You can see my Peanuts Art Set in the shape of Snoopy’s doghouse, a picture of my wife eating a chip and the small ceramic squirrel named Mr, Nuts that Reesa knocked over. Okay, enough of that…
First, I inked the characters and the linework:
And then I finished the brushwork by filling in the blacks with a Series 7 No. 4:
Then it was back to the Hunt No. 512 nib to ink all the spider webs. (I’m glad I wasn’t doing a McFarlane cover.)
Once I’m finished the inking, it’s time to scan. Although I really like my old warhorse Epson multi-function printer, the scanner bed is a rather small 30.5 x 22 cm so I have to scan larger images in two to three passes.
You can see the bottom of the page sticking out like a giant tongue. (You can also see the unavoidable mess of wires on my desk.) I wish I’d taken a picture of my computer. It’s a weak ass Toshiba Satellite laptop that does a pretty good job except when I need to hurry near the end of a project and Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign are all open, and then the whole thing slows down to a crawl.
I usually scan an image in at 600 dpi as an 8-bit Grayscale image. For some reason, I scanned this one at 1200 dpi. (I don’t know why.)
My scanning and colouring process was cribbed from a process post by the cartoonist Dustin Harbin. I’ve looked at other methods, like this one from Tony Cliff, but it seems very convoluted and time-consuming, which is the last thing I need on a Saturday evening with the deadline looming. (One day I’ll try it though because he gets some really beautiful effects.)
Some of the things I do make no sense to me. Harbin recommends filtering the image with Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. I don’t know why or what it does, but I do it anyway assuming he knows what he’s talking about and just copied the settings he uses:
Now, because I ink straight onto the bristol board, I don’t have to worry about fixing stray pencil lines so the next thing I do is go to Image>Adjustment>Threshold. Threshold gets rid of all the grey wishy-washy information and leaves only black and white like an Ayn Randian Objectivist superhero:
It’s to your own taste, of course, but I usually bump up the level to 135. This is what the untreated scanned image looks like:
And after I’ve processed it and rotated it, it looks like this:
The blacks are actually black rather than dark gray and the whites are actually white instead of light gray. I had to scan this image in two parts so I do this to both halves before I stitch them together. It seems easier to “stitch” the two halves together when they are all cleaned up, rather than gray and usually different shades of gray at that.
I take a lot of care when I rotate the image to make sure it is level with a guide line. I do this with both parts since it will make it easier to blend the two images together. When you need to join two scans together, the first thing to do is to unlock the layer. To do this, double click the layer in the Layers palette. A new window will open. Clicking OK will unlock this layer. Next, enlarge the canvas so the other part will fit on the “page” (I usually start with the top image). You do this in Image>Canvas Size…
Click on the arrows so all the arrows are pointing down. This is the direction in which we want to increase the canvas size. Since the other half is approximately the same size as the first, we’ll just double the height, like so:
You can actually click the arrows and choose any direction you want to increase the canvas size or leave the arrows as they are and the image will increase to your chosen size equally in all directions. I just happened to need to do it this way today. Clicking OK means you get this:
You can see we now have room for the other half of the drawing. We move to that image now and use the Marquee tool to select the whole image.
Then we’ll copy (Control+C) and paste (Control+V) it into the expanded image like so:
Then I use the Move tool (V) to adjust the the two images together so they match seamlessly.
Actually, it’s pretty hard at that magnification so I need to get closer for the final fiddly bits. I use the arrow tools to nudge the one half back and forth and up and down, trying to get a perfect match. (Sometimes, like this time, despite my care to make sure everything was straight, I have to rotate the image a tiny bit to get it line up.)
Finally, I have this. Two halves that are blended together seamlessly and look like one drawing. At this point I do a happy dance and then flatten the the two layers into one by going to Layer>Flatten Image.
Time to save the darn thing before I lose it all. First, save your file as a bitmap. This is the final step to ridding yourself of any stray pixels in the art that are not black or white. Go to Image>Mode>Bitmap and then save the art as a TIFF file. I recommend that you save that file and keep it so you’ll always have the original inked art to work from if you need to.
The next step is colouring so now I have to reduce my image size to a more manageable 600 dpi because I scanned it at 1200 dpi like a dummy. Go to Image>Image Size…>Resolution and change the resolution to 600 dpi.
Before it’s possible to change the bitmap mode into a colour mode, it’s necessary to convert your bitmap art back into grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale) and then you can convert it to a CMYK image by clicking Image>Mode>CMYK. Now we’re ready to colour! (Finally!) Also, now is the time to Save As my art so I don’t eradicate my Linework file. I could save it as a TIFF, but I prefer to save it as a Photoshop (PSD) file so I can preserve the layers and other information that I might want to play around with in the future. (UPDATE: I have since learned that TIFF files also preserve the layer information and they are smaller than PSD files. I now save all my files as TIFFs, but it’s up to you.)
Once I’ve done that, I create two new layers that I name Art and Trap. You can create layers in the Layers menu (Layer>New>Layer…) or by clicking on the little square beside the trash can on the Layers palette. You can actually go crazy and create as many layers as you want with this technique, but my colouring is very simple so I only need the two layers.
The next thing to do is – unlike in the above image – keep the Background layer selected and select all the black in the image. To do this, click on Select>Colour Range… and then click the eyedropper icon on a sample of the black colour in the image. When you press OK, all the black in the image will be selected. (Make sure the Fuzziness is set at 200%.)
As you can see in the image below, all the black is selected. Turn off the Background layer by clicking the eye, then select the Art layer. All the black will disappear, but the original drawing will still be visible as uncoloured “marching ants”. Now I’ll fill the image with black. Double click on the black colour on the tool bar. This will open the Colour Picker. I use a rich black, which uses the percentages 60, 40, 40, 100 in the CMYK area of the Picker. Then I press Shift + F5 to fill in the contents of the selected area with colour. Now I have a layer of the linework with an empty background.
The next step is to click on the Trap layer, then go to Select>Modify>Contract. I usually contract this layer by two pixels. The Trap layer is where I’ll do all the colouring. If you’ve ever coloured in Photoshop without preparing the line art, you may have noticed that there is an annoying, thin white border between the black and the colour. By contracting the linework a tiny bit in the Trap layer and doing all the colouring there, when the Art layer is turned back on this white border will be covered by the Art layer. Clever, no?
After contracting the selection, I fill this layer. Usually I fill it with a dark purple so I always know it’s the Trap layer and don’t start accidentally working on the Art layer. (Don’t laugh, it’s happened!)
When that’s all done, it looks like this:
Then I start adding the colour. I mostly use the Magic Wand and Fill (Edit>Fill… or Shift + F5) with a little bit of paintbrush to fill gaps in my lazy-ass brushwork. (If you use the brush, you should expand your selected area after you use the Magic Wand so there is no white border between the brushed area and the area to be filled. You can do this by going to Select>Modify>Expand. Once again, I usually expand by two pixels, but three wouldn’t hurt.) Also, it doesn’t matter if you obliterate the linework on this layer. It will be hidden by the Art layer when it’s turned back on in the end.
If you look carefully at the above image (click to enlarge), you can see the white line between the colour and the purple linework. I created a third layer and coloured it gray. This was easier than trying to colour in between all the webbing. I mean, yikes! Do you see all that webbing? Here’s the gray layer turned on:
And finally, the Art layer with the nice, rich black linework:
Remember to turn on the black before you save the image as a JPEG or PNG. Finally, I added the remainder of the lettering in InDesign. (I’m not going to talk about InDesign today!)
Well, that’s that. I hope you enjoyed this maybe overly detailed look into how I make a title card and perhaps you picked up a few tips. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below. Especially if you have any good tips I can use!
Thanks for visiting Sneaky Dragon!