Drawing the comic

This is a short tutorial on how I make the comics. I'm not a Photoshop expert, and I'm still experimenting with different methods of drawing the comic. I learned this method from http://www.remindblog.com, which is both an awesome graphic novel and a great resource for information.

I start with a pencil sketch, drawing with the darkest pencil I have, and try to keep consistent smooth lines. After scanning at 600dpi, I save a copy and reduce the image to 300dpi, which is faster to work with.

Play with the levels in GIMP/Photoshop to get nice dark lines.


Save this image as 'lines300dpi.png' or something similar. Use PNG or any other lossless format. Now we need to convert the image to black and white. Note this is not the same as greyscale, which allows a range of values between white and black.

 RGB mode


 Black and white mode

Now set the image back to RGB mode. For the next step you will need two filters, Multifill and Flatten.
The Photoshop versions work perfectly, but I have not yet successfully used the GIMP plugins. First run Multifill, which fills in each area with a different color. It ignores small areas < 10px by 10px. This is helpful, as hand-drawn pencil lines are not perfect and have small one or two pixel empty areas in the line. Then run Flatten.

After Multifill, the image looks like:


After Flatten the image looks like:


Now place the original pencil lines ('lines300dpi.png' or something similar) over the flattened image and change the mode to 'Multiply'


The last step is to simply replace each color with the desired color. I add some shading by 'burning' at just under 50% exposure.



If you duplicate the color layer after you flatten, and keep it invisible, you'll later be able to re-select an entire colored area on the final drawing, even if it has some shading. This is very helpful if, once finished, you need to readjust the color of a tree or some other object, even if the tree has been shaded or any other texture has been applied.

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