I’ve spent some time recently looking into different techniques for producing digital comic artwork. Generally it looks like there are a few different approaches, and different people end up using different techniques. The best reading material I could find (in paper) was Digital Manga Techniques. This was great for a high level introduction, but didn’t go into quite enough detail to really come away with a clear idea of the entire process.
Producing sketches seems fairly straight-forward (in terms of process, not skill!). People either seem to sketch on paper and scan in, or sketch directly with a tablet. Using a tablet is more tricky, but you get lots more flexibility by working directly with a pc. The process described in the book is to make a very general sketch, fade it down to about 30% opacity, create a new layer, then produce a more refined sketch using the original as a template. By repeating the process for a few iterations you can arrive at sufficient definition to proceed with inking.
The area that really wasn’t too clear was the best technique for inking (an ink outline is produced from the sketch, then the sketch is discarded). Inking on paper seems to require a great deal of skill, and doesn’t allow you to easily correct mistakes. Digital inking looks like the best way to go, but there are a few different approaches that you can take to produce smooth ink outlines.
Drawing directly with a brush in photoshop is possible, but it’s very tricky to produce smooth lines. The better techniques make use of vector tools to produce smooth, consistent lines and curves.
All of the photoshop techniques I’ve seen use the pen tool to draw paths, then either stroke the path, or convert it to a selection and fill with colour. The downside about these techniques is that the end result is a raster graphic that can’t easily be edited or changed – i.e. it’s a little awkward to adjust the original vector that it was based on. You can convert the path to a selection, save the selection and use that to restore the original path at a later stage, but the process is quite cumbersome.
Knowing that Illustrator is a better tool for working with vector graphics, I then went searching for digital inking techniques for Illustrator. The best tutorial I found is available here. This technique means that the original vector paths are maintained and can be adjusted at any stage. The resulting brush stroke for the outline will automatically adjust in line with the path changes.
I won’t know for sure until I try out all of the different techniques, but at the moment this is looking like the best bet – so scan in a sketch, bring it into Illustrator to produce the ink outline, then export to Photoshop for colouring and shading.
I’ll post about how I get on…
