Drawing for Myself – Making a Mini-Comic Pt 3
January 26, 2011 by Jerzy Drozd
Filed under Blog
Nearly done with the artwork for the new mini-comic I’m attempting to complete in under a week!
As I’ve said before, I’m trying to complete the 8-page tale Boulder and Fleet: Adventurers for Hire in less than a week. I’m using time I usually allocate for a warm-up sketch or two during my workday, so I have less than an hour per page to complete the pencil and ink illustrations. It is my intent to keep that speedy process in all aspects of the comic’s creation, so even at the digital clean-up stage I’m not allowing myself to do much more than erasing a few smudges.
However, at this stage I discovered a bit of a problem. In some of the more challenging panels (like the one above) I found myself penciling a little darker than I usually do. This becomes problematic when trying to eliminate the blue lines in Photoshop. When brightening the page to eliminate the blue sketch lines, I’m finding that some of the dry brush ink lines are losing their quality. My solution? Adjust the levels so the pencil lines are nearly invisible, then use the dodge tool (set to highlights at 5% pressure) to scrub out some of the more stubborn pencil lines. This leaves a few of the pencil lines there, which gives the pages a little roughness that I didn’t expect to like so much. These lines probably won’t show up in the webcomic or print edition anyway, but I’ll be just as happy if they do remain.
I’ve made a few more discoveries as I’ve doodled my way through this comic, which I’ll share later this week. I’m on track to finish it before Saturday, so I might have it up online by then!
Tools used: Blue pencil
Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of the process series for this mini-comic.
Pardon me if I got something wrong here, but why don’t you create a “Black & White” Adjustment Layer to get rid of the blue lines instead of “brightening the page”?
That might work even better, and allow for more flexibility. I keep forgetting about using adjustment layers! Been using PS since ’94, so I wind up defaulting to using Levels to brighten my pages.
Thanks for the tip!