Category: Process

Marsh man

I’ve been itchin’ to ink over some more blue line work since writing my Blue no more post back in April. I sketched up a quick marsh man in Clip Studio Paint and converted the line art to Cyan.

I printed it onto an A5 sheet of cold pressed watercolour paper (200gsm) and inked with a Pentel brush pen, Uni Pin fineliners and a Posca paint marker for highlights.

I got to work on this around 2pm and completed it in chunks throughout the day, approx. 2 hours altogether including quick colours in Procreate.

Mainly using the brush pen at this stage to spot blacks and create random organic shapes.

I used 0.1 and 0.2 fineliners to define the vines/veins and other small details.

I masked off the background and added some brayer texture before using a marker for highlights.

I added a background wash and some further highlights.

Overall, I really enjoyed inking over this blue line piece, there’s a freedom to it, knowing that you could just print off another page if you messed up the inks and start again without losing your original drawing.

I’m disappointed with the brayer texture and will probably need to look at using another ink next time or practice with the roller on different paper. The masking tape also damaged the page in places so I might use masking fluid or cut out a stencil overlay on any future attempts.

The Posca marker worked really well on solid black ink but tended to mix with the brayer texture and grey wash. It’s really difficult to get a good all-round consistent line with whiteout pens like this but it’s also entirely possible that I just didn’t allow enough time for the inks and wash to dry.

I pretty much gave up on the clip studio workflow to remove the blue lines after scanning, the results looked a little faded/grey and the background wash was lost entirely after edits. The technique seems to work best on clean line art only. It’ll probably need tweaked or approached from a different angle for washes/texture. One solution would be to scan the line art and then add washes/texture using digital brushes. Alternatively, washes and textures could be scanned from separate lightboxed pages and added as multiply layers.

I adjusted the contrast/brightness in Photos before adding quick colours in Procreate.

Blue no more

Inspired by Russell Mark Olson’s Patreon I’ve been wanting to get back to drawing with ink again, specifically inking traditionally over blue line or non-photo blue on bristol board.

Alongside other work, Russell produces a page each week for Gateway City starting with pencil layouts before progressing to digital pencils that he prints as non-photo blue for inking.

Despite owning a large A3 printer I’ve never tried printing blue line comic pages. I’ve inked over non-photo blue pencil in the past but I haven’t looked seriously at a specific workflow for removing blue lines digitally from traditional inks.

I’m pretty sure Russell uses Photoshop to remove the blue line in his pages prior to colouring and I figured I’d be able to do something similar in Affinity Photo. There’s probably a macro or an obvious technique but I immediately hit a wall trying to achieve this.

I mostly use Clip Studio Paint these days and looked at it instead. Similarly, it’s not obvious how to remove blue line in CSP but I did find some basic tutorials on Pinterest/tumblr and also this helpful quick tips video from Celsys and Scott Drummond.

It’s prob not as efficient as the workflow in Photoshop but once I record it as an auto action I should hopefully save time on future pages.

I’ve been studying a page from Jeremiah by Hermann and thought it’d be useful to try the scanning prep quick tip on it and outline the steps here on the blog.

Remove blue line from comic pages using Clip Studio Paint

I scanned the inks at 300 dpi and saved as .tiff file to the desktop

1. Import scan/image to CSP

File>Open
Layer>Duplicate Layer

2. Tone Curve

Edit>Tonal Correction>Tone Curve
Change RGB to Red
Adjust the left handle to 255
Click OK

Edit>Tonal Correction>Tone Curve
Change RGB to Green
Adjust the left handle to 255
Click OK

3. Hue/Saturation/Luminosity

Edit>Tonal Correction>Hue/Saturation/Luminosity
Adjust Saturation to -100% (the black looks extremely faded at this stage)

4. Level Correction

Edit>Tonal Correction>Level Correction
Adjust the sliders

5. Remove Dust

Although it’s not mentioned in the video, another great feature in Clip Studio Paint is the remove dust filter. There were a few small artifacts left over from the non photo blue and this removed them outright. Just adjust the dust size to eliminate any dirt, pencils, etc.

Edit>Convert brightness to opacity
Filter>Correction>Remove dust

Pretty happy with the final result on this but it’ll be interesting to see how these steps affect dry brush, ink washes, etc.

If you’ve any other suggestions for removing blue line or some CSP tips I’d love to hear ’em.

Drink coffee and draw

Totti (J Francis Totti) & Forpe (Darrell Thorpe) have been streaming their work daily on Twitch:

If you’ve never seen it they chat about all things comics while working on their latest projects Big F@#k off Worms & Baron and the Kat.

Here’s some fan art of the guys drawn in clip studio paint.

sixfanarts 2020

Jared of OK Comics list for the #SixFanArts challenge was too good to pass up, I mean c’mon… Marv and an extinct shark together on one page! Pretty awesome!

I roughed out the basic layouts in procreate before going straight to inks in clip studio paint. I initially added some screentone but later found that greyscale shading just seemed to work better.

I really enjoyed this, a much needed distraction during the last few days.

Foodles

Jess Bradley posted some foodles earlier this week:

Super fun, right? I was itching to paint some of my own.

I started out with a simple lasso selection and painted lightly with a large brush before adding shading and opaque highlights on a second layer.

I laughed pretty hard when I added the lil onion tears.

Here’s some more…

Bags

Picked up a lot of awesome books and comics at DCAF this year, the first up on the reading pile is Bags by Patrick McHale and Gavin Fullerton. Gavin discussed some of his work on bags during a talk alongside Declan Shalvey and Phil Barrett at dcaf and I couldn’t wait to grab a copy after seeing some of the preview pages.

Such a great book, I just had to do some quick fan art sketches in procreate based on one of my favourite moments. It’s been a while since I’ve inked anything traditionally so I drew the layout onto watercolour paper before inking with a platinum carbon pen and brush for greywash and black fills.

Carnage

Quick sketches drawn in CSP using the rough pencil.

I finished this head sketch on a bus ride to Dublin, ridiculously pleased with the lil Venom speech bubble.

I spent WAY too long on this before I realised it wasn’t working.

Into the Garvey-verse

Matt Garvey posted this yesterday:

*20 comics in less than five years! Matt is a comics machine!*

Some fan art of Dave from Untitled Generic Space Comedy to celebrate Matt’s 20th comic launch.

Abandoned fan art sketches of the primary and tertiary characters from UGSC designed by John McFarlane.

Creepy thing

Swamp Thing should be creepy, right?

Drawn using Frenden’s Hawley Inker Random in clip studio paint, I shaded the face roughly and then applied a motion blur before adding further texture in an overlay layer.

Swamp Thing

Benjamin AE Filby gets some great sketch suggestions:

The brush Slick Sable by Frenden gave some great results noodling with those textures and organic forms.

I wanted to expand the head sketch to a full figure and started by roughing out the layout, then blocking in the basic shapes and shading. I went straight to work on the details of the foliage, copying and pasting as much as possible, creating random in-betweens to avoid repetition.

I didn’t really achieve what I wanted from the drawing, the figure is static and the anatomy is lost in the details of the fungus, branches and greenery.

I roughed out a second layout that feels right for the character and there’s also ample space to include the background of the swamp itself.