Category: Process

Gangsters v Monsters #2

The comics machine Matt Garvey kindly asked me to provide a variant cover (my first cover) for the latest issue of Gangsters v Monsters. Look at that preview art by the awesome Andrea Schiavone! So good!

After sketching a few of the characters and initial ideas on paper I worked up a quick cover layout guide in affinity designer and imported the logo files. I then exported the guides to clip studio paint as a draft layer and scanned in some of my loose sketches.

I switched between procreate and clip studio to create the thumbnails, for some reason thumbnailing was just easier in procreate.

I liked all four of these and couldn’t really decide on a favourite, they all would have been fun to draw, honestly.

Initial set of thumbnails with roughly spotted blacks

After receiving confirmation from Matt on the second thumbnail I started inking the mummy head first, followed by the werewolf before tackling the rest. I decided very quickly to limit the brush size to 0.4, 0.8 and 1.0 for consistency. In hindsight I prob went a little overboard with the texture on the mummy in contrast to the other characters.

Rough sketch to final inks in clip studio paint

I haven’t really been colouring much this last year so took a few hours to refamiliarise myself with some basic techniques before flatting the file, practicing on this art from the previous post.

Flatting WIP, lotsa layers, some would say too many

I had a lot of difficulty nailing down my colour palette and worked up some rough options after finishing the flats.

I coloured this over a few days so decided to create a reference page in clip studio to remind myself of the brushes and combinations used. It was very quick to put together and saved me a good bit of time in the end thankfully.

I had a blast on this and now that the project has surpassed its goal I’m really looking forward to seeing this in print come December.

Shout off in the comments if you’re getting a copy, I’d love to hear from ya!

Prettay good

I originally drew this head shapes page over a couple of weeks in May 2020. It was unplanned and started as just a small A6 canvas to practice using the real g-pen in clip studio paint. It’s always kinda bugged me that it’s a ridiculous size for print and I’ve considered redrawing it larger a few times since.

I’m still trying to get better at inking over blue line so thought I’d enlarge the head shapes page to A3 and give it a go.

I tackled the low stakes stuff first, initially inking with a carbon pen but it felt a little stiff (I was gripping the pen too hard, wearing out my wrist). I switched to a Pentel Arts Duopoint Flex pen that I picked up in Poland a few years back, it’s double ended with an ultra fine nib and a flexible brush. The lines went down much smoother and I was getting a nice variation between thick and thin. The only drawback, it’s water based, something I realised when I used the posca white paint pen for highlights. It looks like the posca pen also irritatingly mixes with the water based cyan ink from the printer too.

Final inks – surprisingly it’s pretty close to the original from 2020

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.