Tag: Inking

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.

Hermann

I lucked upon a yellowed copy of Jeremiah this week in a local Oxfam stuck between a bunch of back issues that were probably donated by the FPI across the street. Published by Adventure comics (a division of Malibu Graphics) in the early 90s the book has a peculiar format but the art is unbelievably good.

The Belgian artist Hermann Huppen (better known as Hermann) is new to me but his work has clearly had a big impact and influence.

The Heirs (1991) #1–2 translates Jeremiah 3: Les Héritiers Sauvages (1980)

There’s not much available online about Hermann’s process or tools but I gleaned a few things from this video watching his effortless line and mastery with a brush, just incredible.

November 2022

Started off the month by messing around with this skull from May 2022 in clip studio.

Can’t remember who recommended the [AA] Gel Pen on twitter but I’m loving the line, reminds me of MUJI Gel Ink pens.

Some pencils and a bonus skull that didn’t make it onto last months page.

Skull and bones

I’ve been slowly adding to this page in clip studio during breaks at work. Mostly drawn using the default g-pen with some texture/tone here and there.

Holidaaaay

I left the iPad at home and took a wee sketchbook on holiday to fill a few pages. I’ve been wanting to get back to drawing on paper again and it felt pretty good to ditch the undo gesture for a bit.

Here’s the raw inks:

Picked up a new pen from empik and a copy of RELAX #38 from the airport. Really impressed with the production and large format of RELAX, astounding work from Jakub Rebelka, Philippe Cazaumayou, etc.

Thumbs up

Just tweaking a thumbprint brush I created in CSP along with some other inking tests.

Alas, poor Yorick!

Inspired by PJ Holden’s thumbprint brush for CSP I created a very simple spiral brush to play with some shading. Gotta say it’s a really nice effect that instantly improved the solid blacks on this.

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.