Thanks for reading...
Comments are always welcome. To subscribe via RSS, click here or sign up for my new publications' newsletter.
Popular Posts
Spinach Comic Book Template (UPDATED!)
Creating Screen tone effect in Photoshop
Also known as zipatone, Ben-Day dots, halftones etc For this tutorial a basic knowledge of Photoshop, colour modes, resolution, history and layers pallete, copy and paste functions will help. It is often desirable to achieve screen tones for artwork for either practicality or for effect. What ever you need it for I am going to show you the most effective way to achieve this using Photoshop. If you can master this, then there is no need to track down real zipatone and fiddle around with cutting it up. The middle section on ‘creating dot patterns’ is fixed although how you create your grey areas and how you use the dot pattern is up to you. Firstly this tutorial has nothing to do with the halftone pattern in the Filter menu. In my mind this filter gives a poor, hard to control, and fuzzy result. Which is not suitable when you need real screen tones for something like screen printing. Creating greys First open the artwork you want to add screen tones to; Be sure that this a
Tangency
The problem of contrast and tone . One of the major concerns when drawing comics or images is that of tone and contrast. This is especially true of B&W drawings but to a lesser degree with colour. It is often referred to as ‘tangency’. When you do not have tangency, the lines that you have drawn blend into one another an become hard to decipher. The image is basically flat and hard to read. A/ This image doesn’t give us enough information; there is no contrast or line variation. B/ This is a little better, with some added line width, but still flat C/ This example is much better, there is line width, hatching and cross hatching, and areas of black. This helps us discern where the objects are sitting. D/ This example uses screen dots to create a grey tone that gives us contrast. Notice how I’ve placed the black differently in this picture. The picture is a little flatter than ‘C’ but still works. This method could be used for stylistic purposes. E/ In this example I have gone too
Review of Sanford Prismacolour Non-photo blue pencils
WARNING: Comic talk ahead! I wanted to write a short review of the 'non-photo' blue pencils I have been using lately. I'm doing this so that if you have to order these things through the mail or don't want to waste money trying and buying these things then hopefully this review will point you in the right direction. There are three pencils that I have come across. There are other types and brands, but these are the ones I have had experience with and I think may be the most commonly used in comics. 1-Sanford col-erase non-photo blue. (pictured) This pencil's lead is quite hard and hardly shows up on the paper. This is good if you only want faint marks as guidelines and not so much an actual finished drawing. There is an eraser on the end that actually works to a certain degree. Although it's really only for peace of mind as you don't need to erase the pencil after inking anyway. I found this pencil too light to do actual finished or rough outlined
Sometimes, when I've watched too much of the news, I go outside to look at the stars and wonder where we'll live next after we're thoroughly done screwing up this planet. Your comic gives me hope that we'll actually be able to achieve that one day.
ReplyDeleteThanks Matt. I'm going to try and do one of these a week (Although not always space themed!) I was trying a new pencilling and inking style with these, it's really subtle though, not sure if it shows.
ReplyDeleteThe amount of energy and money required to generate a biosphere is so great, that it basically makes space colonization impossible. Think about it. We haven't been back to the moon since 1973. No one has been on the Moon my entire life. And chances there never will be again.
ReplyDeleteI agree John. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be adapted to this planet, the air the minerals, the gravity. We're a long way off living in space or any other planet for that matter.
ReplyDelete