This is part two of my article on how to make a webcomic. You should read part one first if you haven’t already.

We left off last time with a Photoshop file that has a white background and then a layer than holds just the linework in black - and nothing else. In other words, the negative space between lines is transparent.

At this point my earlier preparation should pay off in the form of super easy selections. I’m not saying working this way is for everyone, but it’s one way to be able to work fast when it comes to coloring the webcomic. So we left off here:

Remember, I had made sure during my inking process to close all shapes, leaving areas that are surrounded by an inked line. You can see by looking in the lower left corner that the leg line of the Martian on the left does not quite meet up to the border. The first thing I will do is quickly go in and extend any lines like this that need fixing. I usually have a few but it usually only takes a couple of minutes. Simply grab a black pencil of the right diameter (B is the hotkey for Brush/Pencil - use your [  and ] keys to change brush size) and extend the line on the linework layer.

Having done that it’s time to select areas and begin coloring. I use the tried and trusy ol’ magic wand for this. Press “W” to get the wand. In my settings, I have the tolerance set to 0 and “Contiguous” and “Sample All Layers” are always checked. This works 99% of the time in giving me what I need. So let’s say I begin coloring the walls here - I make my selections, make a new layer for the walls (make sure you do NOT color on your linework layer!) and - wait - you don’t want to fill just yet.

What you have is a selection that goes up TO your linework. What you want is a selection that goes a bit UNDER your lines (essentially trapping your artwork in old print world parlance). This means your lines will slightly cover your colors. This is good for two reasons. One, you need this in case you ever want to print your comic, so that small variations in registration do not leave blank spots in the printed piece. Two, when you reduce the comic for the web, you avoid the same thing - small areas of the background showing through.

Doing this is simple.  Under the “Select” menu choose “Modify -> Expand” and enter “2″. Viola, now your selection expands by two pixels under your linework. Now you go ahead and fill in your areas. Now hitting that menu each time is a pain, so do yourself a favor and set up an action for it, and then set your actions palette in “button” mode - then you just wand, hit the button, fill - and move on.

Here you can see the walls have been colored - and you can see the “marching ants” where I have selected the ceiling portion. See the “Expand 2″ button? That’s my action. (I have more that I use, I just did this on my lunch at work). You can also see a little document I use for sampling my most used colors open as well.

At this point I’m not worried about John’s face having the wall color. His layer is always above the lower layers, and I’ll show you how I fill his face up in a moment. So I finish filling in the background stuff and the window in the door and I have this:

It’s really important at this point that you are making new layers for each “section” or area of your strip. For example, John and Asimov always have their own layers. Trust me this will make things much easier when you want to change things, as you always will, either now or later on down the road. So next I set up a new layer for the martians and fill them in:

And you can start to see how fast this can go. So let’s move to John’s face, which does not have a closed shape. Generally, his face is the only thing aside from background elements that is not closed. What I do is grab the face color, grab a small brush and draw a line from his nose to his brow in the flesh color like so:

It’s kind of light, but you should be able to see it on both areas here. What I have now done is effectively closed the shape, but with color instead of a black line. Now I can use the magic wand just like before to fill his head up with color. I go ahead and fill in his body and tongue colors as well, and then for his hair I use a slightly larger brush to paint the yellow in.

But wait! I don’t like the wall colors - too light. Ah the beauty of the separate layers - it’s easy to make changes.

Bingo - in about 60 seconds it’s all changed. Another helpful hint - if you make some kind of elaborate selection, or some selection that takes you 10 clicks to get (say there’s lots of action breaking up a background panel and I have to click a bunch of times to get all the areas selected) do yourself a favor and quickly save that selection under “Select -> Save Selection” which is only available when you actually have a selection made. Just type in a name and forget it. If you need it again, go to “Select -> Load Selection” and choose the name you typed in and bam - you’ve got it again without having to do all that work over.

I don’t do a whole lot of shadow and highlight work simply because I don’t have the time and I developed this kind of super cartoony style that doesn’t really need it. However I do it sometimes. Here I made a new layer, set the layer mode to “multiply” and the color to black at about 15% opacity. Then I just added some shapes for some super light shadows on the wall. This is a real basic way to do it, there are better ways although this works.

You can also use complementary colors instead of black and play with the layer modes. As always, experiment with the settings to see what works for you.

Adding Text

Now I need to add my dialog. First I type in all the words and place them in black in their locations. I’m using a font I purchased online for this.

At this point I actually make a layer group and move all the text layers into that folder. It’s just a nice way to keep things organized - plus - when I want to turn off the dialog to see or fix something, it’s only one click, not 10-15 (or more once the balloons are done).

I used to go through the trouble of making the balloons in Illustrator and copy and pasting them over, but it’s a waste of time. I now use a rounded rectangle (U key) to make the main shape to start:

Then I use the path tool to draw the “hanger” to the speaking character. Then I merge those two layers (using yet another action) to get this:

And I do that for all the text, ending up with this:

Lastly I drag a layer group from my palette file that has the strip information - copyright, date and URL and adjust that position and date.

To export it for the web, I select all and do a copy all layers (Cntl-Shift-C) and paste into a new layer. Then I convert it to RGB, downsample to 72dpi and I have it ready to export. Of course, I have another action for that process as well!

Then I save it as a JPG usually and post it to the web - finished! Usually this process takes me under an hour, sometimes as little as a half hour. My whole point was to get this process down to a manageable time frame so that I can continue doing the comic in color twice a week.

Lastly, here’s a shot at what my layers look like:

Pretty simple.

Color Linework

I didn’t mention it above since this particular strip doesn’t really have it, but often I will color the actual linework lines in the background. Because my linework is on a separate layer with no background attached, again this is super easy.

All I need to do is select the lines I want colored (usually using the poly lasso tool) and make sure the layer lock is on, then fill in the color and bingo, colored lines. Depending on what it is, sometimes I’ll just grab a brush and paint the line - whichever is faster. If you look at any of the strips where John is wearing his helmet and the helmet outline is a brighter blue - that’s how I do that.

I hope this two articles have been helpful. This is one way you can process a color comic quite quickly. Again it’s not the only way and may not be the best way, but it’s working for me. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an e-mail.

Tags: Howto, Process, Webcomic

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Blog, Howto, Webcomics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.