Making Comics: Quick and clean frame borders in Photoshop!
on September 22, 2011 at 12:22 pmPosted In: Making Comics
Welcome to a new feature I plan to do periodically called Making Comics. I’ve been at this thing since 2008, and I’ve been working in art and digital media for much longer than that. There’s a few things I think I can share that might be helpful. So this week I’m kicking it off with a video showing you how to make quick and clean frame borders using Photoshop.
The video will explain it best, but in a nutshell here is the process.
- Draw some guides to indicate where you want your frames.
- Select the Shape tool (U) and choose “paths” as the option.
- Draw your borders. Each time you make a shape, it will be added to a working path (view in your Paths palette)
- When done, choose a brush of appropriate size. I use 5, hard round (I work at 300dpi). Make sure there are no effects on the brush, like shape or other dynamics
- Right click the working path in the Paths palette and choose “Stroke Path” – leave “simulate brush pressure” off.
- Your frames are now there! Click off the work path (and hide guides) to see them. You can save your work path to modify and re-stroke the borders later.
For awhile I was hand drawing my borders, but when I moved to working all digital, it just didn’t work for me. So this solution works nicely.
- Watch on Vimeo
- Download the QT Movie (The QT video is higher definition and clearer, 9MB download.) Enjoy, and share it around if you like it.
- Please Share!
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- Tweet about it
I watched this on Vimeo the other day when you tweeted it.
It’s a pretty good guide, but I think it would have been better with a voice over while performing the tasks.
It would be better with voice. The problem is I put this together at lunch at work on my mac, and I don’t have a microphone/headset. I might see if I can get one for future vids.