Comics revolve around characters, so, to no one's surprise, the character design phase
is one of the most important parts of telling your story.
We are going to start out, thinking about what we want our character to look like because
this character is going to be our guide for our readers throughout the entire story.
We really want to make something that people are going to be able to connect with and relate
to.
You're going to want to think about the silhouette value of your characters.
You're going to want to think about what body type they have which also kind of plays in
the silhouette.
You're going to want to think about the colours that they have, the personality that they
have, the style that you're going to want to use and the character design phase is where
you're going to get all that out.
Okay, now that we have our clean pencil drawing, let's go ahead and take it to inks.
Inking is a way to clean up your drawing, and put final lines on it so it looks clean
and professional and makes the colouring process a lot easier.
What you're going to want to do to start inking, is very similar to what you did when you were
cleaning up your pencils.
You're going to want to take your pencil there and then drop it down [xx] just a little bit
so you can still see it but so that it's not getting in your way when you're inking, make
a new layer that you're going to have your ink on top of that.
Now, select the brush of your choice, I like this G pen, it's pretty good, give it a test
stroke or two here so you see how it's going to look like.
You don't have to do black, but standard practice, usually black.
So that's what I'm going to use.
Now, it's really important while you're inking to pay attention to your line weight as these
will be the final lines, and people will be seeing this.
So, go ahead and think hard about where the shadows are going to fall in your drawing,
usually the underside of things, if you're lighting is from the top, maybe if you're
doing lower lighting, then things are going to hit more towards the top.
But we're just going to have some nice standard lighting here, probably from the sun, and
she likes to be outdoors.
Once again if you don't get your line right, that's okay, just hit undo.
Try it again.
A trick to inking on the tablet or any other digital drawing device, if you want to give
a nice smooth line that helps to move fast.
The slower you go, the more you're going to get a little bit of wobble.
So it behooves to pull out your line as quickly as possibly.
Do try to vary your line weight just a little bit in some spots, it helps to keep the drawing
from looking too monotonous.
If you see anything that you still want to correct from your pencils, go ahead and do
that now.
It's the last chance you're going to get to touch your line work before you move on in
the process.
One thing to remember about inking is that it is not tracing.
I mean it can be, and sometimes it can certainly feel that way, but if you're doing it right
it should be another step in the process that helps add to your finished artwork.
As you can see, I'm going through, I'm doing certain line variations, just hoping to add
a little bit more interest to the line work of this finished piece.
When you're done go ahead and take just one last pass through to see if anything else
that you can clean, just a little bit more tighten out make more interesting whatever.
You add a little bit of final extra line weight, communicate a better sense of lighting, pop
a couple of things out on the foreground a little bit more and you're done.
Okay now that we are done inking, let's go ahead and move on to color.
Again I'll probably talk a little bit more about this process later, but, what's really
important now is making color choices about your characters outfit that will work with
the backgrounds that you are going to put your character in.
So take a moment to think about your setting, think about what kind of colours you want
to use and how that's going to work with your character.
I know that this character is going to be set in a forest setting that's probably going
have a lot of dark greens and browns so I want to make her outfit a little bit brighter
than that in order to pop her out.
So, let's go ahead and get rid of that pencil sketch now because we are not going to need
it.
You can either hide it or you can delete it either way.
I'm just go to hide it and we're going go make a new layer underneath our ink layer
and then we are going to fill that layer with white and merge the two together.
Alright now we are going to make sure that our line work is only black and there's no
grey or anything in there so we are going to up to edit, we are going to go to tonal
correction and we're going to hit finalization.
And just make sure preview is checked, and slide the slider around until you think it
looks right.
For the most part it shouldn't change a whole lot.
I like to set mine to 155 or 156 then hit okay.
This will help our paint bucket tool to make better selections.
Unfortunately, right now you can't see the color under it, so go ahead and go up to the
layer properties and turn it to multiply so we can see what's happening underneath our
ink layer.
Alright create another new layer underneath our inks and then sort your paint buckets
and start setting in colors.
I think I want her top to be yellow, so I'm going to pick a yellow that I'm happy with,
and you can see how fast this is going you can even just hold the paint bucket down on
the screen and just drag it around to film multiple areas, makes it real easy.
Every once in a while you might hit a little snug like that breaking your line work, just
go up take a brush close it off and go back to your paint bucket.
Now in order to keep a little bit of continuity with the outfit and the key things from getting
a little bit too out of control of various colors?
I mean you are trying to use a lot of the same colors over and over again on her outfit,
so I'm going to use the yellow for her gloves as well.
And repeat the reader for search and her hair tier as well, now, one thing you're going
to notice about this particular character design is that, he has a lot of what I like
to refer to as silhouette value.
And what silhouette value is, is when your character stands out even if they were entirely
blacked out as a black silhouette and what is good about silhouette value, is that it
helps the viewer recognize your specific characters for the individuals, who they are.
As well as help them track them throughout the page.
Some things that you can use to help create silhouette value in your own characters are
a very distinctive body type, a distinctive hair style.
You can see she's got these crazy ponytail things going on off the back that, if she
were just in silhouette would definitely enable people to pick her out of the crowd.
She's got this giant sash blowy thing that's going to be popping out as well.
Just try and keep in mind little things like that make really nice character touches and
help to give your work a very professional look.
So the drawing looks pretty good like this.
You can tell that even with just basic flat color, everything is already starting to pop,
and our character is really start to come together.
Alright, now we have our flat color layer completed.
However, if you want to give it a kind of an animation looking feel, you can go back
and add some very simple shell shading.
Create a layer above your colors and then you're going to want to select a very almost
neutrally grey shadow color, I tend to like to use like a really grey purple.
Don't make it particularly dark, just something right about there ought to do just fine.
And then, you are going to want to set the layer you're going to do your shadows on to
multiply and then fill that layer with your shadow color.
Okay, as you can see it's kind of gotten everywhere for the moment but don't worry we are going
to fix that with a layer mask.
So, this little symbol down here, helps us create a layer mask and we can use this, so
we have a non destructive process, which means that even when you erase things, you won't
actually be erasing anything.
Now it's going to make a lot more sense in just a second, but let's go ahead and get
rid of this shadow color for the moment by filling this layer with our clear or transparent
color.
Bam!
it's gone.
Alright, we can now draw on this black part right here with any color we want, and it
will bring that shadow layer back to us.
This is a great way to work if you're to be making a lot of decisions and you are not
sure what you're going to like.
It also just a great way to work in general because you end up with non-destructive layer.
Right now before your finish off your colors you might want to take a look just to make
sure that nothing else is wrong with your drawing.
I was just about to start on the shadow layer when I realized her pig tail somehow become
flesh color, let's go ahead and fix that really quick before we move on.
Go back to your flats layer, fix your mistake.
And how we can move forward.
Alright so moving back to our layer we're going to take a brush, any brush you want
it can be just a regular flat brush like you used to ink your thing or it can be a hairy
brush whatever.
I'm going to go ahead and use this just basic brush to create nice clean single terms shadow
shapes, so it give you kind of animated cell look hence the term cell shaving.
Just go through and make some lighting choices.
Based on where you've decided that the light source is coming from.
I'm going to say for her probably somewhere around here and I'll draw us a little light
ball just so we can remember that.
If that helps you'd have that there just to remind you where you decided what's coming
from go ahead and leave that there and you can erase it when you're done.
And again the way it works is when you're drawing this layer with a regular color it
puts the color of the shadow back on.
If you ever want to go back in correcting mistakes simply hit C need change your brush
to transparent and you can get read of it just as easily.
When you're done hit C again and it will take you right back to the color you were using
initially.
Alright, and that shading done you can tell the character already has more depth.
So now we're done designing our character.
We talked about about silhouette value, about color, about shape, size, personality style.
We've pretty much gone over it all.
Now we're ready to move on to actually telling our story through comics.