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Comics 101
Art tips and techniques, reviews and interviews from my studio. Archived here and at World Famous Comics.

Comics 101 Archives

Comics 101 for 01/22/2004
Crimson Dynamo #5: Digital Inking

Crimson Dynamo 5 Crimson Dynamo #5 is in comic book stores now and if you like what you see below pick up a copy today or order one from my Stuff to Buy page. Here's a little background on this book:
The Crimson Dynamo is an old Iron Man foe who was introduced way back in TALES OF SUSPENSE #46 published in 1963. The original inventor of the Dynamo armor, Anton Vanko, left a secret legacy - a weapon of mass destruction in the shape of a robotic super-suit that neither the Kremlin nor Russian government ever knew existed. The Crimson Dynamo is out there and he's dangerous and now... someone has found it.

Taking its cue from history - both the real history of the former Soviet Union, and the largely unexplored history of Russian superheroes in the Marvel Universe -CRIMSON DYNAMO is a new ongoing series from Marvel Comics.
For this week's column we'll take a look at the process of creating the sequential art for Crimson Dynamo #5 from my final pencils to the digital inking process and then the full colors by Thomas Mason of Mental Studios.

After reading the script first, developing my thumbnail sketches and building up towards full size layouts, I then begin my technique for finished pencils. For this series, starting with issue #4, we've made the conscious decision to go straight to colors from my pencils. Though I tend to draw pretty tight as a penciler anyway it was still kind of an experiment for me to have my work go the digital inked route since it's a process I've only tried by myself in my own work and not as collaborative effort with another colorist as in this case. The term 'digital inking' is still kind of mysterious to the comic book audience at large (fans and professionals alike) but it can be approached in a few different ways thanks to the flexibility of immersive art programs like Photoshop and Painter.

In this instance, the majority of this technique is actually solved in the penciling stage I believe. Knowing that we don't have the luxury of a traditional inker to be involved this time around I set up my pencils for this issue to be extra clean and extra tight, more so than I normally do in my other work. By taking extra time to do more sketching and layering in the layout phase, refining the artwork there allows me to be more clean when translating the penciled page onto board using my lightbox. There's less chance for corrections or mistakes and my technique becomes cleaner since there's less erasing to do.

As part of the digital inking technique, I'm also putting the extra time and care in to develop my line weights and to carefully outline my graphic shaping that I've established with my lighting in the layout. Also, I usually refrain from shading in the larger dark areas when I can since it actually helps to keep the technique clean from any smudging or smearing of the graphite while I'm drawing. I'll eventually be scanning these pages in Photoshop and sending them directly to the colorist so the less cleanup I have to do later the better.

Which brings me to the next phase of the digital inking process. Once my final line drawing is established, line weights are introduced (and correcting any potential dead weight lines), necessary details are added and any minimal erasing is completed, the next step is to scan the page and then, using the eraser tool in Photoshop, spend anywhere from 1/2 hour to an hour cleaning up any of the unnecessary greyscale pixels in the art.

Once the line art is cleaned up in Photoshop, the next steps for this process were completed by the colorist. I can't speak exactly on his behalf for what approach he took to further the digital inking process but I can speculate as to how it was probably done or as how I would have approached it myself.

The real trick to digital inking, along with drawing extra tight, keeping your pencils extra clean and developing all of your line weights in the pencil phase (that is if you choose not to render them with a brush tool in Photoshop or Painter or even using a vector art program like Illustrator or Freehand) is to darken the pencils to make them appear like flat, graphic black inked lines as opposed to the softer, greyscale pencil look. One way to accomplish this is in the initial scanning of the page when adjusting the brightness and contrast features there. But in most scanning software the control is limited and you're actually better approaching this technique in Photoshop itself where the adjustments for the Brightness/Contrast feature in the file menu is more sensitive and more easily controlled. You especially should approach it this way since you would want to do your initial clean up with the eraser tool first to eliminate any greyscale that scanned with your art that isn't neccessary to the page or part of your original linework.

After cleaning up your pencils you should go to Photoshop's Image menu at the top and select the Brightness/Contrast feature (Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast). It depends on how dark your pencils were originally scanned but usually adjusting the slider up towards the 25 to 50 range will produce the effect of darker, almost inked looking pencils. Again, this only works if your pencils are pretty tight to begin with and you've taken extra care to keep them clean or cleaned them up well in Photoshop. You could also experiment with the Levels feature in Photoshop (Image>Adjustments>Levels) to make your pencils darker and eliminate any fuzzy or unnecessary greyscale shading.

Since I've outlined my graphic black shapes for my lighting on my forms in my art and left them unshaded for the most part, the next step would be to take the paint bucket tool and the pencil tool as well to fill them in with a solid black color where I've indicated with 'x's to Thomas. He could also then go back into the line work with the pencil, brush or airbrush tool using black from the color palette and further refine the 'inked' lines by painting over them, beefing them up with thicker stokes where needed perhaps. Probably from this point, Thomas next works his magic as colorist and then completes the final artwork.

Take a look below at a couple of examples of this process from final pencils to digital inks and to final full color art.

Page 2 - Pencils
Crimson Dynamo, Page 2, Pencils

Page 2 - Inks
Crimson Dynamo, Page 2, Inks

Page 2 - Colors
Crimson Dynamo, Page 2, Color

Page 6 - Pencils
Crimson Dynamo 5, Page 6, Pencils

Page 6 - Inks
Crimson Dynamo 5, Page 6, Inks

Page 6 - Colors
Crimson Dynamo 5, Page 6, Colors

And here's a preview for some of the pages from Crimson Dynamo #5 in full color as well. Enjoy!

Crimson Dynamo - Page 15

Crimson Dynamo - Page 17

Crimson Dynamo - Page 22

See you next week for a new Comics 101 feature!

-Joe

<< 01/15/2004 | 01/22/2004 | 02/05/2004 >>

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