Category: Art

Panels Made Easy

An early comic strip of mine from the 1970s. I can see the influence of Frank Bellamy. The border was drawn with a ruling pen.

I FIND Manga Studio EX 4 is a like a cross between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, combining vector lines (as in Illustrator) with Photoshop style layers and colouring but it includes additional features intended to make life easier for the comic strip artist, helping you out with speech bubbles, screen tones . . . and panels.

I like to use simple panels in a comic strip as a formal framework for my hand-drawn artwork. I used to draw these with a ruling pen (below) but now I draw a grid in a desktop publishing program and print it out, a third up from what will be the printed size, for my drawings.

The ruling pen that I used for the borders in my Romans v. Brigantes comic strip was this, part of a Jakar Universal Giant Bow 2001 set which features an extendable compass for drawing extra large circles. I bought it at the Eagle Press, Wakefield, in 1975, price £5.26 (the sticker is still on the box).
Queen Cartimandua hands King Caracatus over the to Romans. Castle Hill, Almondbury, Huddersfield, which may have been an Iron Age hill fort, rises from the mist in the background. The comic strip featured in my first book, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield (1978).

There’s a certain pleasure in drawing with a ruling pen but when I’ve got a deadline to meet anything that allows me more time for drawing the illustrations would be welcome. I’ve been watching some YouTube videos by Doug Hills, author of Manga Studio for Dummies, to familiarise myself with the process but for it to sink in I need to go through the stages for myself.

So here’s my ridiculously simple guide to the concept – I won’t go into every single detail – of getting a comic strip from rough to final printed version in Manga Studio EX4.

This isn’t the only way to do it but it should give you an idea. And please excuse my scrappy doodles.

  1. Draw your rough
  2. Scan it in grayscale (150dpi will be fine)
  3. Open a new document in Manga Studio (I went for A6 portrait, 1200dpi)
  4. Open your scanned rough and adjust it to fit the page. It is added as a new layer, which I set to grayscale (black and white makes it look like a pen drawing). In the Layer Properties panel, select ‘Sketch’ as the Output Attribute.
  5. Create another new layer, selecting the Panel Ruler Layer option. Initially this puts one big panel, a blue rectangle, around your page so you now need to use the Panel Ruler Cutter to slice it into panels then the Object Selector to adjust the dimensions of each panel to fit your rough.
  6. When you’re happy with the dimensions, with the Panel Ruler Layer still selected, from the layer menu choose Rasterise Layer. That’s the panels drawn! Give this layer a descriptive name, such as ‘panels’.
  7. Drag your ‘panels’ layer to the top of the pile in the Layer Palette (right) and, as you can see by comparing the two stages above, it now masks any stray lines between the panels, leaving white spaces between them. When you start inking, any stray lines that go over the panel edges will also be masked.
  8. To make inking easier you can switch the colour of your scanned rough to blue. Press the Switch Colour button in the top left of the Layer Palette to toggle from gray to blue (this only works if your sketch layer is in grayscale, it won’t work in colour or black and white).
  9. Create a New Layer, (1200dpi, black 1bit, output attributes ‘finish’) for inking. I used my pen tablet and selected the G pen, a basic pen, from the Manga Studio draw tools palette.
  10. When you’ve finished drawing you can export your page for print or for the web.

Two mysteries that I still need to solve; the line around the panels came out too thick and when I exported the image it was in negative, white on black instead of vice versa, so I had to reverse it in Photoshop. I’m missing a couple of options somewhere.

Manga Meadow

I’M ENJOYING my comics drawing course but I don’t want to forget the program that sparked this off, Manga Studio 4EX, so as I settled down at the end of the day I drew a familiar scene, the meadow and the wood beyond, in the unfamiliar medium of Manga Studio using my Intuous 4 pen tablet. It’s an awkward way to draw but it’s a good way to familiarise myself with the basic commands of the program such as selecting tool and colours, working with layers and exporting an image.

It’s never going to replace pen and watercolour but that isn’t the aim.

Pictures on Paper

Another of the ‘action within a drawing’ exercises; a newspaper page blowing in the wind. Hmm, I misread that; I went for the whole newspaper!

THE NEXT EXERCISE that Abel & Madden set you in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures is to draw a series of actions in a single panel – and to try and make the actions flow in their logical order.

The cause and effect in this tripped up/knocks over lamp is, I hope, reasonably unambiguous as the action proceeds from left to right, the way we usually read a drawing in the west, but the next frame, the stone thrower, involves a reciprocal action so it’s trickier.

Chain of Events

I had a couple of goes at the throws stone/gun misfires/lamp crashes on stone-thrower scenario. The big problem with my solution is that the crashing lamp is the first thing the reader sees but it’s actually supposed to be the climax of the chain of events.

Homework is to make up your own scenario. Thinking of slapstick action, I remembered Eric Sykes’ almost silent movie The Plank but I didn’t find it easy to set up even the most blindingly obvious stunt in my drawing.

I’m equally clueless in trying to come up with funny captions but – phew! – the great thing is that this is just a learning experience. My career doesn’t depend on finding a solution.

Perhaps I need a more ‘cartoony’ style, as these straightforward sketches have all the comic ambience of a health and safety instructional leaflet. Of course some artists, such as English illustrator Glen Baxter, have made a career out of getting comic effect from a quirkily straightforward retro style.

Heath Tea Rooms

ALTHOUGH IT’S less than a mile from Wakefield, Heath village at the top end of Heath Common, has a timeless rural feel. I don’t know another village that’s quite like it. It’s got a couple of big Georgian houses but it isn’t an estate village, it’s more random looking than that, but as it is almost all stone-built, it blends together.

Kings Arms Cottages, where the Heath Tea Rooms opened five weeks ago, overlooks the village green. For that matter the whole village overlooks the one green space or another. It’s a useful place to bring my mum, who can’t walk too far these days, for a relaxing cup of coffee but it would also be a good stop on a hike because it’s near the Trans-Pennine Trail and half a dozen footpaths radiate from the village.

My Papermate Tikky Graphic Rotring pen let me down by blotting the paper; I suspect that the heat of the sun was the cause, causing the ink to expand. But my mum suggested that the blot added a certain something to the drawing. If that’s so then I’ve got an additional feature for my next two drawings as the ink soaked through the next two pages of my sketchbook.

Drawing Words

My attempt at ‘scenario 1’ in the ‘action within a drawing’ exercises, chapter 1.

IN THE INTRODUCTION to Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, ‘a definitive course from concept to comic in 15 lessons’, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden do a lot to build up the kind of feeling that I used to get when I enrolled in an evening class; a slight frisson of whoa! – what have I taken on here? combined with the delight of getting started on something fresh and challenging.

Above all, their ambitious scheme of work really doesn’t seem scarily professional and they create a friendly atmosphere; it’s like the creative buzz that you can get finding yourself part of a group of disparate talents in a new class.

Well, I’m too impatient to wait for someone to set up a course here and I’m not going to take up their suggestion of starting my own ‘Nomad’ group, fun though that would be, because I can’t wait to get on with the 15 sessions. But I’ll definitely miss the discussions at the end of each session where everyone puts their work on the wall and I’ll miss the jam comics, where you draw a panel of a strip then pass it on to the next student. I’m intrigued by those.

Working on my own, at my own pace, I’m what Abel and Madden call a Ronin, named after the masterless samurai who roamed around feudal Japan. That’s so cool!

Defining “Comics”

In discussing the definition of ‘this thing we call comics’, they point out that it’s not tied to a genre, such as superheroes or manga, they see comics as:

‘. . . a medium, just like “film” or “painting.” You don’t think film necessarily means movies about gangsters or cowboys, do you? Or that painting always depicts realistic landscapes? Film, painting, and other media are ways to express ideas—any you like. Comics is like that too. It’s a container for ideas.’

Action within a drawing

The exercises start not with a comic strip but with a single panel and the aim in the first ‘drawing time’ session is to depict five specific sorts of action. I enjoy these little problems and I feel that it’s good for me to do something different and work a) straight from my imagination rather than from reference and b) in pencil (and they allow you to use an eraser too, so don’t panic).

In my work as an illustrator I’m invariably up against some kind of deadline, so I never have the time that I’d really like to be playful or inventive, also I’m always working for print and I generally go for pen and ink to produce crisply printable linework or, if it’s colour, pen and watercolour, again using the pen to give a bit of definition in print. I’ve hardly if ever used pencil – it can go a bit grey and smudgy in half tone reproduction – but now I’ve got an excuse to use it and I’m finding it so relaxing.

I’m working on office paper as they suggest, so there’s no feeling that I’m going to ‘spoil’ a sketchbook with a duff drawing.

I the freedom of knowing that what I draw doesn’t have any significance beyond the exercise.

Runner

I started the running figure in what I’d call a cartoon style (above, left) and soon got into thinking what props would I add to emphasise the action – a billowing coat, hat coming off his head. Then I thought this isn’t an exercise in using props or building a character nor am I obliged to draw in a slightly unfamiliar ‘comic’ style.

I find the concept of comics being simply a medium for expressing ideas is liberating. I don’t have to start feeling that I’ve got all that baggage of a century or more of comics history to emulate. Here it’s simply the idea of running that I need to focus on.

Speeding Car

Another of the action drawing exercises; ‘a ball falling’.

I say that I’m trying to avoid working in any style but, for this speeding car, I couldn’t help going for some 1930s streamlining, the sort you’d find in Tintin story or in a Goofy cartoon on how not to drive that I remember.

I’ve just finished reading Alan McKenzie’s How to Draw & Sell Comic Strips. He’s a professional with years of experience, so his book is full of practical advice, the low-down on how the business works and the nuts and bolts of putting together a comic (he edits, or did edit at the time of writing, the British science fiction comic 2000AD). But compare his advice on drawing cars:

‘Drawing cars convincingly is where many artists fall down. Readers are likely to be very familiar with what cars look like, so you better make sure you use good reference.’

with Abel and Madden’s more encouraging:

‘If you don’t know how to draw a realistic Porsche, just draw a rectangular shape with a few circles under it: instant car!’

Exercise 4; ‘a person staggering’.

The latter approach isn’t going to get you a contract to draw the next instalment of Spiderman but I know which of those gets me itching to pick up my pencil and have fun.

Links

Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website (lots of additional resources here, if you’re tackling the course in the book)

Alan McKenzie’s How to Draw & Sell Comic Strips

Sketchy Intervals

Mirfield from Charlotte’s ice cream parlour, Tuesday.
Old butcher’s shop, now a beauty salon, drawn from the opticians when we took my mum on Thursday.

I FEEL out of practice with drawing. I’ve spent my spare time this week learning a drawing program, Manga Studio EX4, but that isn’t the same as getting out and drawing for several hours. We’ve had a couple of mornings of appointments/coffee with my mum, which effectively breaks my rhythm especially as, partly as a result, I’m getting around to tracing one of the branches of our family tree.

I’m finding that addictively interesting, like a puzzle or a detective story.

Manga Studio

My attempt at the ‘Creating Your First Manga Page: A Quick-Start Guide’ in Doug Hills’ ‘Manga Studio for Dummies’.

As I enjoy drawing in a sketchbook, why should I go through the rather technical process of learning Manga Studio, a computer assisted drawing program?

  • It’s good to have a change occasionally and work in a different medium; I want to use it with my pen tablet, although you can simply scan in your line drawings
  • There’s a possibility that it could save me a lot of time on the structural side of drawing a comic strip

I had about 100 individual panels to draw for my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire so I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities that the program offers to draw panels around each frame. As you can see, I haven’t quite got into that; Doug Hills’ Quick-Start guide in Manga Studio for Dummies shows a figure bursting out of a frame but the explanation of how to do that must come in a later chapter. Manga Studio is also intended to mask the parts of a drawing which overlap the frame, so that you get white borders between the frames, a feature that didn’t work with the method that I used to set up this page.

Dots and Stipples

It offers a lot of help with speech and thought bubbles and comic book sound effects but the feature that really attracts me is the ability to add tones and textures, which I’ve made a start with here.

It’s going to be especially useful in print as I can produce artwork for newspapers or magazines that is pure line; even the tone will be pure black and white, made up of tiny stipples or dots. Pen lines should be crisper as they’re not converted to half tones during the printing process.

That’s probably enough technical stuff!

Links; Manga Studio, PNH Comics; Doug Hills’ website

Anime Studio

I LIKE drawing, as you might have noticed, so the South Park style cut-out animation that I associate with Anime Studio never appealed to me; I’d rather laboriously draw every frame, however I had an e-mail offer and decided to give the beginner’s version, Anime Studio Debut 8 a try.

Apart from the Quick Start Tutorial that comes with the program, this is my first attempt at an animation. I wanted to try importing images (File/Import/Image), converting my scanned sketches into vector graphics (Draw/Trace Image).

In Anime automated animation works smoothly, for example the way the fish and the jellyfish move and diminish in size, but any manipulations that I make, such as moving the crabs claws and the waving of the frond of ‘seaweed’, need a degree of forward planning and care if they’re not going to look as jerky and awkward as they do here. However I feel that I’ve grasped the basics and hope that I can do something more creative with it.

This title and the soundtrack were added when I uploaded the clip to YouTube but you can do that in Anime too.

Monoprint

IT RARE for me to produce any kind of print so I took the opportunity of joining the children who were making monoprints from thin sheets of expanded polystyrene in the Faceless theatre company tent at today’s Horbury Show. My friend John Welding has designed the artwork on the tent, which is a cross between a bouncy castle and a large igloo so I decided to draw that as simply as I could on paper (along with the Faceless 9ft tall Heron and accompanying Ornithologist, who had just made a tour of the showground), then traced it through to the other side of the paper to get a reversed image, before scoring the lines through onto the polystyrene.

I’d greatly overestimated the ability of the bobbly textured polystyrene to produce a fine line so John’s design of interlinked hands doesn’t show at all but, there you are, a finished print in 30 minutes or so.

The Boathouse

We took a walk around Newmillerdam this afternoon and discovered that the Friends of Newmillerdam were serving hot drinks and cakes so I was able to sit and sketch an oak tree from a cafe table at the lakeside.

Catching up

Burton Agnes Hall, near Bridlington, drawn when my friend Helen Thomas spent a week as an artist in residence there.

I’VE BEEN catching up with my holiday diary for Corfu today. I wanted to write about the experience while it was still fresh in my mind but I don’t think that I’ve done anything like justice to impressions that the island made on me.

After catching up with book orders, accounts, the garden, jobs around the house and doing a refresher course on Dreamweaver since I got back, not to mention attending a wedding and a funeral within four days of each other, I’m looking forward to getting back to work on my next book.

To draw a line under a rather disrupted month, here are the meagre contents of my recent sketchbooks, the drawings that didn’t make it into my online journal.

Langsett Moor, drawn from a photograph taken on a recent walk.

On the radio today there was an article on the increase in sales of fountain pens. Some specialist shops report a doubling of sales. I can see the attraction, they often give you a more fluid feel as you write or draw, so it’s very suitable for quick sketches like this Blackbird preening, which I drew when we took my mum for lunch at the Bella Italia at Birstall. I like restaurants where you can bird watch as you eat.

The bar at the Bella Italia, Birstall, drawn with my new Safari fountain pen.
Sowthistle

I went back to ArtPen, the one filled with Noodlers waterproof black ink, for these last two drawings, again drawn while we were out and about with my mum. These were drawn in my new 8 inch square format sketchbook but I’d forgotten to put a spare set of watercolours in the bag that fits it, so they’ll have to stay in black and white.

Bella Coffee

I’M STILL getting used to my new pen, the Lamy Safari fountain pen. It’s great for writing because it flows so smoothly and the slightly italic nib gives a consistent broad downstroke and fine sidestroke but this presents a bit of a problem when drawing because it keeps wanting to go with its natural flow. For drawing I’m used to a pen which will happily go off in any direction, like the ArtPen with its sketch nib or a fibre tipped drawing pen. But I think that the Safari has possibilities either for a simpler and bolder approach, aiming at the sort of ‘clear line’ Hergé used in the Tintin comic strips (yes, wouldn’t it be great if a pen could help me draw like that! I guess you have to apply a certain amount of intellectual rigour as well as change your pen) or alternatively go the other way and try for a lighter, more diffident line.
For the moment I’ll have to make do with plain awkward.