"Let's make it 3 for 3" Tuesday June 19th, 2007

Here is some filler for you because I really do feel bad not having a comic up. In yet another spur of the moment thing, my cousin and her daughter are coming to NYC tomorrow and the day after before heading to Buffalo for some summer school program. So my dad and I will be spending Wednesday and Thursday in the city. For those of you keeping track that makes it three weeks in a row where I have gone into the city during the time I should be making my comic. I've been crazy busy, but I figured I had to at least get some filler up to be fair.

This was the new and improved 5 Spot design I had initially come up with waaaay back when Ninja Spirit was just starting. I really liked the design and I figured that while I was making the Foxy t shirt, I would update the 5 Spot design with new drawings. Thus was 5 Spot V2.0 born. For the sake of detail I will go into how I actually made the finished piece. Keep in mind that up through the last image, these are steps I do for EVERY panel of the comic. After which I will then add a background, SFX, Word Bubbles, and the words themselves. So without further ado the breakdown of 5 Spot V2.0.

P1 - Line Art: For this piece I drew 5 different pictures that would eventually form the final image. I draw on vellum bristol board using blue lead and then go back and ink everything with a size .05 Copic Multiliner Pen. I scan the inked art as a black and white or line art image in Photoshop 7 at 1200 DPI. After the image is scanned I will then turn it into a grayscale image. I set the image to about 10% opacity and then create a new layer on top of this. I then use the Pen tool to go back and completely redraw the entire image. I use ALOT of layers for this step as I pretty much use a layer for every body part. At this stage I copied and pasted all 5 separate images into one and then made sure the dimension of the image is where I wanted it. In the end the image should pretty much look like a crisp line art image of the final picture.

P2 - Color: At this point I resize the image to a 6 or 8 inch wide image set at 300 DPI (6 inches for a half width panel, 8 for a full width panel). I will cut and paste the line art twice and then create a third layer in between them. Using the blue channel I will select the line art and then shrink my selection by a few pixels and then fill that selection in the third layer with my shade blue color. I set the layer to multiply with an opacity of 30%. The very top layer I will set to multiply. Finally I will go back and delete any background portion of the image so that the image sits on a transparent background. the bottom line art layer will be my color layer. I go in with the magic wand and select what parts I want to color and fill those in using color swatches that I have saved for each character. I also fill in an extra pixel or two since it keeps any stray uncolored white pixels from showing up. The line art is not affected because I still have the very top level as my line art.

P3 - Shading: Using the line art as a selection, I will go in with the pencil tool and manually draw in the cel shaded lines in the picture using the shade blue color I have saved. I will then use the paint can tool to fill in the shaded areas. After I am done, I will create an overlay layer above the shaded layer set at 50% opacity. I will then use the shaded layer as a selection and then use the brush tool to brush pure black to create a gradient in the shaded layer. I will then select the inverse and change to a light yellow or blue to create a soft highlight opposite the shaded gradient.

P4 - Highlights: (Note that I edited the image in this panel so you could more easily see the highlights. Usually I will turn on the colors layer and then highlight over that.) I create a screen layer in between the shaded and color layer. I will the make a selection of the line art using the blue channel again and create a line art using pure black. This will not show up since the layer is a screen and will only show the white in the final image. I then use the pencil tool with pure white to draw the outline of the highlight areas in the image. Like the shaded layer I will finish by filling in the highlighted area with white using the paint can tool.

P5 - Composite: At each stage I will usually only keep the layer I am working on and the line art visible. Once I finish the highlight layer I usually turn all the layers on so I can see the final image. It is also at this stage where I add things like glasses, textures like chain mail or dress fabric, blood, dirt, etc. For most stand alone one shot images the drawing is pretty much finished at this point and even if I add a background it's only another hour of work at most. However for the comic, I end up doing another 4-6 hours of work adding background, resizing the image, adding special effects, animation, words and word bubbles, panel borders, etc. Doing one stand alone image I can fly through this whole process in maybe 2 hours, but for a whole 9 panel comic it usually takes me 8-12 hours.

P6 - Finished Art: For this image I selected each characters panel and then manually changed the color to its finished hue by adjusting the hue/Saturation settings to get what you see as the finished product. I will save the image one last time and then resize it to a server space friendly 70 DPI version and save the resized image. You should know that I ALWAYS and with OCD like precision save my art whenever I finish each step. Sometimes multiple times in between steps. You only have to lose your work a few times before you too start doing this. I really wish they could have an autosave feature in Photoshop. Maybe they do in the CS version and I just don't know. At either rate remember to ALWAYS SAVE and SAVE FREQUENTLY. Drawing a comic or image in deadline type scenario is hard enough, you don't need to push yourself over the edge because Photoshop decided to crash or your computer does the same.

Well that was it. I know a lot of the terms may not make sense to those of you unfamiliar with Photoshop, but I included them for those of you who are. I should also note once again that this style of coloring was given to me by the MacHall coloring tutorial. I have adjusted and changed it heavily to suit my own needs and because I am just not as good as Ian McConville. I take comfort in knowing that very few people are. Again the basic premise of the separate layers (save the highlights) and their function are the same, but the details have been smudged and altered to make it easier and faster for me to do the comic. I hope this long and detailed post makes up a bit for not having a comic up and I hope you enjoyed this little insight into how I draw the Ninja Spirit comic.

I want to mention that I cannot promise there will be a comic on Thursday/Friday, but I will make every effort to have the comic I was working on, done and uploaded. We'll see how the city treats me. See you soon.

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