The Kingfisher

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  1. A comic drawing and coloring tutorial.

    Here is a technique I use on the Kingfisher, that I developed as I created the comic. Originally I drew it all by hand, but I began drawing it with the tablet. This will be a step by step of how to draw a kinda lame picture of Jack!

    Step 1.) I sketch very roughly at first, but I already am thinking about the character I am drawing, and his expression. For example, Jack has a long head, prominent nose and upturned eyes, so I keep this in mind as I scribble.

    Step 2.) On the same layer I rough in more details, Jack’s eyes are generally “<” shaped, and he has a distinctive shape to his jaw. I draw the anatomy of the chest though I will cover it with clothing.

    Step 3.) I set this sketchy layer to 50% opacity, and start a new layer on top. I draw on top more carefully, as though I were ‘inking’ the pencil. All my characters have littles clues in their character designs to make them unique. Jack has small lines under his eyes for his cheekbones, and his piercings. 

    Step 4.) I drew him a more stylish outfit, and began coloring. I start a new layer set to multiply on top of the lines, and using ‘use all layers’ option on the fill bucket, I paste in flat colors. I have a color guide for each character so their palette stays consistent. Right now there are gross lines around the fill areas, but we will fix that later.

    Step 5.) I added in a background and some details like his lips. To fix those gross lines, I used the paintbrush tool on the layer with the colors, with the brush set to ‘behind’ mode, so I can just go in filling in the colors behind the lines to smooth them out.

    Step 6.) Some simple shading. I set a hue/saturation layer on top, with about -25 brightness and adding a bit of saturation. (So the shadows don’t get too gray.) I add a layer mask to this layer, and invert it, so the layer doesn’t show. I use the brush and ‘paint’ in the shadows on the layer mask, the darkness appearing where I draw.

    Step 7.) I add another hue/saturation layer set to lighten everything, and do the same thing for highlights. To make this less blocky, I set my brush to about 10 percent opacity and brush around the edges of the shadows to soften them. The brush is low opacity, but hard edged. I like this because it creates a chunky, painterly look as opposed to the more typical airbrush look.

    Step 8.) Final step - I add in a gradient background, and set it to ‘posterize’ to keep it from looking lame. I flatten the image and use the dodge and burn tools to add a little extra dimensionality. I realize Jack’s nose is too big, so I copy and paste it on to a new layer and resize it, using the brush tools to patch it up. I sign it!

    Now… if this were a comic page for Chapter One so far, I would now take this into Painter and do all kinds of insane things to it before I was finished. But this is a good start!