One of our clients at work has a son who wants to be a cartoonist, so I just wrote a little “inside peek” at how I do my work for Strategic Coach. I figured I should share that here, too.
When I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with coming up with my own characters (“copying” was a swear-word to me). Unfortunately, though, I stopped there, just drawing each character standing still, over and over.
Working with Dan has been a brilliant challenge for me. He’ll say, “I picture dozens of entrepreneurs jumping from one platform to another, all of them looking and doing something different.” Um… okay! As a result of taking on these challenges, I’ve learned a ton, and my skills have just exploded over these past few years.
In other words, I’m finally drawing characters in comic strip panels full of action.
The biggest tip I could give about drawing goes back to all those books on cartooning I read as a kid — although at the time I found their advice constantly frustrating — as is summed up perfectly in this internet meme:
But I’ve finally caught onto this principle, called “under-drawing”, and it’s made a huge difference in my abilities.
Putting pencil to paper and producing a finished drawing is like walking out of the shower, onto a stage, and performing an opera. Sure, there’s probably someone who can do it, but most of us mortals need to rehearse.
In comics, the equivalent to that rehearsal is “under-drawing”: using a light “non-photo blue” pencil to rough out the shapes that make up your character and scene, then going in with your pencil or ink to do the final lines — the “performance”.
The advantage is that it makes everything hold together — whereas if you just start out somewhere in the middle and go from there, you get some pretty weird anatomy happening, find your words all squooshed into a corner, or you make a mistake you can’t undo. (Okay, I do my final Coach work in software, so, yes, I can undo it. But I can’t Control-Z on paper. I do often find myself trying to “pinch-to-zoom” on paper as well.)
So this is how I work:
1) I’ve made cereal box cut-outs for all my different sizes of comic panels. So I start by tracing out my panel on paper.
2) Inside the panel, I rough out the geometric shapes that make up my characters and the scene. Then I go over the lines in pencil. (You can see my blue under-drawing here. I had trouble getting the hands and the book right!)
3) I scan this and bring it into the program where I do all my cartooning work, Clip Studio Paint. It’s a complicated monster of a thing, translated from Japanese, but it is incredible. It does absolutely everything — like Photoshop on steroids, just for cartoonists. Unlike Photoshop, though, which is $50 a month forever, Clip Studio Paint is $50… once. I don’t get how it can be so cheap, but I’m grateful to the people who make this miracle of a thing.
I was spinning my wheels trying to understand it until I found some great YouTube videos that helped me get started, and I’ve been learning something new just about every day since.
4) In Clip Studio Paint, I can turn my real-world grey pencils into blue lines again — like digital under-drawing.
5) I do my final “inks” on the computer. Clip Studio Paint has layers, and I use those a lot. It’s so much easier than drawing permanently, destructively on top of your original. So I create a new layer and ink on it.
6) With my inks in place, I turn off the blue layer, create another layer underneath my inks, and colour in the character. (In the comics profession, this is called “flatting” — probably because “colouring-in” doesn’t sound like a job somebody would get paid for.) Some of the brushes make hard lines, whereas others are soft, like watercolour brushes — I like to use those for shadows. (You can see those softer brush-strokes on his cheeks, hand, arms, and hair.)
7) Then I put in a background on another layer.
8) Now it’s time for all the decoration and special effects, which I putter around with a lot — but, since they’re on their own layers, they don’t damage my foreground character at all.
And that’s how I make my cartoons for Strategic Coach!
I hope that’s helpful.