Transcripts
1. Introduction: Greetings, everyone. My name is Eric Faris, and welcome to my class on how to make a comic book from start to finish in this class, I'm gonna be teaching you basically how to make a comic book from scratch from the beginning phase all the way to the finish product. Now, I've divided this into two sections. I did this for a specific reason. Now the two sections are the writing phase and the art face. Now it did this so that anyone coming into these videos can go to the section that they want to go to meaning. If you're just a writer, you could go to the writing phase. If you're just an artist, you can go to the art phase. This will allow you to basically pick and choose what you want to learn, depending on what your level is already. And obviously, if you want both, you have them. They're there. So that's gone home. Going to basically separate these two eso. I hope you're gonna enjoy these Baxley At the end of the 1st 2 sessions, I'm gonna also have an extra session later on these air going to be just some basic things that I don't think need to be talked about right now, but our little tips and tricks that I can teach you guys about even more things when it comes to comic book making. Also, I will allow questions and I'll answer the questions, make videos in these new formats for a later time. But for now, I just want to focus on these two big sections and are gonna be talked about and all the little things that go into the actual production of a comic book. So I hope you enjoy these. I hope you get something out of them. And I hope that by the time this is over, you can make your own comic book and share it in the class project, which will be what yells would be other than making a comic book for yourself. So let's get started in the first phase, which is the writing phase, and I'll see you guys there
2. Tools Needed: Greetings, everyone, and welcome to the first lesson of the writing phase of creating a comical in this lesson. I'm simply going to go over many of the tools that you're going to need in order to write a story. Now note that some of these are optional, meaning that if you don't I want to use them. There are different options, so just keep in mind that you can use any tool that fits your needs. So some of the tools you are going to need in order to write a story are his fault. You're going to need something to write your story on this congee, either a notebook, a note pad, a computer, laptop or tablet to go with the notebook and the note pad. You will also need some type of writing utensil, either a pencil or pen with a computer, laptop or tablet. You're going to need some type of software to write your stories down. These could be anything as simple as note pad or word pad. You could also use Microsoft office, or you can use a very cool website called Celtics. It is designed to help people make screenplays, scripts and other types of writing. The website is free to use if you wish. Pen has a subscription option. If you would like some more features, however, all you need is the free version to do everything that we're going to be doing in the next lessons. Now let's move on to the next lesson of the writing phase.
3. Brainstorming and Plot Summary: welcome to the second lesson of the writing phase. In this lesson, we're going to brainstorm and rough out the plot of the story. Brainstorming is simply when you sit down and come up with ideas for your story. This could be done anywhere, really rather your at home or at your office, or even if you're on a train or bus. All that is important is that you coming up with ideas and keeping them in your head. An important thing to do is to write down these ideas as you come up with, either in a notebook or on a computer, either a desktop computer, a laptop or even your tablet. Other things you could do is carry around what is known as a pocket notebook, which is just a very small little notebook that you can fit in either your chest pocket or your pants pocket. You could also carry around a recorder recorder is just a way of recording your voice, and you can talk about the idea that you're just had. You can also use your phone to record your ideas as well. Brainstorming is very important as this is where you're going to get all of your main ideas right off the bat. And don't try to think of the whole story all at once. Just think of the big picture, all the big important information that you really want to kind of just go into your story, such as the theme, maybe a few characters, if you want to. The setting of the story, even the time period. All of this is just quick. A little brainstorming is to get thoughts moving after you've done a lot of your brain storming and written them all down. It is a good idea from this point is to kind of create your characters. Now creating characters is kind of personal between people. Everyone has their own way of doing. My method is usually Aiken sit and think of the character all in one setting, where I'm coming up with the look of the character, a lot of their back story and even their name usually up in one point. I like to do this because it allows everything to feel consistent and feel true to the character. Now I won't be going over the actual drawing information because that will be taken place in the art phase, which will be coming later on. Once you've created a character in your head, write them down in any form, either Computer tablet paper, anyway, once you've come up with your character sheet, which is basically a form to have all the characters information like their name, some physical features like body type height, colors of their eyes, skin tone, hair style, hair color, any information you think is important, as well as making notes of either the characters, history or some of the interactions they might have with other characters. Whatever you feel is important, once you've created all your characters, it is a good idea to also create the scenery or the setting of your story. If you're setting is based in reality than it's good to just make note of important facts about the places that is taking place. Once you've done all that, the next thing that I like to do is write a plot, something. This is a single paragraph that will tell the entire story. Now, if you're a comic book writer, this should also be taken into consideration that you're only gonna be doing the plot summary for a single issue. or a single arc of issue once you've done that. Normally, this is where I stop, as I do things very much like the Marvel way back in the old days where the editor or writer would come up to the artist and give them a basic plot summary. And then the artists would have free reign to create the story themselves, which then a writer or editor coming later and add the dialogue afterwards. This is something that I like to do, as I am also an artist, and I do all that myself. However, if you are just a writer, you want to now go in and break down that plot summary into multiple stages on multiple parts of that story. So I would take it first and break it into three segments of beginning, middle and end. After them, you take each of those three and then break them down again into three each. This way, you're breaking it down the segment mawr and more to get more of the finer details that you're going to need later on. Once you've done that, you now have the basic summary of your entire story, or at least this issue. Next, we're going to move on to the actual riding stage where I'm going to be teaching how to write a comic book script, so I'll see you in that video.
4. Writing a Script: Greetings, everyone. And welcome to the third lesson off the writing phase. In this lesson, I'm going to be showing you how to actually write a comic book script. And what I'm going to be using is what you're seeing in front of me is the website for Celtics Celtics. Like I stated in a previous video is a website that is used to create screenplays and other types of scripts. You see here now with the free version of this website meeting. If you're just using a free account, you could only really make anything right here. Uh, anything that has a lock on it is for premium memberships only. So things like project schedules, all these other kinds of things. But thankfully for us theme comic books, scripting is for free. So you don't have to pay for that now. I already have right here a file created called flare. Many comics number one. Now I will explain what a mini comic is in the art face. It'll be a video completely separate on so you can go over there and watch that video. However, just to kind of quickly some up. A mini comic is in name a small comic. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna make a simple four page comic book. I will only really show you a little bit of the actual scripting just because I want to get this over pretty quickly without drawing and out too much. So right here in an open, I have a very quick plot summary of what This minute comics gonna be? The character flair and the character Brick our characters of a comic book that I am working on. So these air my own pair original characters Now, in this one I haven't said here, Flair is out on patrol when he comes across villain Brick causing trouble in city, the two of them come to a confrontation, and it leads to Blair players. Easy victory. Now, this is just something really quick that I can get over in, you know, easy. Four pages. So this is what we're gonna be working with. So all I have to do is to create a thing like this You said clear, create. You click on whatever you want to do, like comic book and we'll bring up a window and you enter the name when you click. OK, it will put the It'll put the script right here to edit it. Just simply click on when you click on it. It is going to open up in the new page. Now you can see here. This is where you're actually gonna be writing. Now, let me just explain a few little bits and bobs. You have your main title right over here, which you could edit by simply clicking. You have your navigator here, Would just you'll see in a moment helps you navigate through your script much faster. Obviously, you have your print for print to pdf features here your save feature, which it can't save right now because there is no changes. You have things like your history, which just lets you see things you've done sharing, which is pretty obvious. And comments on the actual workspace here has multiple things. You could turn off the navigator if you want. You can choose here what type of format you're going here, like right here. It says Page, because this is paid one which would have a lot of your information about page. If you want to put anything however you need to in most complex scripts. You have Page one and then you simply go down One. Now, thankfully, Celtics automatically in dense for you here. So it knows that because I went down 12 page one, it knows that the next thing is panel one. It knows this because that's how you write a script that is, the format of Coppola's script goes. So Panel one, he's gonna be the first scene in your comic in this case, the first panel. This is going to be a two panel page, this first page, and I'm actually gonna put here just for my own sake. This will be the actual panel on This is where you put the actual information. Four, said Pamela. So this one impanel one I'm going to simply right flair is flying over the city. Very simple. Now there doesn't need to be a caption, but here is what you do next. When you hit enter, it takes you to the next line, which in this would be where you put a caption or if you want to. You can change that to character balloon, which the which character in Blue character is basically depicting what character will be talking and then balloon is basically saying what the actual text is and a caption is something different. So in this caption, I can say right here that is what will be typed in a caption box. Now, Captain Mark is simply a square that will go on the page so you don't have to worry about that. Next. We have a character. So the character were to be saying anything, I would be putting their name here, So Flare was to be saying something I would put player. But since he is not in this panel, I will leave that until I get him in there again. When you cook in her again without typing anything in that section, it automatically opens up a new path. So on panel two, I'm gonna have something like this. Very simple. Blair reacts to a large sound. This is gonna Teoh just kind of his. This is a reaction shot hit Enter again and as caption Now, with this, you can also put information like sound effects for me. I'm gonna put sound FX in this case I'm going to put boot, and that's just something for me to know. That there is going to sound effect. Now, once you've done this and you want to start your next page, you simply go down, go down one time and then change this to pay. Now it knows that I'm on the next page. So the next ever again and they'll have panel one like I did before. I'm gonna know Tate right here. How many panels I want this page to have in this case, I believe I'm going to go with three because I think that will work best for the seen Mary . So now we're going to say what's gonna happen in Panel one Paddle one. I'm going to show Brick the main villain of the story. So for it, I'm going to say Brick is causing trouble very simple and gets the point across. Now, if I want to, you can go into far greater detail, which I would highly suggest you going into detail, meaning, explaining exactly what is going on in the scene. There, I put much more detail of the visuals of what's actually happened. This is great. For if you're going to actually have an artist for all your comic book, as it allows them to know exactly what's going on now. I just want to quickly make a note over here of the navigate here. You can see exactly what I meant when I was saying how it works. It no Tates every page that I set up. So when I click on something like this, it brings up to the top where that page is. So that's how you're going to be able to navigate through much quicker. If you need to get to certain pages When you have maybe 20 pages here and you're always him down, you can simply cook on a page to go back to it to see some information you might need for reference. Because in this case, I have a brick himself yelling. That means I'm going to have him saying something. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna hit enter. But I'm also gonna hit enter one more time to set two characters. So now I'm gonna put the character's name Brick. Then I'm gonna click enter and now I have what's called Balloon. This is what's going to be said within a text. So now I'm going to be typing his dialogue So there we have a dialogue. Um, it's very simple and just kind of very straight forward for a villain to just kind of boast about himself. So I think it'll work once you have the dialogue, that's pretty much what's gonna be in the text. And what you can do here is if you're the letter, you're able to simply copy this and put it right into the comic itself. And that's very helpful, especially with files these days where things were done digital. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm quickly going to finish the rest of this script off camera quick thing I wanted to know before I finish here is a quick, little a short cut for doing certain things. For instance, if I cook enter, it takes it to caption over. In this case, this is panel three, which is gonna have no information on it other than the fact that it is a scene, I'm not gonna have any text. So what I want to do is I want to switch to page. So instead of just continuously hitting enter, well, you could do is you can hit the tab key and you can cycle through the different types of things until you get to the one you want, which in this case, is the new page. Another quick thing to note here is another great feature is that the program Celtics will actually remember things that you have typed before. So, for instance, on pastry, I wanted to also be three pedals. So if I immediately start typing three, it notices that I've already done this before and allows me to simply just hit enter, and it will copy that information down for me to know. So this is actually a good way to save time. If you've already type something, it should also do it for character names as well, as long as you have previously, type them. So what I've done here is I've finished the entire script. You can see this is the entire thing. It stops with Page four. Like I noted now, I did change a few things now, as I was typing. Originally, I had Page three with only three panels. However, in order to make things look nicer, I decided to add an extra panel to the page, which made Page four a lot easier to wrap things up on and not seem like it was two brushed because this is a mini comic. I didn't want any of the pages to have more than maybe four panels. As with a many comic, the pages are much smaller, so you only have a little bit of room to work with. But that's something we can talk about in the other video and this one. You just need to know that this is the entire script that we're going to be working with when I do get to the art Now, for any of you are writing script, this is a great format to look at because it really does define the way comics or written. Now I know that was a little brief, and I kind of went over things very quickly. But with a comic book script, it's really not that complicated when you're trying to get things down. All you need to know is that when you're working with panels and you're typing information , in reality, you want to put as much information as you possibly can, especially if you're going to have another artist working on it here. I didn't do so because I am the artist, and I have faith in my ability to remember what I meant when I simply said something like Blair is flying over the city. It's very straightforward to me. However, if there is anything in your script that you need to specifically say, like a certain building you want in the background, put that information because remember, the artist needs to know everything that he needs to know in order to make the page look the way you want it to look. So put every bit of information that you can that you feel will help the artist, including characters who might be in the background, any type of buildings that might be in the background or any scenery that might be important. So I hope that was helpful in some way. If you have any questions, please leave them in the discussion section, and I will try to answer him. If I feel that the question is worth making video on, I will make a separate video to answer that question in a whole nother section of my class . Thank you for watching, and I will see you guys in the art phase of my class
5. Mini Comics and Webcomics: Greetings, everyone, and welcome to the first lesson of the art phase here. I'm just going to go over to other types of comics that are different than standard. The mini comic and the Web comic, A mini comic is simply a very short, sometimes small comic book that you can get done. That usually is around 4 to 6 pages, sometimes eight, if you really want to push it there. Just designed to be very short, very simple comic books, usually printed very small and could be done at home without having to go through any type of publishing. They're very good for beginners, and a good tool to learn on a Web comic is simply a comic book that you post online in many cases these air ones where you instead of posting an entire chapter every month, you can sometimes put a single page a day or a single page every week. These can be continuous stories or gag a day reels. It doesn't really matter as long as you're just making something entertaining for you, and it's usually posted online for free at a few different websites. I'll put on the screen a couple of different websites that you can go to now I'm going to be making a mini comic for the next couple videos. So that's what I'm gonna focus on, so I'll see you in the next lesson.
6. Character Creation: Greetings, everyone, and welcome to the next lesson of the art face. In this lesson, I'm just going to quickly go over the basics of character gration. Now, while I talk, you're going to watch as I basically draw out one of the main characters from the story that I had worked on in the writing phase. His name is flair. Now, when you're kind of coming up with characters, a lot of the Kemi done during the writing phase. When you're writing out all of the details with your character, however, you do still need to at least draw out the character, especially if you are the artists, because you need to know how they're going to look. A good thing I like to do is I usually start off with the basic body, so I sit there and I'll sketch out the rough body, usually just kind of getting in the proportions of what I think they should look like. And then I'll just slowly add some detail when I'm designing characters, usually for me. I have most of the designs already in mind, but I understand if for someone else it might not be that easy. So What you could do is you can draw multiple bodies and then just throw in different designs on each one. Try out some different looks and even different ages and different shapes of the body, the face in all the other parts. One of the things that a lot of artists fall into is same face syndrome. This is where most your faces end up looking the same. To get around this. Ah, good thing to do is to practice making random kind of circular ish shapes or just any type of shape, and then try to make a face out of it. Here are two examples of some faces that you can make with just two basic shapes. Now, with this character flare, I kind of wanted him to be younger, relatively in his teens or so now, in the first design here of the body. The face wasn't really how I liked it to be. I want him to look a little younger. So when I did the final product here, you could see I decided to redraw the face over on the side, and I kind of made it look a little younger simply by making the face a little bit more rounder and have less of that edgy pointing squareness to it. That's one way that I use, especially with my style, to make characters look young or old, depending on how I wanted to go. Now this character you're seeing right here on screen, I already draw off camera. His name is Brick, and he's the villain of the story, and I want him to look more bulky and edgy and just kind of brutish, So I gave him very square features. Now I was gonna draw him, making him look like a rock creature. However, I decided to go against that instead. I'm going to and make him so that his body is still very bulky. But the only thing that makes him kind of different is the skin tone is going to be mawr stone looking, and maybe I'll add a texture later on. However, for right now this is good enough for what we're doing. Now that we have our characters fleshed out, let's move on to the next stage, which is where we're going to actually get into the working of pages
7. Rough Layouts: Greetings, everyone. And welcome to the next lesson of the art phase in this video. I'm just gonna quickly show you how to lay out a page. Now, page layouts are very simply you're just going to create a rough layout of where the panels are gonna go and the scene itself. Now, if you look on the actual script we have, which I'll show up on screen the 1st 2 panels of the first page of very simple. The 1st 1 is Flair is simply flying over a city in the second panel. We have him reacting to a sound. Now, I'm just gonna quickly layout this page. Now, here, you see here I just quickly just did a little black outline here. This is to roughly symbolize a page. So this is a single page. I'm just gonna use a standard pen. Uh, you're using this instead of a pencil because it means I can't erase. So I'm just gonna really loosely do something. Now I know it's gonna be two panels here. Now, the first thing one of the side is the size of the panels. Now, sides of the panels really depends on how important the panel is so for something like the opening shot, which is him flying over a city. I kind of think that that should be the bigger panel on these two pages. So instead of dividing it directly in half, I'm gonna go where the half mark is. I'm just gonna go a little lower. And then that's roughly where I'm gonna set up that so that you could see the bigger panel , which is the establishing. It's just gonna show flare flying through the air across the city and then on here, he's gonna react to something. So here, I'm just gonna quickly figure out where I wanted to go, so he's gonna be flying over the city, so I gotta decide on how I want that to go. So first panel quickly laid out. I have everything I need to know, um, for the layout. So I know that he's going to be flying through the air here is gonna be buildings back here . I probably put some, you know, obviously some buildings, they're gonna go fry right around here as well. So that's something I just remember. This is just roughing out the idea, So nothing here is permanent. Nothing here is really crucial. So down here, I'm going to do the same thing. He's gonna be reacting to something. So when I'm just gonna quickly rough out, what is that? He's reacting to something very have it very crude, very simple. Just roughed out that, Hey, he's reacting to something, and that's all you need to do. You do not need to over complicate this step. This is the easiest step because you're just putting down lines to tell where things are going to be. So this video is really quick, and that's because this is a really quick step. And I just want to make sure that you understood that you don't have to be perfect with step. This is crude. Rough stick, figure drawing. That's all you need to do. So thank you for watching this one. And I'll see you in the next video. We're actually gonna get into more of the main stuff, which is actually working on the pencils and the rough pencils in the final pencils of drawing a page. So I'll see you in that video
8. Pencils: Greetings, everyone. And welcome to another lesson of the art phase. In this video, I'm going to be showing you how to do the pencil stage of creating a comic book page. Now, the first part we're going to do here is we're going to the penciling stage now. The penciling stages actually two parts. You have your rough pencils and your final pencils. Now they're all gonna be done here on this 11 by 17 piece of paper, and I know it's a little cut off here on the camera, but don't worry, I'm gonna be zooming into a specific spot that we're gonna work on, which is going to be the first Pretty much top half of this page is all gonna be one image , because remember, the first page that we worked on in the layouts is two panels. So I'm gonna have the first panel which is going to be a big, little upper place up here, and I'm gonna draw that now. Normally, I use blue pencil when I do a lot of my roofs. However blue does not show up very well, cause you can see there are actually blue lines on the page. here itself. These air guidelines now guidelines air just so that you know when you're creating com book , where certain parts are. And here's how it works. The inner square. There's a big square here in the middle that is the library. This is all the safe area. This means all textured pretty much go within this first box. After that, you have the bleed areas, and the one after that is the full bleed. What these mean is basically anything after this Final line, which is way over here, anything past that is most likely going to get cut off, because in a comic book the whole page is not being used. They actually cut off sections around the outside. So if you want a picture to go all the way to the edge of the paper, even when it's printed, you want to go all the way to the edge of the page knowing that part of it's gonna get cut off. However, anything you want that you know you don't want to get cut off, keep it within these two first lines, which is the live area in the bleed area. So that's just a rough of what this looks like. Now let's actually do some of the rough pencils. I'm gonna do it first in blue, but I am going to use Black to darken it so you can actually see what looks like. So I'm gonna do it off camera just because you're not gonna really able to see what I'm doing. But don't worry. I'll be coming in afterwards to do a lot of my time or finished pencils with the black pencil. So I'll see you in a moment, all right? And we're back. And I used my blue pencil to do all these Rough says You can see here now they're a little hard to see. I did try to darken them a little bit with the blue, but basically I have flare here. He's flying over the city. I kind of changed the perspective a little bit from my layout just because I thought this was a lot nicer looking because it hasn't coming at us. It has a little bit of four shortening as well as a lot of perspective going on with the buildings. And with this kind of thing, just know that perspective is basically meaning that the further back. Something goes obviously this smaller. It looks now if you have three dimensional shapes that are squared off like these buildings and all, they're just gonna look like they're going back in space. Now, as you can see, the point that they go back to is here. So this is the vanishing point, and then everything comes out from there. So I kind of did a little bit of a grid pattern with some blue lines just going everywhere , and even he is going back in space to this point. So what I did here was I just roughed him out, got him mostly tight penciled. But everything else is, you see, is very barren now with buildings and all with my style, I don't put a lot of detail. I just put a little bit of things here and there wherever I need them. But when we do is I'm gonna quickly just go over it in black pencil and I'm gonna I'm gonna do a quick little time lapse. It's just going to be really fast and really little crude. So I know I'm not putting a lot of detail in here, but that's not the point of these videos. It's just to show you the process so real quick here, I'm going to go ahead and just quickly pencil back over these things with my black pencil so you can see him easier. Here we go. All right, then. Now you can see I've got all the pencils pretty much the way I want TEM. Now you notice that there's no details in the buildings themselves. Now, this is something I got. I gotta stop and really point this out. You noticed that as I was doing this for some of these things, I was using a ruler. But as you saw with some of the background stuff, I wasn't used ruler. Now, please do not emulate me. Use a ruler any time you're doing straight lines. I cannot stress this enough. The only reason I don't use it would be simple, because I am very lazy. And for this type of video, um, I just for me and the way I drawl it just doesn't work for me. But I have to tell you, you need to use rulers for stuff like this, At least for the penciling stage. If you feel you can use a steady enough hand to get some of these things to be done in the inking phase, or if, during the inking face, you want it to look a little more rough. Go ahead. But for the pencils, use a ruler, especially for a lot of these buildings now. Like I said, I left these blank because I'm going to do those with the inks. I'm going to think in a lot of the detail here, using a lot of black. Now that's just my style. I use a lot of heavy blacks and heavy shadows in stuff like buildings and backgrounds, so that instead of using the black to create the lines and the detail, I'm gonna be using the white space to create all of the details, like the windows, some of the doors. So they're already very much black on bats. Just personal. That's my style. That's the way I do things. You don't have to do it that way. Even so, with character here, I even change the hand a little bit just cause I liked this, the fist a little better than the hand of swishes. It was off. There's a lot of things off about this picture. I'm just There's just not really enough time for you going correct everything. So I'm just gonna leave it as it is, and I'm gonna leave it as I'm gonna leave it in. Perfect, because sometimes you just have to. Now, obviously, I would suggest going in there and fixing this, like lowering this arm moving that But anyway, thes air the basics of doing the pencils from rough pencils to finish pencils. Now, these to me are finished pencils for me. Now, I got to stress that this is just for my style. For you, I would say go in and put a lot of extra details depending on your style. So that's how this is gonna be very subjective. So thank you for watching this video. And in the next videos, I'm gonna actually Inc this so I'm gonna be going in and seeking all these little details. I am gonna go in and add the extra feature down here as well, as well as I'm going to be doing a lot of the extra stuff with the borders. And also we'll see you in the next video where I do all the finishing up with the inking phase
9. Traditional Inks: Greetings, everyone. And welcome to the inking stage of our little comic book, Endeavour s Oh, yeah, I've zoomed in really tight here on flare himself here because that's all we're going to actually think here. Now, I have scan this into the computer and I did that because I'm going to do to videos here. I'm gonna do one where I'm gonna think this traditionally with what I'm going to be using our these micro pens, these the ones I really like. Pigment micron on my favorite I'm gonna using 03 and 0803 is for everything pretty much. Just get everything down And then I go in with a no way just to outline the character. It's just a nice little design thing to make him pop. I'm not gonna do any the background stuff. Although if I was into the background, I would probably either stick with the eight Onley or I would use a five, which is in between these two just because these don't really need too much, um, boldness to them. They're already just gonna be flatlines anyway. Especially since I'm gonna be filling that in with a lot of black but yeah, this is what I'm gonna be using. Mainly, Another tool that I would use and then I'm starting to use more often is my little brush pen here. This is the prakit brush. This is a tool I've started getting comfortable with. But I'm not quite there yet, so I'm just gonna stay with the pens here. All right, now, now you see that I'm wearing gloves. This love is just called a smudge guard. It's designed to make it so that I don't smudge any of the pencils or the itself, and it really is just a helpful. It also keeps your sweat. So I apologize for doing this in time left. But for time constraints, however, I am going to just quickly talk a few of the things I think about when I mean, when you're thinking, you always want to keep in mind of where your light sources because that's gonna dictate line with times and where shadows Now in this picture, it's not easy to tell just because I didn't go into a lot of great detail, especially because I just wanted to get this over with video. However, whenever you think of life so I just think that dicker lines are always gonna be on the opposite side of where the sun is because they're being cast in shadow. You also want a very your line with just to make things interesting. In this video, I obviously I'm not doing the background. However, when I go for the clean up stage, I will show you what the background a few good things to keep in mind when you're is trying to keep your hands steady. You don't want your hand to be shaking about all the time like mine tends to do so. Just try to keep your hand as steady as possible, even if you have to do things a little slowly doing things like what I did on the feet. They're All you really got to know is that when you're you want to kind of put your fingers so that way, you go from stick thin. It's an old technique, but it works really well now. It doesn't work quite as well with felt tip pens, as they don't have much variation. But if you do it properly, you can get a little bit of a 50 filling in black areas is very simple and want to do it after the race allowed your life to indicate where you're going to fill in a lot of black. Just put a few exits in the areas where you outline this will remind you to go back and add black. So there we have it. That's the basics of how I eat things. And that's just for this character. And that's traditionally so Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into my computer and I'm gonna take my scan of this, and I'm gonna show you how I do things. If I were to ink this digitally with my tablet, so I'll see you guys in that video.
10. Digital Inks: Greetings, everyone. And welcome to another video in the art phase. In this one, I'm just going to quickly go over some of the things that go into digitally inking a comic book. Now you can see here. I have manga studio already opened. I have the image already set in. You're wondering how I got the image in here? Well, first I scanned it Now a scan mind in three pieces that you can see here because I don't have an 11 by 17 scanner. And then what I did is I went into photo shop. Or you could just use manga studio if you want. And what I did was I put them on an 11 by 17 blank sheet and I put them together. And then I blended them. And then when I would end up with is this final image right here? And this is the full one here. And then when I did was I opened up manga studio. I want to up here to file. Then new and I created a new canvas and then simply are here, right? Says presets. You could just create your own presets, and then you just set it up to the way you want it. Just figure out what works best for you, based on whatever comic board you have. But cancel out that. That's how I got it on here. I created a new page in the blank, but they would have just have these little borders. So if I get rid of that, it would literally just have this information and that's all it would have. Is this blank information right here. Now, with this information, it comes with these little guidelines. Now, with these guidelines, If I open this up, I matched them roughly to the guidelines that are built in here now. They weren't perfect, as you can see here. So I did have to do a little bit of movement just to get it right, which is fine. You can do that any way you want. However, it's just something you want to think about when you're creating a temple of your own. Once I had my template. I made this a blue to fill in that blue area. All you do is you take your layer, you make it a color layer and then you click this right here layer color and you change. That's whatever color you want. I changed mine too blue, and this will fill the entire thing. So basically anything that isn't white will become blue. So any blacks or reds or anything, they all become blue. And that's very helpful when you're thinking now the actual inking phase is done with this tool over here, the pen tool, which you can just hit p to get to. I use the G pen here. I did mess with the settings a little bit, but not by much. But one of the main settings I love is the stabilization, which it says right here change how much to stabilize in foot from tablet pen, which just means how much it's going to stabilize any wiggle in my hand. For instance, if I were to go right here and kind of do this, it's actually slowing down and stabilizing and from my hand. So finally works best for you and use that now. I already inked this picture. As you see right here, this is a layer. If I click that on boom, you could see I inked it and inked it just the same as I did with the other one. When I did the traditional side, however, I just did it digitally. The reason I'm not doing this on screen is because when I'm recording, I get a good amount of lag when I'm trying to think. But basically it works the same as you can see. I can do the same effects here just by drawing, inking and for a lot of these tricks, I just used the fill bucket, and that's how I filled in. Some of these larger is a black. When I go to the finishing touches, which will be the next video, I will have all of this inked so you won't have to worry about seeing any of that. The only thing I want to show now is the final thing, which is how to get panel bores Now. There's multiple ways you could do it. You could just go in and use a tool like the figure tool, and with it you could just quickly line up a few different lines and just boom. You got some lands there. Let's just keep him straight. For now. I don't need it curved and boom, You got a black line. Now if you want a better line that you can obviously just use different types of lines. There's tons of settings here, obviously. And just way too many for me to really mess with you could make a little thicker. The way I suggest doing it is actually better way is this little thing right here whom you see that now I'm gonna show you. Do it quick. Did you go to your toe layer? Click that you go to a new layer frame border. Call it frame. I'm going to set this to about 16. That's just the pixel. With which, because how biggest images? That's actually not that much quick Boom. What that does is it makes you border. Now you notice that it goes all the way around the live area in order to cut pieces in between. You need to go to this tool, go over here and it frame. Now, What I'm gonna do is I'm also gonna go over here because you see the vertical space, which is how much caps gonna be in between here. I'm just gonna chill. Won't not that high. I'm just gonna change it to about 50. Then all you do is you click and drag over and automatically make it cut for you, and they will do that any direction you want. So if you want to make cuts like that boom, easy, whole control to do any little bit of editing. So if you wanna move this because it's not quite where you want it, and it's just there's a lot of little things you can do. So that's basically all I really need to show you. As I already got one finished here and basically, you just need to know that you just keep repeating that process over and over again until you're finished. So that's all for this stage. I know I went over it super quick, but there's really not much to talk about in a general overview. If you have any questions, leave them in the discussion and I will go into further detail as needed. However, this was just to get you through the basic stuff. Everything else is very much trial and error and finding out what works best for you. Next, I'm going to quickly finish this all up, and then in the next video, I'm going to show you how to finish by cleaning up a few these things and adding some final details, so I'll see you in that next video.
11. Finishing Touches: Greetings, everyone. And welcome to another video in this one. I'm just gonna go over a quick little finishing touches things about when you're doing your comic book. Now here you can see I have a finished page here of what I've been working on lately. So all you saw me really do was add the character here of flair. Let me zoom in here a little bit. So all you saw me do really was flare himself. But as you can see here, I added the background as well as finished off this panel down here and also add a little bit here. Now, with a lot of that, I didn't really want to show you all this just because it's not really important. It's a lot of the same old things. However, with the background, I'm just gonna quickly gets name off a few things you want to think about when doing backgrounds. And that's mainly just perspective. Now I could see here everything is going back in perspective. Perspective is just a way of showing depth or showing that things were going back in space and that they exist in a three dimensional world. Hence, why everything looks like it's going back towards this kind of center area here. Even the character himself is going back in time now to help out with stuff like that. If you're doing things digitally and even traditionally you can do this just just takes a little longer. What you want to add are over here we have a layer called perspective. I have all the other layers. I have this completely finished. But here I have a layer called perspective. Now, if I just turn that on no, quick and this is gonna look a little weird, but, boom, You see all these blue lines here Now, um, this itself is actually something that I grabbed from Freddie Williams. The second all right. Think it's Freddie Williams 1/3 or something like that. He has a book called the DC's Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics. And one of the tools he has on his website is a perspective path tool. What? You come over here, You see, there's things here that I created myself. But what you can do is you can open up a path stool, drag it into your file, and then you simply stroke all the lines which struck it just means it makes them solid line. So if I zoom in your love it you see these air solid blue lines here. Excuse me for the lag. Um, recording does tax my computer a little bit, but it's very simple. Things here is you can see nothing too extreme and it just allows you to stay within perspective. So now everything you could see goes back to this one Centrepoint. Now, this is one point perspective. Everything is going back to one spot. If you would have multiple points of perspective, you would just make multiple of these and put him in the sponsor. Need to be. But in this case is just one point so I can turn that off. And you see, everything follows that pattern. So when I did the background, I just made a quick notes of everything. I did everything very simply. Nothing too complicated here. Like this is all very basic cartooning, which is, uh, with how my style is. I just dropped basic windows, things like that. A lot of this stuff in the background. If I zoom in again Sorry for the lag. You see these little windows I did those using my own path tool here, which is Windows here, the windows and more windows. And basically all that did was just add a little past like these, and this is how pats work. And then all you do is you take your path tool, which I believe it's some around here yet Pat selection tool or even your path tool here and all you're really doing is you're just right clicking and you're stroking the path. If I click start path, it gives me auction of how I want it, which tools it recognizing I have the pencil tool, you can change the color and all that kind of stuff, and then it just makes the lines. So that's how you do that. You just click away to get rid of that. So that's how I got those areas back there. These I just did with straight tools and stuff like that. Eso yeah, with the background and all. A lot of things I did was I just made sure everything was in perspective, and you could see I had shading here just to make sure you understand that the light is kind of coming from back here and kind of pushing its way this way. So after I inked everything, scanned it in and I went in and cleaned up things, meaning I just took the time to go in and fix any little mistakes. Like when I did the traditional picture. All this was kind of messed up, and I had to correct it. So I had to fix this fix a lot of this stuff going on the background, fix him a little bit because there were some dots just kind of spread all throughout here. So I fixed all that you see here. There's a line misstep here, which I'll have to go and fix soon, but that's easy to fix. Um, now, next thing I started doing was I just started figuring out different effects I want to use . First of all, if I wanted to make sure I wanted to the text in. Now you see this I hand drew like this is just a hand drawn, and that's why it looks kind of crappy. But I just wonder, should do it something like that for my own effect. But normally I would add text here in a text layer and I have two layers here. One is the text balloon which, if I click that open as little thing up here, this is what the basically the text balloon. And then you put the text over top of it so you could see up there and let me zoom in a little bit here on a bright day in the city, which in the script, you know that that is the only caption that goes on here. And then in the second panel, there's that curse mash, which is just no Adam on Apia on Ottoman api is basic, just you using phonetic. It's phonetically sounding out Ah, word. You know, quote unquote word that is of a sound of a sound. So cursed smashes just anonima Tapia of some type of loud crashing noise. Um, you see her? I added a few people in the background. The very tiny so not much detail here and you see the text appear. So that is the first thing I added with the text just to figure out where they need to go. Next thing I did was I started adding coloring. Now, with me and coloring, I do very basic stuff. It's literally just solid colors or flats, as they call him. So I click on this layer and get it open. Boom! Now you can see there's color. Um, these are the colors that I went with for this character. Um, originally, I had him as yellow in a lot of my earlier sketches that I did, but I decided I liked him better as red with yellow being his belt and his hair Z, I added colors in the background. You had to figure out the coloring scheme yourself. It took me a little bit, but I did look at some old comic books and I pick some colors from some of the older comic books just to kind of add in a little variety here and there. So you can see this is how it looks, um, scroll down and again here. Now, here. I didn't have a background just because it didn't really feel like I needed one in this panel. But I did make sure that the color here, this blue in the background of the sky, is following through. Once I did that, I added a few shadows. As you can see, just a little basic shadows on the character. Nothing too extreme, just in certain spots. And even here in certain little locations. Just add a little touch. Didn't have to be much just a little bit there. Another thing I added a she could hear it says Flare glow. Now what this is, if I turned on adds a glow around his body to symbolize that he's flying cause he uses his energy power to fly. So I want to make sure that you knew that that's how he was flying and that that was a thing of his character. So I just added a very basic outline around him of this very glowing yellow. And after that, with me personally, I could finish it right here. This could be completely done, you know, done and over with, however you notice here, there's an extra layer here called texture. This is something that I personally love to do because I love giving it that old effect. If you look at a lot older comics, you'll notice that in certain areas they'll be these little dots now, now, before a lot of people think that that was part of the paper, but it's not. It's an actual texture that they put over. It's over. Click that open and boom. Now you can see there's a dot pattern over everything, which to me gives it that old time feel. However, you'll notice that the windows do not have that pattern. I did it on purpose because I wanted the windows to look like they were windows, which is glass, which has a shiny texture to them. You want to see that? I didn't have it over here for obvious reasons. Even down here, it's not on here either. On again. This is just for reasons, because I wanted things to look shiny for the glass and for other things just to not have that effect. But I just think that personally for my comic, I wanted to have that dot effect because it adds a nice little old time feel to it, which is how I like to draw. Anyway, um, the only other thing you would start doing here after that is you would go down here, and normally you would put where the page number is gonna be, which would be over here, since this is the first page you'll see when you open the book? Actually, it would be over here because the next page in order would be over here. You would see it over here, and then that page number would be over in this corner. So for this page, it would be page one, and the number would be over here in the corner. If this page was the odd number Page meaning it was page two or uneven number paid. Sorry. If it was page to it would be over here so the odd numbers would go. The odd page number goes over here. Even page number goes up in here in American comics, in Japanese type comics. You just reverse that because you read it. Thea pa's it direction, and that's pretty much it. Now you also see there is this layer called guidelines, which I use just to know and make sure everything was lined up with the guidelines. And see it's a little off here just because this is a different board than what I used. But generally it works. Fine. Now, after you've done all that, let me get rid this layer. So you've done that. You saved your work. You know everything's looking nice. Everything is the way you want it, especially with like, a lot of the layers you have here. Next thing you want to do is you notice that this big gap story here well, that's not accurate. Because if this was an actual comic book, it would be cut down to size. Um, it would be cut down to ah from 11. 17 to 10. 15. So that's the next thing you do is you go over here, you can go to image or canvas. I'd like to go canvas, switch that two inches, and I would switch this to 10 by 15. Leave that alone because you wanted to go in through all sides. Click OK. And of course, it's going to say that things were going to get out, which just means, you know, this is I was going to lose some of it. It proceed and boom. Now you have it at the accurate size of what a regular comic page would be. This is what it would be if it was printed. So that's basically all the little things you need to know to do A lot of finished touching . Now I'm not a color, so I can't really go over things like colors. I just did this based off very simple cartooning and very simple cell shading. So you're gonna have to kind of do that yourself. However, look at your favorite color wrists to kind of pick how you want to do it yourself, Um, and then just learned that way. Or what you could do is you can hire an artist or colorist is gay. Who could do it for you as well. So that's all for this video, and that's all you really need to know. For the final product after them, I will do a video just kind of quickly showing some of the places you can put your artwork as well. It's in places that you can put it if you want to have it published. So I'll see you guys in that video
12. Publishing: Hello again, everyone. And welcome back to a new video and this one. I'm just going to show you a few of the publishing options you have for basically what you want to do with your comic book after you're done with your little mini comic. Now let's open up the barrels air here, Good old Google chrome. And first thing I want to show you is the printing options that you have if you want to get your comic book printed, legitimately or not legitimately but you know, for real. Ah, the first thing here. This is the site that I would highly recommend. This is for if you want to self publish, meaning you're an independent person, you don't want to work through another company like a combo company like Marvel DC Image. Dark horse. You can't really get into them or you don't want to do it yourself. Problem. Here is a great website to do it with appear you seek a plan dot com. That's what they do. They print um and ship for you. Obviously, you have different pricings here yet paperback pricings. You know, these just different things. Comic prices is your basic staple paperback, I believe, is the more thicker bound, where it's glue bound instead of stable bound. But the basics here are really nice. They have great resource is where you can get information on things like, um, the dimensions. Your page has to be in the stuff like, What's file sizes? Where you gotta put him. It's a great website You can see here if you get Palm Comics pricings up here in the cup corner. Now the website still go, undergoing a little bit of change. He on those things, that kind of altering themselves here, so don't worry about that. But here's what you need to do. Here's some of your things you need to worry about, because here it sells you what it's printed on. Ah, accounts of how many pages you can have if you want it. Staple. If you want to glued, it has to be. If it's anything past 44 pages, it's gonna be glued on. That just means it has a glued back, and it becomes a paperback like you could see there like manga books and such. So you step there. You can download a template if you want to, and you could hear it says other options. You have the title of the issue, which you just name the comic book. You have the size you consider standard manga or magazine. You have your cover type standard cover sketch covers, which are basically things that allow you to draw all over and self covers. Not sure what those are yet, but I'm sure they're pretty cool. You have interior saying you can want a full color or black and white interior that changes the price that you see down. Cost per copy is a dollar 72 for colored click that boom, you get down 10 cents because now they don't have to color it. The interior pages are a couple cents. You receive 72 down to 17. Um, even the size changes things. Manga size cost a little less because it's smaller and magazines gonna cost about the same . So it's about the same size in here. Interior page count. Just saying how many pages minimum of four. Ah, 65 pay plus pages are trade paperback. So that's what you have to go to get that now. I'm not sure if this includes Yeah, this is just interior pages. So for our many comic this works because that's interior pages. The cover front cover and back cover are two separate things. So you do have to include them. But you have to label them that way. And even here is a a couple AM ad so you can put yes on the back cover. Yes. Inside back cover. Yes. Interior on interior page or no ca plan that now the ad makes it so. You pay mawr because you know you're not advertising them. That's something you have to deal with. I have no problem supporting them, so I would definitely put it there. I would probably put on the inside the back cover again. It changes the price because it's not his obvious to see. I would put it probably in the back cover. Just let it sit there in the back because I love this website. Quantity. This is how many you want order. Um, it Now, if you can see here, if you would like to have a proof copy printed first and simply reduced your, um order, quantity, toe one, that means you're only gonna get one copy. That's a proof copy. Um Now you see here it doesn't. They don't add of digital proofs anymore, but that's fine. This just means they're going to send you a copy to prove meeting. You're gonna look at it and say, yes, this is what I wanted. And then you have your price here. So if I ordered, like five, it would adjust it for the total of five books. So that's just something for you know, so you can see it's not very pricey to print a copy. However, if you want to actually have it sold, they have a sister swept. I called indie Planet. This is their 60 sister planet. I just said sissy in this site. This is where you can post it for people to buy it. It's a great website that allows you to put it up on here. You simply create a Web, create your own category, you know stuff like that and allows you to buy. You can set things like this like all these little different categories. And if you click on it, boom, it will take you to the page of the comic book. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do do do I pay My browser is running a little slower right now, and you can have it set up for different things. So, like a digital copy, you know? Ah, physical copy. Print on demand. That's basically that needed. It'll print it the moment you buy it. Now, what's I like this at least as far as I remember. You do not pay anything from the book. This for 99 is the cost of the book that dollars 72 that's gonna be taking out here will be automatically deducted from this when you print it and you get the rest as profit. So just remember that when you price your book price it up from the print cost of how much you want to make in profit because that's what it's gonna cost for them to print and ship it to whoever. So that's just one thing you gotta have kind of remember when you're doing this guy stuff. I'm just gonna close these two. Uh, you could see the address bar here, so I'm just gonna close these to speed things up a bit. Here's what you do. If you want to publish online meaning Web comics, here's three websites that. I kind of like. Here's comic fury. Very straightforward. This is just, you know, three sites you can post on. You can create your Web comic care of manage Web comics. I do have an account here. Yep. I'm logged in. Right here. Eric. Running. Um, so this is really this is a nice little site if you want to get started. Another good site is Pink Blazers. This is when I actually really like I come here often to read other people's things. Um, it looks like they might be shutting out. I don't know, but, um, yeah, we'll have to We'll have to see. I'm not sure if it's actually shutting down, but we'll see. But you can come on here and try to make you think they used to be called something else. I forget the name back then, but you can just post your comics here and then another site which this guy's actually talking about right here to past it is right here. This is a gold website. I love this website. This is actually really streamlined and really fun. Website. Um, I follow a couple comic books on here. I believe yet I follow a couple here. Um, it's very basic. You just post your comic and you can People can read it. It doesn't post like a normal comic book, as you can see. Like if I click here, hopefully she has something posted. That's not too bad here. All right, here we go. Now you can see here in these comics, it's a scroll website. You don't turn things over. And, oh, I haven't seen her new thing here. I haven't seen her new thing. That's wrong. I haven't seen them. But you see, here it's a scrolls scrolling system here that you can just kind of scroll down and look at . So it's just something you can kind of deal with here, and it's a little weird, I will admit. But it's great for reading because you can just kind of scroll down and look at things. So just do what you feel you got to do, um, follow. You can follow artists here posted the way you want it. These are just ways that I would kind of, ah suggest doing things. I've also linked all these websites so you can find them easily. Just go over to the discussion section, and there'll be a post by mean showing you where you can go to these websites to get things done. So thank you for watching when you close this out. Um, I hope you enjoy these classes. If you have any questions at all on anything else you need work on, go to discussion session and make a thread and ask me some questions. In fact, I will make a threat for you that I called questions. If you have a question, you post it there, I'll read it. I'll answer it there. Or if I feel that it deserves a video, I'll make a video on it. So thank you so much for ah, joining me in these classes. I can't wait to see your class project, um, which is described in the project sections that go check that out and I can't wait to see them. So So you guys later
Eric Faries, Never stop creating!
