Webcomics Essentials: Drawing Comics Using Photo Reference

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is George Folz, and welcome to Drawing Comics Using Photo Reference. I'm an educator and a cartoonist. I work for a not-for-profit called YOU, where I teach students how to cartoon. When I am not teaching, I draw comic books. I attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where I studied graphic design and comic art and I graduated with my BFA in 2010. I currently draw a series called "The Roman Nose" with Seth Kushner, and I also do the Darth Days drawings that are on the internet, where I'd take a shot from one of the original Star Wars films and recreate as a comic panel once a day for all of 2015. So, again, this class is called Drawing Comics Using Photo Reference, and basically what I'm going to do is break down the process that I use when I am creating my Darth Days drawings. We're going to do something a little bit different. We're not going to be doing a Star Wars drawing in this class, but I want to take you guys through the process, show you the right way to use photo reference or what I think is the most beneficial and rewarding way of using photo reference. We're not going to be doing any tracing in here. I'm going to show you guys how to use a grid, consider lighting. I'm going to take it from the top to bottom. Basically, I'm going to pencil, I'm going to ink, and then I'm going to show you guys my coloring process. 2. Your Assignment: Create a comic of your favorite movie scene: So, in this class, you guys basically are going to be taking a still from a movie and you are going to be translating it into a comic panel. So, basically, the reason that we're going to go with a movie is because when you're working on a film, you've got a team of people who are basically trying to create the final thing that you see. So, when there's a shot for a movie, you've got, basically, the cinematographers set it up, you've got somebody doing the lighting, a whole bunch of different things. So, basically, not every shot in a movie is like a stunner because some of it is just trying to move the story along. But you can learn a lot from drawing from movie stills or things like that because you have a team of professionals creating this image. So, doing this project, I hope to teach you guys about some considerations that you should have when you are taking your own photo reference for your comics. Things like composition, the light source, what's happening in the foreground, what's happening in the background, thinking about how you can create a good reference for yourself that you can then turn into a single comic panel. Obviously, you are going to get the most out of drawing from life when it comes to learning how to draw. There's nothing better than having a model, your friends, somebody just sit and you'd be in there, in the moment sketching it out, working out those spatial relationships. But you can learn a lot from drawing photos. It's something where you shouldn't ideally exclusively draw from photos, you want to have a balance and a mix. So, for this class, what you're going to need is access to a scanner, a printer, you are going to need a pencil. You are going to need something to ink with or you draw it with a brush. I don't use a pen or anything like that. I like the aesthetic where the line is similar. It gives me cohesion to the drawing. So you're going to need some sort of final mark making tool, something with which you ink. Like I said, I prefer the brush. If you want to use a pen, if you want to use repeatograph, whatever floats your boat. You want to inject your own style on this thing, so whatever's going to work for you. Then you're also going to need Photoshop for a little bit of preparatory stuff before we actually started doing the drawing and then also to do the coloring and the lettering. So, yeah, with that, I just want to thank you guys for taking some time out and listening to me talk, and hopefully, I will be able to improve your skill set and let you guys have a fun little project. Yeah, looking forward to it, so let's get started. 3. Concepting: Okay, folks. So here, we are in Photoshop and we have our screen up. So, what we're going to do first is we are going to go over to the layers tab. But what we are going to be doing is we are going to be establishing perspective in this frame here because we want a guide like a basis for us to build the figure, the composition, et cetera, et cetera. So basically, this is a three point perspective shot. Perspective, there's a vanishing point somewhere, and the lines come this way, they come that way, and in this case they also come this way. Do you see how this is like a slight diagonal here? It means to a three point perspective shot. If these lines were straight, if we could just drag this line straight down, be two point perspective. But because we have a slight tilt here three. So, let me put on the layer, and I'll show you exactly what I mean. Okay. So, we now have a grid that I have established. Do you see how we have a set a lines just going this way, a set of line is going this way, and a set of line just going that way, and a set of lines going down like that. It looks like these lines are kind of straight, but as you can see they're on a slight tilt, very slight. Okay. So, we are going to recreate that. The way we're going to do that is we are going to use something that you are actually going to need to download off the Internet. So, do you see right here. I'm clicking on something that says F Williams perspective path.pst. So we are going to look up perspective grid path, Freddy Williams. So, first link here freddyart.com/quick tools. You are going to hit this button here, download the perspective path. Once you've done so, you're probably want to save it to your desktop just so you have it handy or go in your finder, drag it on your desktop just so it's easy to find. So, once we have that, close that, you are going to go in here, and you are going to say open, you're going to go to your desktop and say open. So, now go to your paths palette. So, we're going to go over to paths here.There's going to be a little something that says perspective. We're going to highlight that and we're going to click and drag into the file that has our frame. Okay. So, everybody take a look at that. We've got a whole bunch of lines. So, what we're going to do here is we are going to first establish the vanishing point. Now, the way you're going to do that, you can hit command T. We want to make this a little bit bigger, go up here probably make it about 400 percent, make sure this little link is hit. Then we are going to drag this along until the lines start to match up. So, okay, we're getting close here. So, do you guys see how I'm doing this? We're actually really lucky we have a brick wall here that is very gridded out and it can show us where we are. Okay, so not quite. It doesn't have to be exact and this is looking pretty good. For what we're going to do, I think this will work. Press enter to make sure those lines are set. Then we're going to zoom out real quick because we need to find our vanishing point. Okay. So, do we see where this line is all straight right here and like a laxin? Once you get that you're going to drag down a guide and make sure that set right there. To turn on your guide, you are going to hit command and a colon. So, we are going to zoom back out, make sure it's up on the line, good. Now, we going to hit enter. We're going to go to can hit control on perspective. You are going to say a stroke path. Before we do that though, we're going to turn this to about 30 percent gray because it's going to lay down a solid line. You are going to go up to your brushing and you're going to want to make sure that it's at one. So, enter that there boom and then, okay, come on. Again, we're going to go over the perspective, hit control, click stroke, brush, okay. Okay. Now it's stroke. So, we hit command T. Do you guys see how there are some gray lines there now that we've established that one perspective point? So, we're in need to find our second perspective point. We are going to go back out and making sure that we are still locked on that horizon line, because remember, the vanishing point has to be on the same horizon line. We are going to search for our second. Now, as you see here, that line up pretty nicely. So, that's going to be our second perspective point. Now, we going to hit enter again, control, click, then go to stroke. All right. Boom, we're in business. So, our third perspective point, last one. We're going to hit command T and start moving this again, now because the vanishing point. Do you see purples lines are going down here? We're going to want to make sure that we're going to want to get that all to match up. So, we're probably going to have to make this a lot bigger. Make sure that it is the same. Okay. Command T again. Okay. That's looking like it's about on the money. So again, we're going to hit enter. If we've hit enter, we are going to hit control, click on prospective, stroke path. Okay. So, there we go. Now, we've got all that, we're going to hit V delete, and that's going to take away the tool itself. So, what we want to do is we want to erase the parts we don't need. So, we're going to go down there, knock that away, go up there, knock that away. Then I like to put a bounding box around it. So, like that. Now, I'm going to go to edit stroke for should probably be just fine. Boom. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to create a blue line that we are going to then print out and you guys are going to draw on top. So remember, we're not doing any tracing here or knock your image away. There's a little layer that we're going to put underneath our layer with all the perspectives in the sub perspective layer. We're going to make this one fully white. All right. From here, we are going to go to image, mode, first grayscale. So, we're going to say, don't merge, discard. We're going to go to adjustments levels and we're going to make these lines pretty much close to black. So, we are going to drag all the way, say okay. Now next thing, we're going to go to do dual tone. Now, I've done this many times before. So, what's probably going to happen is you guys are going to have a box here that's black and that just says black. What you're going to do is you're going to go and we'll just say, for the sake of argument, we're going to have all these crazy numbers in here. Okay. It's probably going to look something like this. You guys are going to have values in C,M,Y, and K, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Now, what we want to do is we want to only have a value in C. I like to have it at about 19 personally. It's a matter of personal preference really whatever is going to work for you. I think that's a nice little grid. Don't worry about it because what's going to happen is this color is a consistency that is such when you scan into the computer itself, the scanner is not going to register this blue. I'll show you guys that after we do the drawing so you can say okay, okay. Now, we're going to print it. So, everybody's printing is probably going to look little bit different. What you want to do is have it set up for 8.5 by 11 piece of paper and then go scale to fit media. So basically, you're going to print out an 8.5 by 11 landscape piece and you're going to have your blue line on that. We are going to draw first in pencil and then In ink over that. Then we're going to scan back into Photoshop and I'm going to show you guys how to do some cool coloring things and also add in the word balloons. So, with that, let's move on to the next bit. 4. Sketching: Okay, so basically, the first thing that we're going to do when we are going about, working from this photo here, is we're going to very lightly sketch out the whole scene. What you want to do is with your pencil, just look at the photo, choose an arbitrary point, and you're basically just going to start scribbling. So again, the idea here is that you want to keep it moving, you really want to be working fast, and it's instinctual. If you are looking at this doesn't really look right, don't worry about it. Because what's going to happen is, we're going to go back over these lines later. We're going to finesse them a little bit. For this particular drawing, the background is simple. It's really just focused on Heath Ledger, looking absolutely terrifying here. We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, basically, seven and a half rows of bricks outside of the rough edges. If you count the ledges probably six or so. Anyway, so again, the reason we laid out these perspective lines is so we have a guide to draw upon. So again, I'm really as you can see scribbling them in. It's not that serious because again, we're going to take a more critical look at this and actually sketching real details later. It's probably going to be a little hard to see your lines because the blue line itself is blue. But don't worry about it because you're going to be making harder strokes and as you go along it's not going to be an issue. Again, that probably doesn't look like much. We're really going to focus on first as just filling in Heath Ledger here. So, when you draw on the face, basically it is built top off and I'm assuming you guys have some drawing experience, if not that's cool too because I'm going to break it down. But basically, what you want to do is you want to create the head out of a circular shape and then drop down like an egg shape, for lack of a better term. If you see, this as a circle, this is an egg. Now, that's staying on top of the shoulders because we're at three-point perspective, which as I was talking about in the video we've got one side of perspective lines, two set of perspective lines, three sets of perspective line. You can think spatially about how his neck is going to fit in his torso or shoulder, whatever you want to call it. Just looking at the photo, think about, well, how is that really going to fit in? Then, we're just going to sketching the shoulders a little bit again because this is in close up. That's looking pretty solid. So, yes. I think, one of the things when I teach my younger students, I there's a tendency always to some degree to just use a heavy line. Eventually, when you are doing your finish pencil lines that you're going to ink over, you do want it to be a heavier line. But as we're starting it's really important that you just keep it light. Gestural, very sketchy. Now, we got that all worked out. Let me drag it over a little bit. We're going to go back to the fix. We have our circle shape. We have our oval shape. What we're going to do next is slice the head up a little bit just in terms of spatial things. The eyes are usually about halfway through the head. Give or take it's something where you just look at the photo and you take a look, but probably going to be right about there. As you can see, the top of his head is cut off a little bit by the frame here which is why, I brought the circle part of the shape a little bit up. Maybe it's more like this. But again, we're just going to lay it out for now. If you're not quite sure of your line, just sketch it. We're going to finesse it later. Now, that we've got that laid out, we're going to divide the head in half down the middle. This is basically where the nose, mouth, all this, they all just going to be. Usually, see how we have the bottom of the circle right there, the nose or the bulb of the nose is going to go a little bit below there. Now, we have that idea, it's like a sketching a nose shaped circle and to little half circles on the side. I'm going to bring down wings there. So we've got that. Now, so the eyes themselves. The eye obviously is a circular thing, and the lids are coming over the top of it. What we're going to do is, I'm going to sketch in two circular shapes real quick. Now, what you want to do ideally with the eyes is there should be one eye space between the two eyes. So, if I go like boom boom boom, I should have again one eye space. That's about right. Again, light lines right now, we're going to finesse this layer though, don't really worry about it. Then so for the mouth. Because this is a three part perspective shot, it's a little tricky. I think the mouth's going to be right about there. Usually, that's right. It's just a little bit below the bottom of the nose. We're going to wrap that around and it's actually great if you have the guidelines here because the Joker has all this raunchy scarring, and it'll give you a little guide when you're spidering those scars out, for lack of a better term anyway. So, we've got the bare part of the face. Now, we got that. As you can see, in the drawing you've got a pretty defined line where the glass meets the stone. Let's focus on that for starters. We're going to go on top and going to be knocking it out. Batman earlier in the movie knocked the Joker's head against the glass so we've got some glass here. Here's the thing that also you should really keep in mind when you're using photo reference. It's a good thing to stay true to the photo because when you guys are there taking your own photo reference for your comics, you're going to be taking something that for the most part is right or what you want to use. But at the same time, you don't want to be too beholden to the photo itself. You don't have to have the glass exactly as it is in the photo. It's like you get the idea that Batman bashed his head into it earlier. You want to be somewhat divorced from the photo itself. You're taking it for reference. There are people who are just very beholden to the photo and there can be some really nice artwork created that way. But you want to throw something else in the mix because if people wanted just a photo, they could take a photo. People are buying comics, that drawings, because they're interested in what you are bringing to the table as an artist, your sensibilities. Basically, just one thing to keep in mind throughout this whole process, again, like I said is just don't, it doesn't look exactly like the photo, it's not the end of the world. Because at the end of the day, you really want to have some of you in the drawing because that's what's going to make it interesting. That's why people are going to connect with your work. As you can see, I'm just going through here knocking in the wall like it's not that serious. That line's not there. Anyway, so we're going along. Honestly for the wall, because it's just so simple and the lines are not that serious, this is really all the further I'm going to go with regards to detail. I want to bring the eye down a little bit and he's looking off camera. So, you're going to want to make sure that you're capturing that. Again, we're going to bring some of those line smeared down that way and his face is all scarred up and gnarly. Want to make sure you get that in. As you guys can see here, that space, that's enough for me to work off. You can see the eyes are pretty define. As you can see here, I put the x's. Actually, I probably should talk about that real fast. One thing that you always want to consider when drawing is light source. Because this is a police interrogation room, lights coming down from the top. The lights are somewhere off on this side and then above. Basically, what's happening is the shadows are being cast on his face on this side. Because his faces kind of like this stark white here, whatever, you're not really going to want to have a lot of cast shadows on his face because you want that white to pop. That said, because his head is like a 3D solid object or whatever, and the light is again coming from up there and shining down that way, his head itself is casting a shadow. So, I put a little x here and when you put a little x down that basically is like a notation. It's like, okay, this is going to be black. I don't know where that came from but that's just what some people do. Anyway, like I said, this is pretty much what's going to be from my pencils. I'm not really going to do much more than this. Next, that we're going to do is go to inking. 5. Inking: Inking as I mentioned in my intro, I really only use a brush for these things, in this case it's this. This is a good Turkey company size L brush. This is not necessarily a very precise tool, when you have a brush that is big like this you can make the fatter brushstrokes going to wreck the tip. But anyway you can make like a fatter brush stroke like that, and you can make a thinner brush stroke like this. Now mind you, I've been inking for several years and you may not be able to pull something like that off the bed, but you guys I promise you if you practice and you just color it. Just like 10-15 minutes or whatever before you sit down and draw every day, you will get some control and efficiency with this tool so again, I like the fat because if I want to make a thin line, boom I've got it, if I want to make a fat line, I got it. This is Kentucky's small so as you can see, it's a much finer point so like the fattest brush line. Well, I guess I press a little harder than I did there but anyway, so this is more to make those very thin. I think ideally inking is something that is spontaneous and they're going to be some accidents maybe some happy accidents, but it's like this. I'm going to say exorcism, which I'm not sure is the right word but it's just like you've ridding yourself of all this energy or whatever and it's flow from the tip of your brush. One of my old college professors, she said that she always like to start with the hair, so that's just what I'm going to go in for first. Again, we're going to think about the light source because Joker's hair is dark, it says green and his hair is like a darker color whatever, we're not going to have a lot of a light popping out. So again, it's just like you're going to be looking at the photo is going to be like okay, we're going to have some light in here a little bit, but for the most part it's going to be dark. When we go into Photoshop and do some color we're going to make sure the green is in there so that you know is the Joker. But we're on the side of his head here because that's really for the most part cast in shadow, we're going to have it be more dark see like on the top we've got a little light and actually probably should have less light than that. Now one thing that you can do with the brush is something called a dry brush technique, which is where you drag the side and see others like this a little bit where it's not really like a full line or whatever, it looks textural. Because again the Joker is smearing this make up on his face like we don't want the blacks didn't necessarily be solid on his face. So what I like to do it's you've got this organic or textural thing going on is again just get some of that texture in there, see what I'm saying where it's just like you drag the brush and brush is not really collaborating with me right now, we can always go back and do that later but yeah. It just have some of that flavor in there, now when we get a little closer down to his eyes here, this is going to be more solid but it's like around the edges, you can get away with some of that. I'm probably going to have to open his eye back up a little bit, I've made it a little too small so when we get into the computer, I'm going to show you guys how to correct that, I could do it with white out but Photoshop is ultimately more efficient at the end of the day. So again moving really fast just looking the line and like boom, knocking it down here. This I turned out better than the other one but again, I'm going to show you how to correct some of your mistakes that you made on the board when you get into Photoshop, it's one of the wonders of technology. Now, inking his smile, like it's all puffy so you don't want to necessarily have a continuous line you want to dot it and make it look puffy. Think about what the texture on his skin would look like, this is a scar I'm just going to think about this. The other thing is, when we scan this in, all these blue lines are going to disappear the way that I show you guys on how to scan. Basically the scanner only picks up, I might be explaining this incorrectly but it's something that is basically the standards only picking up a certain spectrum of light in this blue. When we enter in some numbers levels, when we turn this to gray scale, and then all the blue's going to disappear. So it might be strange for you guys to be seeing this and being like, oh my God, like this looks wrong or whatever, I don't know how that's going to be, but trust me it's when all the blue gets knocked away, it's going to look better. So we've got our main figure finished here, so at this point we're going to go around and do the wall which will be real quick. So because this is stone, no it's set into the wall not like a 100 percent perfectly. Again, we're going to head of the line be solid but you'll break it up every now and then just to show a little differentiation. Again, don't worry about like your lines being like perfect or whatever because these are imperfect bricks or whatever and it's not the end of the world if it's not a 100 percent correct. Another good thing about this here, like having the bricks we're getting a little bit of texture at the end of the lesson here but you know that the Joker is very dense and there's a lot of black on the drawing so I have him juxtaposed against the wall here really makes him pop and explode off the page. So the wall is done, again we're going to make some corrections in Photoshop because I'm seeing some mistakes in here. One thing before I do off the panel borders I'm going to do a little bit of texture on the wall. Now you know it's not even got to be anything that serious just like a little, just something to show that there's something and I'll say I'm probably going to delete a lot of this when I get in there but again, just something to give it a little extra. So now that I'm all done that again, you can see that I'm just going in and like in a few more lines I think you're going to have to draw in again. You guys should not be afraid of like, well, I mean ideally you want to do as much as you can with as little as you can, but if you think that you see a line that should be good somewhere and you're like, well, you know what, I'm going to make that go for it. Because if you want to, you can always delete them later on and you probably will delete them later on. I delete a lot of my lines so now let's finish we are going to adjust. Some people might prefer to do these with a ruler again, because it's just a super brushy and gnarly looking thing. I like to do my borders but brush we are not working like this but to each their own. So now we are going to move into Photoshop, I'm going to show you guys how to make corrections to your line work and then I'm going to show you how to come up with a coloring solution and how to do the lettering balloon so let's go. 6. Digitizing: Hey, everybody. So, we are back. All right, so what we're going to do now since we have our line art finished, we're going to scan in Photoshop, and color, and letter it. It's probably going to be a little bit different for everybody. I'm just going to go off the system that I have here. So, you'll have to excuse me if this is not 100 percent applicable to your setup. The gist of it should be the same though. So, basically, what we're going to do is, the first thing we need to do is, we need to scan our line art into Photoshop. So, as you can see, we have file here. We're going to go down to import, and we're going to go to whatever your scanner is, in my case, it is Brother Twain. You're going to open that up. All right, so, I mean, for print, you really want it to be about 300 by 300. Some people are requesting a 600 by 600 nowadays. My scanner is 11 by 17, so it's the full width of the scanner bed. If yours is eight and a half by 11, whatever, that's fine. Just you want the scanning area to be the maximum that your scanner allows. So, once you have that, you're going to go to start. Okay, so that's all done now and we have a scan of our drawing. Now, you'll probably remember in the previous video that I said the blue was really not going to show up. I guess that's not 100 percent true. The pencil blue is going to show up a little bit and you can see the lines from, okay, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, from the previous one in there, but I'm going to show you a trick where we're going to knock those out 100 percent if your scanner is picking them up a little bit. So, the first thing we're going to do is, we're going to go up to "Image, Mode" and we are going to go to "Grayscale." Let's say "Discard". Then, we are going to go to "Rotate Canvas", it's whatever it is for you. So, in my case, I'm going to go 90 degrees clockwise. We're going to do a quick crop, and there we have our image. Now, if we zoom in a little bit, like I said, we can still see a little bit of that blue. Some of the grid still in there, right? Now, what I'm going to show you here, in other words, in grayscale, this is like 99 percent of the time going to knock away all that extra stuff. There are some instances where you might have to do a little bit of correction by yourself kind of some minor adjustments, but for the most part, this should work for you. So, when we go to levels, in the far left box here, we're going to type 100. Now, everybody will notice that all the blacks went very, very, very, very black. We're now going to want to do the same thing for the whites. We're going to go over here and type 185, okay and boom. Presto change-o. Our way goes all that nasty stuff. Now, that's again, actually not true. There's a little bit I can see up over in here and not the face too, I guess. So, let's get in and sample this real fast. So, just grab your brush. Make sure it's on the white. Just go in and pop that stuff away real fast. It's probably a little drop, that's not a problem. We're also going to be doing probably some further adjustments change up the line work a little bit. So, let's see the face, maybe get the eyes a little bit. Also, probably did not help that I was using a somewhat dark-blue pencil. You usually want to use a lighter pen. So like if you had been using a light green or, it really depends on what you want to do. Light green probably works the best. I used the blue because that's just what I had at my disposal, but the lighter the pencil, the greater the chance of it not showing up in the scanners. But again, when you scan out, you really can't see it. Honestly, people aren't going to be this close in on your artwork, it's just not going to happen. Also, once we get some of the color in there, it's not going to be as big of a deal but that kind of digress. So, the stuff that I saw. First of all, it was up over here. Let's knock that stuff away. That should be good enough for now. Okay, so at this point, we are going to start the very beginning of the coloring process. 7. Prepping Line Work: Now, before we start doing any coloring, we're actually going to need to do something to our line work, which is what I'm going to show you guys right now. So, if we go over to layers here, we're also going to have our channels. As you can see right now, it's just grey. So, because this is going to be a coloring job that we're going to do, we're going to want to go with CMYK color. Now, as you'll see, we have a few different channels. So, which go on to do is you're going to want to click on the Black channel. Take it down to here, see out right next to the trash can, we have like a page looking thing. That's going to make a copy of your black line work. So, black copy is highlighted right now and when you go up to CMYK, see how it changed a little bit. We're going to want to stay on CMYK while we're doing coloring. I'll show you what this black copy is for later but it's very important that before you do any coloring, you make this black copy. So, now we're going to go back to this. Basically, when I'm doing my darth days drawings because you want to add something new to the scene or you want to have like a different dimension that's just what was there when the film was shot. I usually like to change the color of the ink a little bit. So, the way I do that is I go- I'm going to double-click on background here. Say, Okay. I'm going to go down that same little page looking thing which is going to create a new layer and we want to make sure that layer is on top of the black ink. Now, the way that you do it is you go over here and you choose color of an ink. So, the way this scene is he's under these gnarly-looking lights, it's a greenish tint to it. That's what I take away from it. So, I'm going to go over to this little green here, I'm going to click on that. I'm going to say G for my pain pocket and this whole layer, I'm turning it green. Now, the way to change at the line work itself, You are going to see how there all these different options here that we can pull down. I'm going to try a few of them out and see what it looks like. So, see if I go to overlay here, the ink is still black, but there's a green issue about. Like that looks gnarly, highlight that and see how soft light looks, not so much. Hard light, that's going to fully change it and give us a little yellow in the background, which is cool. Vivid light, that's intense. Linear, pin light. For now, I'm just going to go with overlay. I like the black ink with that green tint. So, let's see what we can do with that. So, as we're going to add color underneath our black ink, we're going to want to hit that again or go underneath. So, we're going to make sure that we have the line work selected. We're going to go up to Normal and take that down to multiply. So, now basically, any sort of coloring that we do underneath our black line work is going to show up. Now, when you are doing coloring, you just want to get one solid color in there for the whole panel then you go do individual things. So, the wall is like a peachish yellow. Let's go with that for starters. We're just really laying in flat color right now. There's a good chance that some of these colors that I'm selecting I'm going to change. But basically, what I'm doing is I'm just using the Polygonal Lasso tool here. Close that. I'm just clicking around the panel until I have the whole thing selected. So G, fill it up, got ourselves a little yellow there. So, the jokers face is, he's got like peach colored skin but he has the white makeup on top of it. So, for this, let's get the peach and that we can add the white in. The other reason the green is nice because it gives that added thing to his hair. Now, remember, we've got the green layer on. So, some of these colors are going to come through a little fine. So, we might have to play with it a little bit and let's go a little darker here. That's looking better. Now, let's see what straight up white does because remember, Joker smears his makeup on his face. If you want to take a more painterly approach. Lasso tool is not my friend today. With this, you can too. I'm just going to do the big chunk and probably go back and finesse it a little bit. So, we have that now. Looking rather terrifying. I will do the lips next, a little red. Now, that red's not coming through too red. So, let's see if we can go with a brown and maybe look at, that's not going to do it either. Let's see. No. Okay, that's looking super intense. So, we probably want a little more subdued than that to just go with the rest of the palette. How about that? For now, that'll do. So, let's see. He's got this crazy green streaks running through his hair. The darker parts of his hair are already dark. So, we're just going to put the green in here. That's looking alright. Let me see if I can get his skin a little darker. I like that. I actually like that a lot. So the jacket kind of purplish. Scope this one for starters and see how that looks. That's not doing what we want. I like that. It's more blue but, let's see. It's a little dark. Yeah, I actually like the blue. Remember you guys, you don't have to be a slave to the photo. It's whatever works. There is a bluish tint too. I guess the part underneath is far. So, that works out. 8. Coloring: The color should be minimal because the line work is very heavy, you know what I'm saying. You've got a lot of strong black in this drawing and the color is really just there to separate and differentiate. So, with the wall, some part of me wants to- well, let's just give it a shot and see what happens. Some part of me wants to fill in where the cement is here. Let's have this be a different color and just see how it looks for a little bit of it. We might just leave it be solid. I want to just leave it be. Again, when you guys are doing your own projects, it's going to be completely up to you, but for this particular drawing, I want to let the wall just stay flat. Now, we do have this glass up here so let's figure something out for that. Okay. Let that be a full on white. Okay, then the card, a bit that probably without gray of sorts. It's more of a green, dark, black. I might just leave that be for now, anyway. Okay, so I like the bright green so I think we're going to stick with that. So again, the color in this piece is really, it's very minimal. So, we just want to go back and make sure. Let's see here that everything's closed up so we're going to turn the layer off real quick and just make sure that we don't have any gaps. Oops see, like here's a little mistake. Get that fixed up. That. Kind of throw that in there, that, that. Okay, so throw that on. Maybe, just to give a little more kind of flavor we'll take- have his skin peeking through on the outside here just a little bit just to, again, show that you know like he's smearing this makeup on, it's a little more on the haphazard side. Okay. That looks like it's probably be good. So, now that we've done this, we're going to want to add in the lettering. So, in this particular instance. Okay, so in this particular instance. Sorry, I just want to make sure that's still going. In this particular instance, the Joker's line is, "Would you like to know which of them were cowards?" It's a taunt to that police officer who's guarding him. So, above our line work we're going to have a new Layer for Type. I have downloaded a comic font that I've been using for a number of years and I really like it's based off the lettering of really terrific cartoonist named Tim Sale, he did all those color books from Marvel. Spider-Man: Blue, Daredevil: Yellow, he did the Batman: The Long Halloween, and Dark Victories. Really, I think his work is wonderful. He has good- I like his lettering too so much that bought his typeface. I think you can go on Comicraft, I want to say so. So anyway, it's Comicraft, Tim Sale. So, I'm going to drag a little box and we're going to type, in black. "Would you like to know which of them were cowards?" Now, probably we're going to put a little emphasis on cowards. Because that's that's really the sticking point of the Joker's line in this instance. Once again, we're going to click on our line work layer, we're going to add a new layer. This one's going to be white. So, we're just going to create a little speech bubble. Now, because the Joker's kind of, actually yeah. Because the Joker's kind of, well, he is psychotic, we're going to have this be a deformed weird-looking bubble. Boom! Okay. Great. So, we're going to take that down, it'll be like that. Now, lets move it so. So, that Black copy that we made earlier, we're going to bring that back in the mix real quick. Let me go to Channels and see which of, the Black copy, there. We're going to want to make sure our line work is selected. We're going to go up to Select, Load Selection, go down to Black copy. Okay. Now, see others radiating lines going on here. We go up Select, Modify, Contract, two. Basically, what we're gong to do is we're going to be backing up our black, making sure that it shows through as true black because see how like we've got a problem here where it's like, oh, well, that's really black but that's green. We want the blacks to be very solid on the page. So, we're going to go to Edit, Fill, going to go to Color and then we're going to go to Normal. Now, let's go back up to Color real quick. In C, you need to have 60, in M you need to have 40, in Y you need to have 40. Once you have that you say, Okay. Once this says Normal, say Okay. Now, see how everything looks all crazy and weird, don't worry about it we've still got one more step to do. We're going to go up to Fill again, going to go to Black, going to go to Multiply and Boom! We now have solid black on the page, which is what we need. Okay. So, let's put this on top. Okay. Still it's a little, it's a little light, so I think we're going to have to basically just change this yellow so it's a little darker. Okay. So, yeah folks at this point that's really, that's a wrap. For exporting it, you're going to want to probably have that be a little wider on this side. That's good. Go there, add layer and just put a little, not black, we wan't white. A little white down there and then, yeah, you're going to go to Image Size 72, say Okay. Then say File, Save for Web and Devices. Then once you've got that, Save. You want to have the original file be at the highest resolution possible. So, see how I am going to go to Image Size and have this be 300. You're going to want to save your original file for lack of a better term, is a tiff. We'll call it Joker on the desktop. Then you have that. You can just- if you want to take it down to 72 dpi, to do that, you can. If you want to have it be something else, you can. That works. 9. Closing: So, yeah, you guys, I guess just in closing you can learn a lot drawn from movie stills. It's not something that I'd recommend doing exclusively and don't go off trying to sell these because it's really not quite legal, but as an educational tool it's a really wonderful way to learn and to have a lot of fun. So, I do my dark days project, but I also do the Roman nose which I've been working on for about a year now and that really takes up most of my comic time. In the dark days, there's so much fun and I really do love it and it certainly is helping me improve, but when you're kind of doing your own comics hopefully you can take your own photos. You can get your friends together whatever, and now that I've showed you this process, you kind of have a better understanding of how to kind of translate it to your own work or that you can start to kind of figure those things out for yourself. So, really I want to thank you all so much for participating in this, for kind of doing this class. I'm really excited to see what people come up with. Comics are wonderful. It's really crazy sometimes, the business of comics, but at the end of the day comics are great. You just keep working at them, just don't ever give up. I wish you guys all the best, and again, thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Yeah. Take care. 10. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: