How To: Create Word Balloons February 25, 2010

Posted by Dalis in How To.
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Alright so you got your piece but you don’t have the words to give it life. That’s where this little walk-through comes in. First up, load up the image you want to use. We’ll use the picture I had loaded form the last tutorial (But with colors finished, etc) First up, create a Layer that’s on top of the list. This layer will be the one where the Balloon will be created with.

Next you will choose the Circle tool as seen here. Make sure your main color is White, since the balloon will be white.

Next you will click and drag til you got the shape you want. You’ll get a outline of the circle you’ll want, like so:

Now right click and choose Fill Path. Hit Ok. This will fill in the Circle.

Now the next step is to get the tail. First hit Enter. This will remove the current path (Which isn’t needed anymore)

First choose the Pen Tool:

You will then want to click once, where the tip of the tail of the word balloon will be. You will then make a second click/drag inside the word bubble. The dragging is to help you get the curve you want for the tail of the balloon. Once you have the tail you want, just let go of the mouse.

Third is just to click on the bubble to help prep for closing the tail.

Finally, click the Starting point of the path, aka the first point you made. You will hold down the mouse button like before until you get the curve you want.

Right click and Fill in the Path like you did when creating the circle. Hit enter afterwards to remove the path and the image should look like this.

Now to give the word balloon that black lining. To do this, the layer in which the balloon was made, you will want to Double Click it. Do not double-click the name or else it’ll ask if you want to rename it, but double-click the area that’s to the right part of the name where it’s open. This window will be brought up:

Next you will check mark Drop Shadow and select it so it is High-lighted. This will allow you to set up the properties of the drop shadow.

What I like to do is set up the setting “Pin Light” in the Blend Mode. Opacity set to 100%. Distance: 0. Spread: 100. Size: 5. And uncheck Global Lighting.

Once you are done, hit Ok. Insert your text and you are done!

Hope this How to guide helps a few of you in making comics. I’d appreciate any feed back of course or questions. Cheers!

-Dalis

PS. If you look at the clock on the top right, you’ll go “Does it really take this long?” No it doesn’t, it took this long only because I was making the tutorial and taking screenshots, etc :P

How To: Clean-Up February 25, 2010

Posted by Dalis in How To.
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Hi there everyone. This is a post to review the clean-up that I had shown on Wednesday. These are the basic steps I use to clean-up and prep a comic for coloring or just cleaning it up in general. This is done on Photoshop CS3, but I know it can still be done on Photoshop 4(Yeah, 4, the REALLY old one)

So the first thing here is to get the image you want to use. Normally I pencil in the art, pen it, then erase the pencil. This makes clean-up much easier. In this case, I have no erased the pencil work and kept it in. Place your scanned image as a separate layer so you can work on it more easily.

Now the first step is to make it easier to manage. To do this, turn it into a black and white image. You can do this by going to Image -> Mode -> GrayScale

It will ask if you want to discard the color information. Say yes. If it asks if you want to flatten the image, say no. You want to keep everything as a separate layer.

Next is the actual clean up, setting up the levels of the image. The result of doing this is to bring out the blacks and whites, while lessening the grays (Pencils).

To do this you will want to go to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels

By choosing levels it’ll bring up this window:

You’ll notice little arrow things on the window. Slide them back and forth and you’ll see results on the main image. Adjust them accordingly until you have the desired effect.

Once that is done, now it is time the eliminate the white of the image while keeping the black. Think of it as inking a transparency sheet. There’s no white on it, but the lining remains. This way you can color what ever you want, underneath, without it overlapping the Black Lining.

To do this you will want to look on the lower right of your screen where you can find tabs. You will want to click on the Channel tab.

You should get this screen. While here, on the lower part of the selections, choose the circle button. Just click it once. It’ll make your line work crawl with ants so to say.

Once you see the ants crawling all over your screen. Hit delete on your keyboard. The result will be that your whites have been removed from the line work.

Now the next step is to re-darken the image. To do this, click on the Layers tab and click on the Preserve Transparency button as shown here:

What Preserve Transparency does is makes it so what you color, only effects the layer. So in this case, the line-work. NOW before I forget, deselect the image so there are no more ants. You can do this by going to Select -> Deselect.

With Preserve Transparency selected, take the Pencil tool, choose the color Black (Or Red if you want the line work to be red, or whatever color you want) and stroke over the line-work. This will re-darken the artwork.

LAST step, just go to Image -> Mode -> RGB (This will turn colors back on)

Now your piece is ready for coloring. Just create a layer underneath the Line-work in the Layers tab, choose that layer and color where ever you desire. The line-work will be preserved while colors are added. If you have any questions or corrections to be tossed in, I’ll edit the post accordingly! Peace and happy arting!

-Dalis