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Does anyone have any tips for using gradients? I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I feel like I could streamline the drawing stage a bit if I used them right.
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May 29, 2018 18:23
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Use them extremely sparingly. I've used them now and then for skies, and also for stuff like oceans receding into the distance.
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May 29, 2018 19:59
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:Does anyone have any tips for using gradients? I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I feel like I could streamline the drawing stage a bit if I used them right. I use them as overlays to make things fade or gradually change color, set to low opacity and usually multiply or screen mode. Basically as post-coloring touch-up to accentuate different areas.
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May 29, 2018 21:44
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:Does anyone have any tips for using gradients? I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I feel like I could streamline the drawing stage a bit if I used them right. if youre using them with flat colors, think of the spaces of flat color almost like color field paintings. is there some complexity i want to evoke with it? is it especially large/something which contains a bevy of shades etc. If youre using them for more complicated colors, maybe dont! its a simple tool but having to repeat it panel by panel creates an additional step that is largely noncreative and more suited (imo) for projects like animation where simple tricks like that have to be spread over a whole image/have more space to build effectively. Think instead how to render color more impactfully to imply the changes in light or atmosphere gradients is good for.
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May 29, 2018 22:29
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every solid plane larger than 5 x 5 px should have a gradient on it and you should never use the same colour combination twice
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May 30, 2018 02:54
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Try constructing your gradients manually with the paintbrush. It will give your art a warmer, more natural feeling. This goes for every digital art tool: try reproducing the effect you want that tool to do on your own to help better understand how they work and how the effect fits into your art.
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May 30, 2018 03:41
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:Does anyone have any tips for using gradients? I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I feel like I could streamline the drawing stage a bit if I used them right. You will probably not use them correctly. When done right, gradients blend in seamlessly with the rest of the piece, but a lot of people fail at this. I'd second what Reiley said and if you're interested in using gradients down the road, check out Mary Cagle's twitch channel because she actually knows what she's doing with them. Watching her color in general is pretty great anyway.
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May 30, 2018 04:58
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You ever think about how photoshop is a photo manipulation program? is it good for comics? webcomics thread, also, whats up besides webcomics, what are yall doin. i'm making a cartoon and teaching my left hand to draw. i pass the campfire talking stick to...the next poster!
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Jun 2, 2018 07:44
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FunkyAl posted:if youre using them with flat colors, think of the spaces of flat color almost like color field paintings. is there some complexity i want to evoke with it? is it especially large/something which contains a bevy of shades etc. I didn't have an example ready when I asked, but I was thinking something like this:  Mostly just using the gradients for atmospheric or optical effects, and mostly flat areas of color for light and shadow, a few for reflected light if I think it'd look good, and some outlines. The gradients would just be there to play off the rest of the lighting.
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Jun 2, 2018 20:29
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:I didn't have an example ready when I asked, but I was thinking something like this: You got the right idea i think! your page looks great, whats the comic about
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Jun 3, 2018 19:36
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:I didn't have an example ready when I asked, but I was thinking something like this: Yeah that works. Another thing to consider is using the gradient as a mask on adjustment layers. You can then fine tune stuff like saturation/curves adjustments in a non destructive way.
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Jun 3, 2018 19:49
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FunkyAl posted:You got the right idea i think! your page looks great, whats the comic about This is just gonna be a short thing for me to get comfortable with the format, since I haven't really done comics before and it's been awhile since I've done any sort of fiction writing. It's an excerpt from a longer story idea I had, where it's a sci-fi/western about an alien making a living as a bandit while various human factions are colonizing his planet. I really like Tuco from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, so I kinda wanna write a character in that vein. If I like how this turns out I have another story idea that I'd probably go with for a longer comic first, though.
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Jun 4, 2018 17:15
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That looks proper good! I'm actually ahead of schedule on this month's comic which is a first!  Probably need to work into the skin on this, i hue/saturation-ed it pretty agressively late in the painting.
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Jun 4, 2018 22:43
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FunkyAl posted:You ever think about how photoshop is a photo manipulation program? is it good for comics? If not photoshop, is there a better adobe program suited for drawing? I should probably try other programs besides adobe, but so long as I have access to creative suite I'm their whore. Also, props to ThePlague-Deamon and lofi, those panels look legit.
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Jun 5, 2018 04:17
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if you think a bout it, a comic is just a photograph of another dimension
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Jun 5, 2018 07:24
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There's tons of apps that do specific things better than photoshop, but nothing I've come across can do everything ps can.
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Jun 5, 2018 10:53
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Most of the things only Photoshop can do are useless.
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Jun 5, 2018 10:57
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Counterpoint: content aware scaling.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:25
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Abyssal Squid posted:Counterpoint: content aware scaling. Do people actually use that for not-loving-around purposes?
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Jun 5, 2018 14:51
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Isn't that good enough? (But for real its intended use is completely irrelevant to comics and basically anyone who doesn't do photo manipulation professionally, yes.)
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Jun 5, 2018 15:29
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FunkyAl posted:You ever think about how photoshop is a photo manipulation program? is it good for comics? Photoshop has been around for 28 years and has gone through a lot of changes since its inception, saying it's just a photo manipulation program is pretty reductive. You seem to be on an anti-digital kick lately and I understand where that thought process comes from but it is very beneficial to look at Photoshop and its brethren as just another set of art supplies that a person may or may not choose to use to achieve any number of desired effects. For instance I did a bunch of stuff in Photoshop to portray rain a little while back by applying a motion blur to some noise, adjusting the contrast and making it a screen layer, and then repearing that a few times so all the droplets weren't going in the same direction. I also used a basic gaussian blur on some blobs of color to get the shimmery effect of raindrops bouncing off of the tops of objects and the haze.  I'm sure it's possible to have done this non-digitally but I just prefer to work digitally; I still need to know the basics of color theory, composition, etc. to achieve work that looks any good. Even if you don't do that fancy stuff with it, it's real good for coloring. It is not great for inking. Fortis fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 16:23
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I don't know of a better program to clean up and stitch together scanned images so Photoshop is pretty important for that feature alone.
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Jun 5, 2018 22:07
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FunkyAl posted:You ever think about how photoshop is a photo manipulation program? is it good for comics? Yes, considering how many professional comics and concept artists use photoshop. It's an integral part of tons of production pipelines, from comics to animation to UX/UI dev.
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Jun 5, 2018 23:22
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Reiley posted:if you think a bout it, a comic is just a photograph of another dimension mine are observational doodles, of that. Ccs posted:Yes, considering how many professional comics and concept artists use photoshop. It's an integral part of tons of production pipelines, from comics to animation to UX/UI dev. I get where youre comin from with this! i think photoshop is a great tool for concept artists and for aspects of the comics process, its got a great paint bucket, i dont mean that sarcastically, and its pretty intregral for a lot of my process in things apart from eau de comique, BUT I think a lot of its strengths and versatility are also what hold back a lot of comics online i see. I get it, I did it, when I used a lot of photoshop I really went in for the painterly look and the blend modes and tricks but it slowed down my process quite a bit! It's frankly easier to make an animated movie in the adobe suite than it is to try and make a longform comic like cucumber quest, that looks like how cucumber quest does. or dresden codak. or one of the other bad ones. buffet of lies. Like, here's a question I pose. Comics are "texts" and clear symbolism helps them read better. it is possible to make great sequential work with complicated tools and rich images, but the information conveyed in those images usually demands more space and limits. a tryptich of paintings is great, but twenty paintings would be too god drat many! but twenty or more is a great number for a book! So if people are now trying to make comics in the form of old school, ink and clear exaggerated icons and labels and words comics, but with a time consuming process, why? Fortis posted:Photoshop has been around for 28 years and has gone through a lot of changes since its inception, saying it's just a photo manipulation program is pretty reductive. You seem to be on an anti-digital kick lately and I understand where that thought process comes from but it is very beneficial to look at Photoshop and its brethren as just another set of art supplies that a person may or may not choose to use to achieve any number of desired effects. For instance I did a bunch of stuff in Photoshop to portray rain a little while back by applying a motion blur to some noise, adjusting the contrast and making it a screen layer, and then repearing that a few times so all the droplets weren't going in the same direction. I also used a basic gaussian blur on some blobs of color to get the shimmery effect of raindrops bouncing off of the tops of objects and the haze. I think I am not strictuly anti digital, I just question its application for a lot of the processes people take for granted as easier with digital. Of course photoshops a great tool for art, but not all art tools are created equally for equal effect. I think the rain effect you have in the comic is good, but i also think it would be just as easy to draw in with the rest of the linework. And it does kind of resemble a photographic effect still, which isnt bad at all and in fact creates a lot of interesting visual opportunities, its just a question of application and intent.
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Jun 6, 2018 01:58
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FunkyAl posted:Like, here's a question I pose. Comics are "texts" and clear symbolism helps them read better. it is possible to make great sequential work with complicated tools and rich images, but the information conveyed in those images usually demands more space and limits. a tryptich of paintings is great, but twenty paintings would be too god drat many! but twenty or more is a great number for a book! So if people are now trying to make comics in the form of old school, ink and clear exaggerated icons and labels and words comics, but with a time consuming process, why? Photoshop doesn't force you to add time to your production process or make you paint in a painterly/concept art type style, it's a design choice that many artists make. Photoshop is maybe not the best choice for convincingly emulating traditional media but nothing about the program forces you to add more time to your production timeline or to use a more time-consuming style than drawing on paper, that's all up to the artist and how they choose to use the tools Photoshop provides. FunkyAl posted:I think the rain effect you have in the comic is good, but i also think it would be just as easy to draw in with the rest of the linework. Also that rain effect would have taken me at least 10 times longer to draw and color with the rest of the inking process than doing a simple noise layer > filter > duplicate layer in photoshop. Whether it fits the style of the rest of the artwork or was a good design choice is up for debate, sure, but saying it's "just as easy" to draw 100s of tiny lines that also don't obscure the underlying artwork is not something I'd agree with.
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Jun 6, 2018 10:08
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I'm quite anti-digital a lot of the time, I hate the distance it puts between me and the art, but it's biggest benefit is how much faster it makes so many jobs. Laying out panels, say, takes a good half hour to do neatly by hand, measuring, adding gutters, doing the maths on stuff. Photoshop, you can do it in five minutes. The comic I'm working on atm is painted because digital speeds up the process enough that I can take that approach, there's no way I could do that trad media in any reasonable time. I'm doing it in photoshop because ps does painting ok, and does panel layout ok, and does text editing ok, and I know photoshop because it does all the other art stuff I do ok, and I don't want to learn a new app to do just one job better. FunkyAl posted:Like, here's a question I pose. Comics are "texts" and clear symbolism helps them read better. it is possible to make great sequential work with complicated tools and rich images, but the information conveyed in those images usually demands more space and limits. a tryptich of paintings is great, but twenty paintings would be too god drat many! but twenty or more is a great number for a book! I disagree with you that twenty paintings is too many. Look at something like Blacksad for how amazing a painted comic can be. My pet theory is that creating comics is a balancing act between length/complexity, quality of images, and time taken. Digital lowers time taken, letting me up my page count, or devote more time to each image. lofi fucked around with this message at 11:11 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 10:54
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lofi posted:I'm quite anti-digital a lot of the time, I hate the distance it puts between me and the art, but it's biggest benefit is how much faster it makes so many jobs. Laying out panels, say, takes a good half hour to do neatly by hand, measuring, adding gutters, doing the maths on stuff. Photoshop, you can do it in five minutes. my defenition of "painting" here is kinda pedantic, i mean the physical fine art object as opposed to the printed object, the blacksad books. if you had a painting of a blacksad page, you could hang that up and look at it forever! you might not even need two. You're right that its a balance though, and part of the balance is in clear reproducability, which is the part of the game photoshop, and computers in general, are intregral at. I think of them predominantly as design tools lately though, and seperating the actual creative process from them somewhat helps you streamline it. I can keep work more spontaneous if i am using a pencil or paint, but at the same time cannot house a camera or printing press! i get the dichotomy, but its also, as they say in france, a double edged sword... gmc9987 posted:Photoshop doesn't force you to add time to your production process or make you paint in a painterly/concept art type style, it's a design choice that many artists make. Photoshop is maybe not the best choice for convincingly emulating traditional media but nothing about the program forces you to add more time to your production timeline or to use a more time-consuming style than drawing on paper, that's all up to the artist and how they choose to use the tools Photoshop provides. No, but the predominance of digital tools like photoshop and even the use of things like color displays prompts webcomics to do things comics historically couldnt have done and found ways to do without. webcomics are almost expected to be in color, even if you use black and white it cant really replicate its innate intensity on a standard rgb color display, so this means a majority of webcomics take that step that adds slightly to the process. its why newspaper cartoonists, whose job it was to make stuff that could be printed in the cheapest format possible, could make a comic a day, while the hated son newspaper gamer webcomics has to update MWF and copy paste a ton, if you are scott kurtz. and if you are more ambitious than a gamer consumer game review comic such as that, as many hardworking webcomickers are, the temptation to use these particular tools to prove so are everpresent. but it has an effect. AND having depicted rain in much the way you're describing, I don't necessarily agree! It takes time certainly, but there's a lot you can do by designing around it. You could have one panel depicting a large, detailed amount of rain, and the other panels perhaps just "mood" colors or artifacts of the rain, a drainpipe a stream etc. In the last panel on the page fortis posted, for example, it might have been more effective to have the panel filling the window with a couple rain drops running down the outside. And even when there is a large amount of rain to draw, it's easy to work into the rest of the page as a gradual "tic," or if youre usin a nib its good to test lines out on.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:56
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As a digital painter artist one of the most important skills I've had to learn is adding imperfection or simulated chaos to my work. Digital art is mathematically perfect, which makes it sterile and lifeless, which is why you gotta keep in mind to add in the variations in brushstrokes and the little stray shapes that occur organically in traditional media, the imperfections are what make a piece feel earthy and warm and hand-made. For all the convenience and cost-effectiveness you gain from working digitally, you have to pay back into it with that extra bit of effort to keep it ~95% good.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:08
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FunkyAl posted:its why newspaper cartoonists, whose job it was to make stuff that could be printed in the cheapest format possible, could make a comic a day, while the hated son newspaper gamer webcomics has to update MWF and copy paste a ton, if you are scott kurtz. and if you are more ambitious than a gamer consumer game review comic such as that, as many hardworking webcomickers are, the temptation to use these particular tools to prove so are everpresent. but it has an effect. That's not because of the tools, its because they're not as good artists and the newspaper artists were under editorial deadlines. No one is holding webcomic artists up to deadlines.
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Jun 7, 2018 00:21
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Is there any point to this weird-rear end digital vs physical argument? There's an awful lot of words being posted that seem to amount to 'I don't like it'. Newspaper cartoonists are working full time and doing lazy-rear end stuff. There's web-toons that update daily that achieve quality better than most newspaper stuff. Look at SSSS for example. Or look at John Allison, who does SGR and a bunch of other stuff simultaneously. EDIT: VVV and it is? Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 01:32
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Fangz posted:Is there any point to this weird-rear end digital vs physical argument? Yes.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:37
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Fangz posted:EDIT: VVV and it is? shootin the poo poo
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Jun 7, 2018 02:12
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just having a casual convo, not a full blown argument or anything
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Jun 7, 2018 03:28
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i'm having a full-blown argument. i'm mad as hell
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Jun 7, 2018 04:08
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i'm going to kill each and every one of you
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Jun 7, 2018 04:13
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I'm all for talking it out - it's a tension that I think about a lot. For me, an added factor is that I don't enjoy working digitally nearly as much as trad drawing, but I can create a far higher quality of work on computer. I'm still trying to work out a balance between the two, and how I want to balance the value of me enjoying making art versus the value of making the best comics I can. I think it's also worth remembering how young digital art-making is - there's still a lot more exploration going on compared to trad media comics, people experimenting with what works and what doesn't.
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Jun 7, 2018 04:20
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i got the most enjoyment out of making comics when i did trad-media pencils and inks and digital colouring, texture overlay is a good way to cut the flatness and warm it up but obviously you shouldn't overdo it (i overdid it). also i was in uni so i had plenty of drawing time during lectures, and my friends would watch me and offer their interpretations of what was going on, which were always wrong and much more entertaining than what was actually going on
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Jun 7, 2018 04:21
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So hard not to overdo textures.
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Jun 7, 2018 04:24
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lofi posted:So hard not to overdo textures.
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Jun 7, 2018 04:34
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 Gritty Concrete Trees is the name of my new trip-hop band.
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Jun 7, 2018 04:36
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