Valentine's day - vector comic

For the first time I decided to actually make a comic rather than a stand-alone vector graphic. I figured it would be good practice for me. So I sketched up very loosely what I was going for:

As I was sketching I was also figuring out which parts are going to be reused and assessing how much work I would need to do in Illustrator. One thing was decided from the beginning - this wasn't going to be a point by point build. I decided best way of going about this would be to just sketch it up with a stylus and color with a blob brush for the most part - for small separate details I could always resort to point-by-point or shape-building methods.

I didn't finish sketching out the final frame but I just knew it would be an easy build based on previous content so I left it alone.

I started with the tree - traced the trunk, and used a blob brush to make the leaves. I put the darkest green behind the tree trunk, and the med. green and light green shapes in front. grouped it up and copy pasted it everywhere I needed it. Then made a couple ellipses and applied clipping masks. In retrospect I could've waited to build each frame and then apply the masks but this was more helpful visually and the area wasn't cluttered with unnecessary details.

Then I drew the girl, the bird, and the bear - all just traced and colored. Even though I had drawn the bird a couple times I just re-used the one from the first frame and added details were needed (like the tail and spread wings), or moved parts of it where necessary - like the beak and eyes. Same goes for the girl. The bear I had to draw 3 times as he appeared completely differently in every frame and there was  no way around it.

The rest was little details here and there that were quite easy to make anyway.

The layout is what took another 1-2 hours after the fact - since my sketch was too loose and I changed some stuff around the layout I had in mind just didn't work. I grouped everything by each frame to move it around without a hassle. And copied al those groups onto one new layer and turned all other layers hidden. Finally I got a composition that I was happy with and the work was done.

So this took me about 5.5 - 6 hours with one smoke break (without counting fixing the layout later). I was almost glued to the screen the whole time. The first frame probably took me the longest. Looking back I probably could've saved some time if I wasn't organizing my layers and sub-layers in such a meticulous way. But it's a habit that I've worked hard to acquire and which pays off in most cases - especially if you are to reuse pieces of your work later for something else - then instead of a giant tangled mess you have a clean neatly ordered set of layers.

Point-by-point build would've taken a lot longer for this because my sketch was so loose. If I had spent more time drawing on paper the point-by-point would've been the way to go probably :)

Surface 2 Pro setup for drawing

This is my setup for drawing / vector graphics / etc.

Surface 2 Pro by itself is great - full blown OS, small and light yet as powerful as my Desktop PC. Stylus support is amazing so naturally I was very excited to draw on it rather than a Wacom tablet - Finally I get to look at where I'm drawing rather than my hand drawing somewhere on the side and my eyes being glued to the screen in front of me.

But for using Illustrator or Photoshop the screen is to small. What do to do? Get a docking station. And not just any docking station - Microsoft docking station specifically for Surface. you just slide the sides in - and immediately everything connected to the station is working - no hassle.

At first I just set it up on my desk normally - but the tilt wasn't enough for me so I came up with this idea of setting it flat on the table - just like my Wacom was. It turned out to be surprisingly sturdy and convenient to use.

And when I'm doing web-development or don't need to draw with a stylus in general I just set it up normally to my left. with Type cover attached - docking station doesn't get in the way so especially when I'm not mirroring the display it's actually kind of nice to have to keyboards :)

And when I need to leave I just slide the sides out ...

And I'm good to go!

My poor PC doesn't get any action any more. It just sits there sadly with a Scorpion tattoo on its side. And the only time it gets turned on is when I'm moving more files from its hard drive to my sky drive (it's a long process - I have a lot of photos :) and want to filter out the baddies before I put it on SkyDrive.) Oh yeah and with the purchase of Surface Pro you get 200 GB SkyDrive space for 2 years.

Ah, and for people extremely loyal to the Wacom tablets - be happy - you can install the Wacom drivers on your Surface. I personally haven't done that because I just don't feel like it's something I need to do. Surface Stylus support hasn't let me down - pressure, tilt everything is perfect (for me anyway).

This is not part of my normal set up but 'it' keeps flying onto my desk and pushing keys. He is very drawn to the clacking of mechanical keyboard keys, and anything shiny...

I've got one more thing to write about which arguably isn't very related to this post. On the other hand it was the last piece of the puzzle and essential gear for having a very convenient set of tools for drawing. A light tracing pad.

I looked at a couple options and this one seemed perfect for me - it's very thin and light, has a brightness setting and is LED. It was $80 on Amazon for 8' x 12' size (it's actually slightly bigger so is perfect for both A4 and Letter which is pretty much what I draw on). There were cheaper options - Autograph had a 40$ one but it was more like a box that seemed inconvenient to use over longer periods of time and used a white light bulb - don't know how evenly it would be lit up so I figured if I am to buy such a thing I'd rather get the one I want. Really you can just build it yourself - take a picture frame and put a lamp under it :)

This makes my life a lot easier - I make a rough sketch than trace it and make necessary adjustments then scan it in - which takes out the guesswork when rebuilding in vector (guesswork as in hmmm which one of these 10 lines in the sketch is the on I'm supposed to build).

Improving drawing skills with a stylus

I can draw okay for the most part but I do feel a need to improve on that. I can pull it off better when I have a pencil in my hand. It's much easier than controlling the stylus pen in some ways. You look on the screen instead of right where your hand moves, the space is a lot more limited than when drawing on paper, etc.

So for building graphics in Illustrator I prefer placing a sketch drawn with a pencil as a template layer and building graphics with the Pen tool. You get all kinds of flexibility and precision but it definitely requires more time.

Besides, for other programs like Animate stylus drawing is the way to go for the most part - partly because it's a lot quicker... for people who are good with it.

I don't believe in such a thing as talent. For me it's all about putting time into something. Anybody can get really good at anything if they clock in hours and hours of work. The trick is not to get discouraged with bad results. Chances are when you start something you are going to be bad at it especially if it's more of a physical thing - drawing, playing an instrument, singing, martial arts etc. It's easy when we are kids because there is all kinds of spare time and no work / responsibilities. So, I came up with this little plan.

Every evening before I go to bed I draw a very small picture with a marker on a dry erase board. Then I take a picture of it with my phone. Next day when I have time to kill I place the photo on a template layer and use a stylus to trace it. Sometimes I skip it - and let those sketches pile up a bit. Since they are very small and simple it doesn't take much time to re-create it. And it's easier to work with a template rather than drawing with a stylus from the get-go. I don't try to fix any flaws of the marker scribbles - the exercise is just to train my hand. Later if I feel like it I can color it and add to it. I use the Brush tool in Illustrator, set its size to vary from 1pt up to 10pt depending on the line thickness.

It's a long shot. The improvement will come slower than if say you put in 5-6 hours into it daily. But it's a lot less demanding, and easier to stick to. It doesn't really matter what the subject matter is. You can pick a couple characters and just keep drawing those in different positions or doing different things. I usually base it on something funny that happened that day.

Another thing that might help stick to it is if you sort of do it for another family member - a spouse, a child, or a parent. That way it's easier to come up with something cute and funny every day as you have context and can make inside jokes. Also you will get feedback which is extremely important with creative work. And if it's a family member they will be happy about it, they will look forward to it. Here's a couple I did:

Oct 21

Oct 22

Oct 23 - kicked myself in the eye with my knee while doing an ax-kick. It really hurt but was very funny.

Oct 24 - I realized I needed a haircut after I continuously zipped my hair into my boots on accident for a couple days.

These were the first 4 that I made. I will post more once I color the rest. For coloring I use a blob brush and draw behind mode as it's fun to do and it's another thing stylus is really well-suited for.

Digitizing hand-drawn art - part 2 - Bézier curves, pathfinding

Here's a link to Part 1. In short it suggests using a real scanner and the LiveTrace tool in Illustrator.

So, again, scanner is essential. I use a $50 Canon and the results are always much better than taking a photo with my DSLR camera or especially phone camera - mostly because there will be no warping of the image.

For me, there are 2 types of sketches - perfectly drawn through, inked ones and messy scribbles. Like this:

The first sketch is clean, inked, and finished - the only thing left to do is to color it. In this case I should be fine using the LiveTrace tool. This is best for people preferring to do most of the work on paper and to deal with Illustrator as little as possible.

The second sketch on the other hand is a real mess - parts of it are drawn with a pencil and the rest with a pen. All lines are messy and not drawn out. Some details are just not there, and some need to be redone. LiveTrace is really not an option here because the sketch is loose and not finished. To deal with this kind of sketches I will need to do 95% of work in Illustrator. Here's what you need to do.

1. Draw your sketch - don't worry about it being messy or having some curves done wrong. You can make a clean sketch like the bear one and still use this method - it's up to you. The point is you don't have to.

2. Scan your sketch, place it in Illustrator on the bottom layer (and set the layer to template or make it semi-transparent).

3. The sketch will be your guide. The idea is to build that with Bézier curves, basic shapes like elipse, rectangle etc., and the use of pathfinder panel tools. So really it's a combination of different things and you yourself can decide which of the three to use and when. But you should be familiar and comfortable with Bézier curves and pathfinder tools. If you are not, I strongly recommend investing some time into it. In a long run it will save you a lot of headache and trouble.

If you choose this method, you will have 100% control of every tiny detail and curve and can readjust things quite easily. Also readjusting one thing won't "break" other parts.

Here's an example.

On the left is my initial pencil sketch scan. On the right is most of the artwork built with curves and shapes. Notice that everything in the right picture has no fill and precisely the same outline (0.5px plain solid #9E005D). I save that as a graphic style and always use it when I work with this method.

And here is the end result.

Everything is a separate path that I can easily control and modify at any time with no hassle or inconvenience.

When you have a sketch that you use like a template or a guide it is a lot easier to just build paths by points with the Bézier curves rather than using a stylus and the pencil or brush tool. That's also a way to do things but I personally like doing that when I don't have a sketch and am drawing something in the Illustrator from the start.

Bézier curves

(You should watch this in full screen mode)

Use the Pen tool (P) to build a path point by point.

You can add/remove points later with Add Anchor Point (+) and Delete Anchor Point (-) tools (they are in the Pen drop down menu but really you should use the + and - keys).

Each point will have 2 handles - they control curve segments directly to the right and to the left of the point. Use Direct Selection (A) for selecting a specific point (or multiple points). If there are no handles on a selected point it means it's a corner - you can convert it to a smooth point with the Convert Anchor Point Tool (Shift C) or if you have Direct Selection it will show up on the Control panel.

The way Convert tool works is you hold down on an anchor point and drag in any direction - it will convert the point to a smooth one and 2 handles will appear. At first the handles are connected and dragging one around affects the other. If you want to break that, use the Convert tool to drag one of the handles - after that they will move separately from each other. If it's a smooth point you can convert it to a corner one by just clicking with the Convert tool on the point directly.

Placement of points is crucial. There is no rule about it however I prefer to have as little anchor points as possible - it's easier to control the path that way. There is sort of an unwritten rule called "rule of clocks" or something like that. It says if you can fit an imaginary wall clock (elliptical, not necessarily round) into a piece of the curve, that curve needs to have anchor points on 12, 3, 6, 9 o'clock points. You sort of rotate the imaginary clock - so 12 doesn't necessarily appear on the top. It's hard to explain with words so here's a drawing :)

The red path is your curve. It has 6 anchor points - start point, 3, 9, 6, 3, and end point. I could have put another anchor point (or added an imaginary clock) into the curve right before the end point - but it was unnecessary since it's the last 'segment' and i could achieve the desired result by adjusting handles on the end point.

If you regard this path as a  function, you need to have an anchor point on every point of extreme - every maximum and minimum of the function, or every peak and valley.

Don't think too much about this - just get a feel, add points remove points, play with the handles.

Pathfinding

(You should watch this in full screen mode)

Open the Pathfinder panel. The first line on that panel says "shape modes" and has Unite, Minus Front, Intersect, and Exclude buttons. Sometimes it's easier to build a shape by breaking it down into simpler shapes and joining them - for instance, if you are drawing a heart, the easy way to make it perfect would be to draw a circle and a triangle, Unite those shapes, and then reflect the united shape. Then unite 2 pieces of hearts and voila - you have a perfectly symmetrical heart.

Minus Front is like a cookie cuter - the shape that's in front will be subtracted from the shape underneath.

Intersect works like an AND operator in programming and logic. If you have 2 overlapping circles and click Intersect you will have a new shape that's the overlapping area of the 2 circles.

Exclude will do the opposite - it will unite the 2 circles and subtract the overlapping area.

One thing to keep in mind - when you use the pathfinding method it's a good habit to copy and paste in front the 2 shapes you're working with. Because, for example, when you use the Minus Front button you will lose the shape in the front - and if you have other future uses for it it's best to have a copy. The copy or the "throw-out shape" has only one use - to modify some shape.

Know your tools and hot keys!

Most of the books on Adobe Illustrator explain every tool in depth but don't do a good job explaining when and why you should use them. That is what I'm targeting in this tutorial - I'm hoping it will give general guidelines and ideas on how to accomplish your goal and how to work with the tools. Once you understand when and why to use certain tools you should read up on those in your Illustrator book or online - there's plenty of material on that.

Hotkeys are important - it saves a lot of time to push a button on the keyboard rather than selecting a tool on a panel with the mouse cursor every time. However, I strongly discourage getting a list of shortcuts and trying to memorize them. You should learn the hotkeys naturally - by use. You will notice that there are a lot of tools that are used very frequently - like Direct Selection, Selection, Pen, Ellipse, etc. just pay attention to the tooltips when you go and click on a tool. You will learn the important hotkeys overtime and with no effort.

Practice makes perfect - do a couple examples from here and there. Start with a simple sketch, then move on to more complex artwork. Explore the tools and options, try different techniques, see what you like and what you don't like. There is no right or wrong way of doing things - you can accomplish the same result through different methods - just some may take a lot more time than others.

Ah yeah, and here's the final graphic for the squirrel sketch. I was lazy I didn't do highlights and shadows on the squirrel. :)

__________________

EDIT

In the Bezier curves part of this tutorial I was writing about the clock method and described it as an unwritten rule. That was my bad - it's Von Glitchka's Clockwork Method (TCM). I accidentally stumbled upon his video lecture on Lynda.com once and later I bought one of his books (Vector basic training). I'd recommend that book to anybody who hasn't read it. It focuses more on the whole creative process rather than explaining what each tool does. And gives perspective in general on some techniques. Anyway. I just didn't realize TCM was Von Glitchka's method and assumed it's just a rule of thumb.

Drawing in Animate

https://www.toonboom.com/products/animate

Animate is one of the ToonBoom products best suited for 2D animation. This is what I'm learning now. Apart from animation it also has excellent tools for creating and manipulating vector graphics. The tutorials are a really good place to start at and basically you don't need any prior knowledge of anything else - it helps but it's not necessary.

The biggest feature that seemed amazing to me was the rotation of canvas. Just at any moment hold down Ctrl - Alt and quickly rotate the canvas in any direction. Seems like a small thing but it changes everything especially if you work with a stylus.

When you draw on a piece of paper you can rotate it as much as you want. Because some lines are difficult to draw simply because of how your hands and arms move - when you rotate paper you make sure that at any point your hand goes in the direction that's comfortable for you. This is a problem in Illustrator when you draw with a stylus - you can't rotate your screen every time and you can't rotate your canvas. In Animate you can and quite easily - it fits into the creative workflow very naturally to the point that you don't even have to think about it. In my opinion this should be added to any software dealing with drawing.

The other interesting point of making your graphics in Animate is how they deal with vectors. You can create a closed path with the pen tool and yet continue that path. The coloring seems similar to that of good old Paint - as long as you have an enclosed area (it can be defined by a couple paths) you can give it a fill. In general this approach to things feels a lot closer to how you draw on paper - you just draw and color without worrying about anything - the software does the rest for you. Also, there is an option for automatically merging paths that intersect together, and another option to make sure they get extended enough to "touch" the other path they were close to. This lets you not worry about unclosed paths and just keep on doing your thing.

Another really amazing and helpful feature is Onion skin. Say you have the front view and profile view of the same character. You put them onto 2 separate frames and go to the frame between them and enable Onion Skin. It will show the previous frame in one color and the next one in another color. Then without thinking just draw your 3/4 view by simply drawing between respective red and green lines.

Another big plus is you can use the Adobe Flash keyboard shortcuts rather than learning the Animate ones - this is convenient for any Adobe fan / user.

Also, an interesting approach on coloring. You can keep your line art and fill separate. The way it works is you create shapes from your line art that have no outline which you can color. If you do so you can always go and look and your clean line art without colors getting in the way and you can always see them together if you have the "Preview Color and Line Art" option enabled.

I haven't made anything exciting yet and am still learning - there will be more on this later on. Right now I'm trying to improve my actual drawing skills and the drawing speed. And the only way I know to make it happen is by just drawing as much as possible.

A couple illustrations

Here's a couple more stuff I've made with Illustrator:

This is from "How to Draw New Retro-Style Characters" book.

I just built it in Illustrator and colored it.

 

Gallifrey at night. I'm a "Doctor Who" fan so I recolored and modified my previous artwork a bit :)

Evil girl. She looks more annoyed than evil though. 

These 2 are from the same book. I'm going to keep adding more parts and keeping them in separate ai files. This way when I need to build a character in this style it will go very quickly.

 

the balloons are semi-transparent. and I can easily change color for when I need to quickly make a birthday card of sorts.

 

This is hand-drawn. Goofing around.

 

 



 Anyway. This is it. Last day of April, so a good place to wrap up with Illustrator. I do have one more post planned but it won't apply directly to Illustrator, so I'm wrapping up for now. I still have a lot to learn and do in Illustrator and I will return to it at some point but for now I'm putting it away.

 

I've gotten Animate from Toon Boom and shifted my focus there completely. It's an excellent tool for 2D Animation for those who don't know. Next post is going to be about that.

 

Comic book art

This is done the same way as described in the previous post - sketched, inked, scanned, colored in AI, and background made in AI. For sketching I used a wooden manikin to get the pose and proportions right. I was going for a dynamic pose - it's a little bit of strange one but hey maybe she just let go of a rope she was hanging onto and is going to punch somebody while dodging to the side... Definitely made it challenging to draw.

If I end up making some comics she will definitely be one of the main characters. And if I go with animation I can simplify it a bit out of this style and make it more cartoony but in either case this will definitely be used later on one way or another.

Anyway, drawing her and coloring her in AI took me about a day. All things considered not too bad timing for right now in this style. I stepped away from learning AI a little bit and have been training myself in drawing lately but after making this I realized there is still a lot I need to learn to do in Illustrator so I'll be back to that.

Digitizing hand-drawn art

Creating art directly in Illustrator is great - you can mess with each single line and change colors and even components on the go. However creating something from scratch is rather tedious and time-consuming - even if you're pretty good with a stylus it still is faster to draw something by hand with a pencil (at least in my case anyway). This of course doesn't apply to say abstract-ish sort of art like the three I posted before. I'm talking about drawing pretty detailed characters and objects.

I got a book called "how to draw your own graphic novel" (which is great by the way; has good advice and nice practice exercises). I went ahead and drew the very first character from there - a barbarian. Once it was done I used a 0.05 Black ink pen to outline it, erased all the pencil and was done with it. I wanted to color it in Illustrator so it was time to test out the Image trace feature. I took a photo with a DSLR camera, tuned it in photoshop a bit, and placed the file and tried different tracing modes. It wasn't the best result - I kept losing either the very top lines or the very bottom ones because of the way camera focused. I tried using a tripod and went back and forth with it. Then I started just rebuilding the whole image with curves and lines using the photo as a guidline. It worked but the process was very slow and tedious. And well it wasn't what I wanted.

Then I figured I'd go get a cheap scanner and see if that will make my life easier. I got a $50 Canon scanner (2400x4800dpi). Scanned the image (in grayscale or black and white), upped the contrast and placed it in AI. 

Inked sketch

Image trace worked like a charm - I used the "Sketched Art" option. The black outline was a compound path and all the pieces had no fill but where there so I didn't even have to use a brush to give it a fill - just selected each single piece or groups and colored it. Then I made a couple sub-layers to add shading and detail. After that was done I made a background layer and drew the ground, mountains, etc with a stylus - easy stuff.

Final result

Now, please remember, that this is a picture from "how to draw your own graphic novel" book - not my own creation - so don't use it anywhere or for anything :)

Another way of doing this is building the art point by point and using the sketch as a guide. This method is described in Part 2 of this tutorial.

Buffy / original Scoobies

This was a good show. I decided to attempt making a t-shirt design (which was limited to 5-6 colors). That didn't fall through for me but I still had fun. Anyway here's my original image and t-shirt version.

 

 Next time I make a tv-show themed graphic it will probably be either Doctor Who (10th doctor) or Game of Thrones. But for now I have a bunch of other things I need to make first, so probably will be a while.

Eraser and Brushes

My first attempt of using eraser instead of a brush. For this technique you draw a basic shape and then use eraser to give it detail.

The tree has 4 layers - first I drew a blob of the middle green shade. Then set the eraser to vary in size based on stylus pressure from 1pt to 3pt and kind of deleted parts where branches would be seen. It was pretty ugly. Then with a blob brush I drew the trunk and the branches, made it azure with the eraser, put that layer under the green. Was still ugly. Drew a dark green shape, placed it between the two, made it azure with the eraser. Finally drew the light green with a blob brush on top of everything and used the eraser again.

The ground was done the same way (2 layers - azure dark on top, lighter solid shape behind). The grass was drawn with a brush with same settings as the eraser. Gradiented the background, added mountains, added the frame and the 'stars'.

The fun of this technique is you draw very generally and liberally and in very broad terms. And then with the eraser just make it azure. It's rather simple and easy to do. What's neat is the same can be achieved with a brush - just then you have to be good at giving it a general shape. This way instead of growing your drawing you take away from it - it's subtractive. But because you have layers and isolation mode it's super-easy compared to say subtractive sculpturing.

The stars being on top of the frame but behind the tree give the graphic some depth.

Foxies

Made a graphic for my mom for International Women's day (March 8).

The writing actually has a couple pieces to it - two layers of the same text (one with a stroke with flowery endpoints, and the other with stroke of none, outer glow, drop shadow), and two groups of flowers (made with transform tool - easy stuff). All flowers on the foreground were stars with all of their anchors converted to curves and readjusted a bit.

I had a different idea for the background but it had to be something happy and with flowers. Took me probably just as long to draw and color the foxes as everything else. And I still kind of don't care for anything but the foxes.
 

Laziness and mistakes

I've discovered 2 things in the course of creating 2 new graphics.

1. Don't be lazy! Even if an object is the same color as the background still fill it. Sometimes when the graphic is done you will find that the background choice wasn't the best and it needs changing. Then depending on how objects are filled it will just be annoying to fix the background and fill the lines.

Also, do yourself a favor and from the very beginning create a new layer and call it background and give it some light gray or other neutral color. If it bothers you, you can always hide the layer and proceed with working as usual. And then if there are any details that will be white just make the background visible and color away.

This comic strip took me exactly 5 hours. 1.5 hours was the initial drawing and reshaping of curves. In a grand scheme of things I do think that working with a stylus (or even a mouse) is going to be faster than drawing with a pencil, especially if you know the hot-keys. When drawing on paper there is no undo-redo and well erasing is not as easy as on a computer - there are always traces left of incorrect lines.

Another thing I noticed that I was doing in a lazy way that later cost me extra time was not closing some of the shapes. While the Blob Brush is excellent and really fun to use it takes a lot longer to color with it than applying a one click fill to the object. So even if part of the object will be hidden under another one just merge the curves/lines or add anchor points were lose-handedly otherwise the straight line by which an object will be filled between 2 open ends may not always be ideal.

2. If you want a clean graphic without color exceeding the lines, and using fill rather than a brush for coloring stay away from using a brush width of which will be dependent on stylus's pressure or other variables. In this case you're not creating lines and curves anymore but closed paths that can have their own fill. It's more difficult to modify the curves and if there is any intersection it will all become one object rather than separate paths. The cat's 'outline' was essentially one path and it was not quite easy to change anything towards the end. So I ended up redrawing with a normal brush where all setting where fixed. I essentially did the drawing twice.

The pressure thing is really neat and looks good and works fine with Blob-brush fill, just can turn into a much longer process depending on how complicated the drawing is.

Just don't be lazy and if you recognize a mistake of using the wrong tool or missing something fix it right away and don't continue and hope for the best. It will save a lot of time to fix stuff from the beginning rather than suffering consequences of bad choices and prolonging the work-process significantly.

Some more graphics from earlier:

Quick and easy drawing. Blob brush. ~1 hour on everything

 

 

 Original sketch and the final result. This one was done with shapes in Photoshop. Hours of work as punishment for bad choices of tools

 

Stylus, Blob-brush. The original image of the gift card was too small and I had to vectorize it. Even so I spent about 2-4 hours and this was the first graphic for work done in Illustrator. The more practice the faster the process.