Action Cartooning with Ben Caldwell

[ben c]

hi all!

there are 3 or 4 different coloring
techniques i usually use, i'll post
tutorials for all of them here.

i will also be seperately posting
an ongoing tutorial about how
to properly use colors, color
combinations, and other color
theory fun.

FIRST, a nice, basic "cartoon" look
i used for dare 1.2... flat color with
color lines. now, really solid color
choices and combinations are a
billion times more important than
rendering, you can render and
filter all you want, but bad color
choices will turn it all into mud
(consider almost any non-Image
comic from the 1990s...). but
the colored line look, reminiscent
of animation and cartoon merchan-
dising, works best with "painted"
backgrounds, like a cartoon still.
otherwise the lines can get lost
very easily.

soo here we go...

step 1: scan in your art, set it to
"bitmap" (black/white) mode. this
gives a nice, crisp edge. for comics,
and especially to keep the sharp
lines from looking too jagged, it's
best to work at 600dpi resolution.



(there are all sorts of tricks to get
the best quality out of your scanned
line art, but that's a seperate tutorial.)

step 2: make sure your paint bucket
and magic wand tools are set to a low
tolerance, and the "anti-alias" option
is switched off. normally, anti-alias
smooths edges and selections, which
is great, but here it would muddy the
colors and lines.



you can now fill in the various colors
with the paint bucket. here is an example
with anti-alias off -- nice, crisp lines --
and one with anti-alias on -- notice the
muddy borders. it can also be a problem
if you want to repaint an area, since each
time you drop in color the color "pool"
grows wider, eventually spilling into
other colors. waht a mess!




step 3: use the magic wand to select the
black lines. you can now color them in
with the pencil (not brush!) tool, and you
don't have to be too careful, since the
selected area keeps you from coloring
the non-line areas. for isolated lines, like
the lips and nostrils, you can simply use
the paint bucket.



step 4: select any "surface" area you wish
to detail, like the face skin. then you can use
brushes and air brushes to add details like
eyelids and rouge that don''t interfere with
the more important linework.



when using white lines -- like the hair --
do all other line and skin coloring first.
also make sure you have made your art
a layer, not the bkg, and deleted any white
background space. otherwise, you will
get something like the bottom example.



...that's it for the basic coloring, and here's
how it looks with the fully painted bkg:



(a little later today, i will show additional
steps for her head shading and gauzy
skirt, in addition to some rendering
techniques. but first i have some dracula
pages to do!)

ben c

[Li'l Aswang]

awesome! thanks ben!

[lafe]

nice tut.

so if i'm seeing this correctly you start off with a fairly large image, and don't worry about the line jaggedness, due to the final being shrunk?

if that's the case, it seems as if it would save time when coloring.

[the_batcomputer]

That sounds a lot like I do mine, but simpler. Thanks for the tip!

[ben c]

lafe - i color at 600 dpi,
which is the final print resolution.
i don't shrink it down.

well actually, that rule really
only applies to BLACK lines,
you can shrink color lines
down and it doesn't matter
if they get a little fuzzy, it
prints out okay.

but either way, it's much better
to start large and anti-aliased,
i used to work smaller with
fuzzy aliased lines, and it's a
much more involved process.
which i will probably go into
some other time.

[lafe]

yeah, i'm trying to find a quicker way to do my lines for color...at the moment, it's taking quite a bit of time, that's why i have few fully finished pieces. I have more sketches than i have time to do.

Still these are some very good pointers... if the black is on a transparent bg, you can lock the transparency and color the lines that way... that's a good time saver once the outline is already etched out.

[pandaman]

Thanks Ben! that's gonna help a lot!
...now all i need is photoshop.....
anyway..do you draw your original pictures with pencil and paper or do you do that on the computer too?

[Li'l Aswang]

lafe, i'm still pretty new to ps. how do you lock the transparency?

[darrbow]

This is darrell suggestion only.

Sometimes you get overwhelmed with the white of it all.
so personally if i dont know were to begin i start with flesh or faces
cause i know there a pinkish yellow color.
or a cereleuan blue sky so something that a given.
cause starting is 90 percent of the work.

i be interested in;
-what color palete ben using.
-traping shapes would be a question - does he go in trap them all.
-if ben does have a flesh number or is it random.

-sometimes i set tolerance to 2 so it doesnt grab to much
other colors.
note- what i do is go cmyk ...go to my black and slide it all the way to
the end to get a 100 percent black for printers.

this is random you could save your line at start as a chanel if it going to be
black and after you color it all select ur chanel and recolor it black.
give you a perfect black line without regoing over it.

[ben c]

i'll have to tackle the technical questions later.
for skin, each character has their own unique
skin color, that fits both their personality and
other colors (clothes, hair, etc.)








once i've designed the colors for each character,
i save them in the palette window for easy use.
i also started doing color guides for dare 1.2,
since mike mucci and bill halliar were helping
me color it.

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more on color design for characters later, too.

[darrbow]

Thanks a million trillion i probably speak for all of us.
a lot of work, great stuff, just seeing this alone ...applause to you.
thanks for sharing.

for me the whole key would be the line going in cause with
out that, selection and trapping would be frustrating for me.
in other words i would need to know how u ink it going in.

thanks
darrell

[lafe]

Great stuff Ben, awesome work!

[Li'l Aswang]

well, it was only right in front of my face! lol! thanks for the tips lafe!
those'll be very useful!

and again, thanks ben! awesome tutorials!

[lafe]

np lil.... i recently found out about it myself.... and I use the program everyday lol!

[Li'l Aswang]

okay. here's my first attempt using this plethora of newfound
knowledge on one of the monkeys i drew for the first weekly
challenge. know i just need to learn how to draw bg's....