Digital Comics 101

The first step to creating a comic is pencil out the layout. Fill in the general shapes of where you would like the characters to go. Using a "dummy" as seen in the body tutorial is a quick way to get the page layed out. Once you have your drawing, use a ruler to assist you in making straight lines where the panels will go. After the panels are drawn, fill in the details and background for each of the drawings.

Things to consider:

1.Make sure there is room for text in your panels! You don't want to cover up an important part of the drawing with equally important dialogue!

2. Make sure that you have a consistent way of drawing your characters. It is odd to have a character look one way in the first panel, and in the last look like a completely different character.

3. Make sure that the reader's eyes can follow the panels in the correct order. If all else fails, use overlap or an arrow. Objects on top will be read first.

Some digital comics color directly under the pencil work. This gives a softer, more artsy feel to the comic. Most online comics will ink their panels. Some do it in a program like Photoshop, Painter, or Illustrator, but I personally ink mine directly on the paper.

What You'll Need - A thin pen and a thick pen. I used a 005 for my thin lines, and a 01 for my thick. Microns are excellent disposable pens and come in a variety of sizes. Black gel pens or the elite rapidograph pens are also good for inking. If all else fails, grab a sharpie, but this is a worst case scenario. Sharpies will bleed so your lines will not be straight, nor will they ever get very thin. You will also need a soft, white eraser to get rid of those pencil lines.

Trace around the boxes (using your ruler... keep those lines straight!) and around all the lines of your character with your thin inking pen of choice. Once everything has been inked, wait to make sure that the ink has dried. Go in with your eraser and remove all of the pencil lines. When all of the pencil is removed, you should go in with your thick inking pen and emphasize the lower lines and the lines of things that are coming forward in space. It is very rare to make a thick line in the background.

Scan your final inking into Adobe Photoshop at 200 - 300dpi.

Open the document in Photoshop. Crop off the excess paper by useing the marquee tool to select the area you want to keep, and then pulling down the Image/Crop option in the upper menubar of Photoshop.

Adjust the brightness and contrast of your document so that you get rid of all of the extra gray. Finally, go to your layers menu and double click on the background layer, (the layer with your drawing) and rename it "drawing". Set the layer properties to "multiply" on the drawing layer. Finally, create a layer above it called "black box". We're going to box off the comic now!

Making sure that you have the "black box" layer active, grab the rectangular marquee tool. Click on the upper left corner and drag to the lower right on your first panel. Hold down the shift key on your keyboard and you will be able to continue to select all of your panels without losing your original selection.

Once all of the panels are selected, go to the select menu in the top menubar of Photoshop. Click Select/Inverse and the program will select the area around your boxes intead of the area inside of the boxes.

Grab a paintbucket full of black paint and dump the sucker! It will flow only in the selected area. Make sure you are on the empty "black box" layer when you do this, otherwise it will not work.

If you would like a white border around each of your panels, follow these steps.

1. Go to the layer menu in the top menubar and select layer effects or layer style. It should bring up a box as seen to the right.

2. Change the color from the default yellow to white by clicking on the color box.

3. Drag the opacity arrow up to 100%, the spread up to 90%, and the range down to 10%. Changing the size will give you a thicker or thinner line. 5 pixels wide is the default, I usually keep it there.