So here’s something neat. I’m just about done colouring chapter one of DDATOL, and I discovered a neat time-saving trick.

I’ve been using the gradient tool to quickly throw down colours in abstract backgrounds. That’s what you see above. It works well – it’s easy to experiment with and is fast. But I don’t like how smooth it looks. I’ve been fighting this in the past by using a textured brush to go in, sample a colour, paint, sample again, paint, sample, paint, etc. you get the idea. It takes longer than I’d like, and it sometimes muddies the colours. On top of that, I prefer a sort of mottled texture in the BGs – something that looks more like natural media.

Fly past the break to see the results and the method.

Rather than re-paint that background layer – which destroys the original gradient-tool sketch, by the way – I’ve made a layer above it and set it to “Overlay”.

Now I set my foreground colour to a grey of, say, 70% brightness, and my background colour to a grey of, say, 30% brightness. Grab the textured brush and go to town on that Overlay layer.

What you end up with is the subtle texture coming through, but it doesn’t destroy the colours underneath, making it possible to really tailor the texture to the image while preserving the colours from the sketch. This is basically the look I would have been trying to get by sampling and re-painting the BG, except I wouldn’t have had as much flexibility. For someone as indecisive as I am, flexibility is a good thing.

^Click to reveal The Truth

Here’s a thing I worked up yesterday as a gift for a good friend. Probably took about nine hours, including an hour and a half spent trying to find good animal references. There are a few things I would change, but you know how it is with the incessant passing of time and so on.

The Laser Panther is, of course, a nod to Brütal Legend.

I’ve just finished flatting Chapter 2 of Oriental Lieutenant. For those who don’t know, flatting is a term some people use for a process that makes it easier to colour line art in Photoshop. You isolate the line art and then start filling in the various shapes in the image on different layers. In the image above, each different shade of blue is a different layer. For a traditional analogue, think of it like the sort of masking you might do for airbrushing or watercolours.

In the past, when I was colouring my flatted pages, I would CTRL-click the layer thumbnail, which would create a selection of the shape of that layer. For example, in the image above, if I CTRL-clicked the layer with the big flat shape of the sail, I’d get a big sail-shaped selection. Then I’d paint within the selection.

This is the wrong way to do it.

Kazu Kibuishi revealed to me the awesome correct way to do it, and it is very simple. It’s the “Lock Transparent Pixels” button, and if you don’t know about how it can improve your life, I’ll explain behind the cut.

That is the Lock Transparent Pixels button, and this is what it does: After you’ve painted your big flat shape, the contents of that layer consist of the thing you painted and a bunch of transparent pixels around it. Clicking this button tells Photoshop not to paint any pixels where there aren’t already pixels.

Here’s what would happen if I painted over that layer without engaging the Lock Transparent Pixels button:

(Note that I’ve hidden the line art layer – you’re just looking at the flatting layers.) And here’s the same thing, except I’ve told Photoshop to not put pixels down where there aren’t some already:

This is functionally similar to what I had been doing previously by creating a selection and then painting within it, but it is much better. For one, it’s faster: once all the layers have their transparency locked, it’s simple to flick through them and start painting, not having to worry about getting paint all over the place and not having to take the extra step of creating the selection and making sure you’re still painting on the correct layer.

But the real reason it’s better is that it is much, much cleaner. Here are the results from using that make-a-selection method, where my layer contents were some black pixels, and I’ve painted red on top of them. Notice the line of filthy half-red, half-black pixels along the edge.

Here’s the same example, except I’ve locked the transparency on that black layer:

Much better. Using the selection method has another disadvantage: creating successive selections, painting within them, and then selecting again, and again, etc. etc. eventually degrades the quality of the shape – it can get aliased (sharp and jagged), which could potentially lead to little specks of colour sticking out of the line art.

If you’re using this sort of method to colour line art in Photoshop but weren’t aware of this little feature, I hope you find it as helpful as I have.

Whoops – I’m late in posting this. But there it is – the clean line art that will appear in the finished book. A few small changes were made between the rough sketch and here. (That link’s included in case you’re somehow not viewing this on my site, where in order to compare the two you need only exercise that scroll wheel a bit). It looks a bit cluttered right now, and Selim (right in the middle there) gets lost, but the colour will put the focus back on him.

Some of the line weights are a bit inappropriate, so I might fudge those in Photoshop later.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to help me out with my multiple-choice difficulties! It started out with Option 4 taking a pretty strong lead. Option 1 was sort of like a tag-along – it seems like people who liked 1 also liked 4, and 4 gained the most weight. But then Option 3 started to pick up steam late in the day!

Unfortunately for 3, if you put it in context, it doesn’t work as well as 1 or 4. So I’ve tightened up 4 a bit (you can see that above) and printed it off (you can see that below). This page comes between 19 and 20 in Chapter 4, so I’ll be pencilling it in about two weeks. I’ll share the line art when it’s done!

(FWIW, I shove a “Gradient Map” adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack, with one end representing 15% Cyan. Print it out, and when you scan it in again, and you can just pull out the blue, leaving the lovely line art.)

For a page in “The Oriental Lieutenant”. Without me providing anything so trivial as “context”, which of the four images above do you prefer?

I’m aware that, as an author, I’m not traditionally allowed to do this sort of thing. But this is the Internet! The twenty-first century’s Wild West! Anything goes!

EDIT: Durr, comments are disabled. Sorry. Hit me up on my Livejournal or on Twitter!

100% zoom of a tiny chunk of the line-art pages I’ve been scanning in at 600DPI.

You’d think the Bristol Smooth paper would show less tooth than the Vellum, but only by a small degree (this is vellum, by the way).

This is what the scanned pages look like before I Photoshop them into high-contrast submission.

This little image reminds me of the girls in high school that would just doodle pretty eyes in the margins of their workbooks. They always had long, long lashes and little glinty reflections. Much more ornate than this.

Speaking of high-school and margin-drawings, my Grade 11 math teacher would get mad at me for doodling in the margins of my notebook. His disapproval messed me up. Now I write equations in the margins of my drawings.

Progress continues on Delilah Dirk and the Full Length Graphic Novel. I am well-ensconced in the line-art process, where I’m making some dark, clean lines on top of the squiggly blue ones. You can sort of see the the process in action above, as I’ve plucked out the strands of meaning in dark lines while the chaos of the blue roughs swirl underneath. It’s been a preeetty slow process so far, and I’m getting about 2-3 pages done per day. Usually two. Thirteen pages were completed last week, and I’ve got a lot of pages to get through, so as you can imagine, this is probably going to take a while.

Working on paper means I don’t have to turn the computer on each morning, though, which is nice. It also means I’ll update the blog less. In fact, I will post so infrequently that older posts will probably start disappearing. It’s negative posting. ZOOP.

Look at this, and let me tell you what it is. As I do, you should realize that it’s pretty awesome. LiveJournal user “manintheboat” has taken a smart-aleck line from Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople and made a real-life thing out of it. It is “Blood of My Enemies Tea”, and it is pictured above (along with the wishbones of My Enemies’ Turkeys). For the full (long) list of ingredients (which, sadly, includes no actual blood of My Enemies), take a look at manintheboat’s LiveJournal post. You can also see a photo of her crazy alchemical tea-making laboratory.

If you haven’t read the comic, at one point Delilah Dirk is imprisoned. Selim brings her some tea, as a gesture of kindness, but she responds:

Thinking about this warms the cockles of my cold, mechanical robot heart.

No matter how much I work in colour, I can’t seem to get really comfortable. I thought for this one, I might try a limited-palette, solid-colour approach, similar to this image (read the whole article on the artist here, at Leif Peng’s wonderful Today’s Inspiration site). I couldn’t get it to work, though, since I hadn’t started the drawing with that colouring style in mind. As a result, I didn’t design the image with enough big, solid, shapes or with the big contrasty hits of black. On images like this, I have usually failed to think in terms of colour, focusing instead on the shapes, the linework, and describing the things that I am trying to make an image of. That carries over to the colouring so that instead of really visualizing the image as a colour composition, I end up basically colouring within the lines, like a fancy colouring book. It becomes a technical exercise, where the new challenge is giving everything a colour and value that will approximately balance the composition now that it’s in colour and not just black and white lines. I would like to be thinking, “how can I use colour in this image to create the composition” rather than, “well, her boots are brown cause her boots are supposed to be brown, so how do I either mute their colour or compensate elsewhere so they don’t stick out”. I need to be using the colour purposefully and confidently, rather than as an “add-on” or a technicality. So I’m going to have to start thinking ahead.

That said, I enjoy the way images like this turn out, but the process is still too fiddly and technical-feeling.

Blah blah blah. Here’s some images and notes on the process…