Innholdsfortegnelse for Volume 3 i Comic Artist

... to yet another cracking Comic Artist collection – the third volume, to be exact! It’s packed with stunning pieces of art to inspire you, pro artist Q&As filled with tips and tricks to help you improve your own art, features and interviews to learn from, and in-depth step-by-step workshops to work along with, accompanied by exclusive videos to follow, free custom brushes to try out, and much more. And with Thor, Black Panther and Harley Quinn leading the charge in this volume, it’s a really special release! Whether you’re familiar with the industry standard software Photoshop, or you want to take your first steps in an affordable alternative with SketchBook Pro, this volume has plenty to get you started. And with expert tips on narrative and depicting character in…

“All the brushes are displayed in one easyto-access toolbar” SketchBook Pro comes with a variety of brushes and tools to fit the needs of every artist or designer of all levels of proficiency. All the brushes are displayed in one easy-to-access toolbar called the Brush palette. This palette offers all the basic tools with simple adjustable properties for you to enjoy working with. The icons within the Brush Palette are graphically visual and easy to identify, which all helps to contribute to a smooth and user-friendly creative workflow. In this part of our guide you’ll learn how to locate the Brush palette within SketchBook Pro, how to open the Brush Properties panel for each brush and how to organise your brushes to improve your painting experience. 1 Finding the brushes…

Along with all the amazing user‑friendly tools and options you’ll find in the current version of SketchBook Pro for Windows and Mac, the powerful Lock Transparency function can make your life much easier and help improve your workflow when creating artwork. In this guide you’ll learn where to find this function, how to colour your line-art and even render any element you either draw or paint on the canvas using Lock Transparency. The name isn’t very helpful: it doesn’t so much lock anything as mask transparent areas of a layer. All you really need to remember is that when it’s active, you can only affect content that already exists on the layer, not draw or paint in new areas. This is a basic formula to help you better understand this…

PROFILE Randy Bishop location: US Randy is a character designer and illustrator who lives with his wife and children in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He’s been working as a freelance artist for the past several years, primarily as a character designer for animation and games, but has also worked as an illustrator, creating artwork for the publishing and education industries. www.randybishopart.com SURPRISE “I found a photo of a girl wearing this expression and had to draw it.” WIGS “I did a few sketches of skulls wearing wigs. I’m not sure why.” TROLL “He’s been a little down ever since his encounter with the three Billy Goats Gruff.” SHE’S A GIRL “It took me a minute to decide whether I was drawing a man or a woman when I was drawing this.…

PROFILE Julian Totino Tedesco Location: Argentina Julian is a freelance illustrator working mainly doing comic book covers for clients such as Marvel, Dark Horse and dc: http://ifxm.ag/j-tedesco Creating a cover, whether it’s for a book, a magazine or a comic book, involves much more than just picking a nice image. A cover serves a purpose, and therefore there’s a lot of things you need to have in mind before starting to draw. In this case, I’ll show you how I design and create an effective comic-book cover – a superhero comicbook cover, to be more specific. There are a few things you have to keep in mind when it comes to superheroes, and the first is that they’re usually all about dynamism and power. You’ll find a few exceptions out…

As a traditional illustrator I look on software as a tool – a powerful one that offers countless possibilities in comparison to traditional media. The main advantage is simplicity of use and the option to undo mistakes at any moment without the fear of ruining your illustration. It’s simpler than oil, watercolour or acrylic paints, because you can step back. The only problem is knowing when to stop. Like any medium, it has traps. You can easily lose yourself in useless details and quickly bury your idea. But you have much more control over several aspects of painting, including the composition and what your picture is telling you, which are by far the most important points, before dealing with the detail. In Photoshop, I have reduced the selection of tools…

Use insect designs Tony Foti takes inspiration from natural forms to create striking alien spacecraft designs Paint a girl and her tank Brett Parson presents his take on the iconic Tank Girl in Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop Create great characters Arthur Mask concepts characters with varied body types tied together with style and colour Caricature Hellboy Jean-Baptiste Monge produces his unique interpretation of a younger, cuter Hellboy Draw more varied faces Tom Foster explores anatomy and proportion to help you depict distinct facial types Use classic colours Tom Foster shares his secrets for giving comic art a bold, eye-catching colour scheme "My custom canvas brush gives my artwork a more painterly look and helps me blend areas delicately Admira Wijaya", page 142 CUSTOM BRUSHES! PHOTOSHOP CUSTOM BRUSHES: CANVAS 001 Good…

MEET THE EXPERTS… Struggling with a comic art technique? Having trouble with a character design? Our artists are here to help! Dave Brasgalla Dave is a graphic designer and illustrator from Stockholm who works in both digital and traditional mediums. He’s currently employed at games company Riot Minds. www.pixelhuset.se Tony Foti Tony is a freelance illustrator from California who works primarily in the gaming and publishing industries, most notably on Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars lines. www.tonyfotiart.com PJ Holden PJ Holden is Belfast-based comic artist who’s best known for his work on Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, and is also the co-creator of DeptOfMonsterology. www.pauljholden.com John Petersen John is a production artist and animator for Engineering Systems, Inc. He’s also an illustrator whose clients include Monte Cook Games and Catalyst…

The latest SketchBook Pro is an all-in one package crammed full of tools and brushes to satisfy any type of artist, giving you plenty of helpful digital assets to complete your projects. Although the software provides you with all the tools you need, SketchBook Pro also gives you the power to edit and customise an existing brush, or create your own unique brush, and the possibilities here are almost endless. In this short step-by-step guide, you’ll learn the basics of creating a new brush, where to customise the brush’s properties, how to best name your new brush and change the brush icon, and finally how to add it to the Brush Palette. I promise it’s not as complicated as all that might sound! “You can edit and customise brushes –…

The animation Flipbook feature in SketchBook Pro 7 can for now be considered a bit of an experiment from the program’s developers. It’s best to see the tool as a work-in-progress project, because while the brush tools and user-friendly functions are impressive, this new feature is still limited. But it’s worth spending a little time investigating. You can’t export your animation as a video file and the layers system is very basic, but to be fair, this is the beginning of a feature that could very well lead to the next generation of “tradigital” animation tools. In this brief introduction I’ll guide you through the animation side of SketchBook Pro, reveal how to animate with the Flipbook, and explain how to handle the new layers system. The animation Flipbook feature…

Just that line, taken from Robert E Howard’s very first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” is enough to set the heart of a comic or fantasy artist racing. And, since the character first appeared in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1932, dozens of artists have drawn or painted him – including many of the greats. The latest to render the great barbarian is Spanish artist Sergio Davila. He’s on board with Dark Horse to draw its brand new series. The artist is relishing the freedom he has to visualise the Hyborian age. “I’m having great fun working in this fantasy world. It allows me to invent things, overdo some characters, and take some of the action to the limit in a way you wouldn’t be able to…

Cartoonist BRETT PARSON presents his take on the iconic Tank Girl, using the drawing tools of SketchBook Pro and colouring in Photoshop PROFILE Brett Parson LOCATION: US Brett is a freelance illustrator and comic book artist from America’s East Coast. Recently he’s worked on a comic series for DC/Vertigo called New Romancer, and on the 21st Century Tank Girl title for Titan Comics. http://ifxm.ag/bparson So I must have been 11 or 12 years old when I discovered Tank Girl. A comic book museum that I would go to, often several times a month, was having an exhibit of all the artwork from the original series. This was my first introduction to Tank Girl, to the art of Jamie Hewlett (now famous for creating the cartoon band Gorillaz), and to the…

Five years ago, I was a brat who was overconfident about my art skills. I drew the same four poses over and over again, but since I drew them well, it just fed my ego! Then I met one of my heroes, who was kind enough not to throw my sketchbook away, but harsh enough to let me know that I didn’t know how to draw. “Your drawings have no life. You need to feel what you are drawing. Your back needs to ache if you’re drawing someone bending over,” he said. Honestly, I didn’t understand a thing. But it did set me off on a hunt to understand what he meant. Three years later, after having regularly sketched every day, I got the first glimpse of what he was…

PARIS CHRISTOU Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro for Windows and Mac is known for giving artists easy access to its many tools when working on any type of artwork. The essential philosophy behind the software is to help artists feel they have an application that acts just like a real-world paper sketchbook, which you’d use while out and about. The program is quick, simple and very effective. SketchBook’s Pro’s Lagoon is a user interface (UI) that offers a series of common shortcuts for speedy access. By default, it’s located on the bottom left of the application screen. Having these common shortcuts in one compact area helps you to streamline your painting process. Better still, you can even modify the Lagoon to fit your exact needs. So, let’s see how this can be…

Layers are an integral part of SketchBook Pro’s flexibility. If you’ve used other software such as Photoshop you’ll be familiar with the concept, but if not, imagine a layer as a sheet of glass which can be stacked on top of others. Layers are the building blocks of a piece of artwork. The key is that each layer is normally transparent except where it contains an image element. For example, if I draw or paint a clear blue sky on one piece of glass (a layer), add another piece of glass (a new layer) on top, and then paint a forest scene on the top layer, I’ll still be able to see the blue sky on the layer below, peeking through the unpainted parts of my forest layer. That’s the…

With the buzz that surrounds superhero movies continuing unabated, it seems on the face of it that there’s never been a better time to be drawing comics. Let’s crunch some numbers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy brought in nearly $1.2 billion for Warner Bros, the parent company of DC Comics. The 2012 Avengers film earned $623 million and in May 2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron came out with a tale of $191 million in its first week. But how much do the films actually help comic sales? According to US sales figures, in the month Age of Ultron came out, the comic Uncanny Avengers Ultron Forever 1 took $201,331, while Uncanny Avengers 4 made $186,736 in sales. The industry was boosted with the launch of Secret Wars, which sold over 500,000…

My favourite character is Special Agent Gale because he’s a sarcastic jerk. Almost everything he says is pretty mean, and I relish drawing those expressions,” says Fiona Staples, probably the hottest artist in comics today. She’s talking about a pale, bat-winged spy character in Saga. After over 30 issues of the smash hit indie title, the comic she created with writer Brian K Vaughan has won her 17 trophies: Eisners, Harveys and more. Saga is the tale of star-crossed lovers Alana and Marko, and their baby daughter Hazel. The couple come from different sides in a galactic war and when their treachery is discovered, it seems just about everybody in the universe is out to get them. As the title suggests, it’s an epic tale of love and war across…

Lewis LaRosa talks about how to interpret scripts and lay out pages to emphasise the action and enhance the narrative… PROFILE Lewis LaRosa LOCATION: US Lewis is a comic book artist whose work includes launching and designing The Punisher MAX. Currently exclusive to Valiant Comics, he made a splash illustrating Bloodshot: Reborn. http://ifxm.ag/l-larosa The comic book artist’s job is to visualise the writer’s script in the clearest way possible. If comics were films, the artist would direct, shoot, act, design the costumes, make the props and do the VFX. The amount of control you have over the book is really exciting. Comics aren’t TV shows or films, and have their own storytelling tools. It’s amazing how much the shape, size and order of the panels affect the narrative. Layout alone…

PENCIL, INKS & PHOTOSHOP All images © Marvel Artist PROFILE Ken Lashley LOCATION: Canada Ken is an in-demand comic artist with more than 20 years’ experience, who’s created artwork for the likes of DC Comics, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Hasbro and Mattel. http://ifxm.ag/ledkilla Artist PROFILE Juan Fernandez LOCATION: US Juan has been working as a comic book colourist for 10 years, providing colours for a variety of titles published by Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, IDW and Heavy Metal. http://ifxm.ag/juan-f SHORTCUTS Smart Lasso tool Alt (PC & Mac) While using the Lasso, hold Alt to lift your pen without closing the selection. To resume lower the pen and release. Black Panther was the first superhero I really identified with. I’m a huge fan of the character. Over the past few years I’ve…

Creating characters, scenes and stories has always been an immensely pleasurable experience. It’s always a lot of fun for me and I never tire of it. My methods of creation are sometimes strange and disorganised when I’m dealing with personal works, and the illustrations almost always change during the course of the journey. This applies both to the characters, which often take on a life of their own and grow in directions I hadn’t anticipated, and to the atmosphere and colour palette of the whole scene, which can change radically as I try out different hues for the ambient lighting. This in turn influences the colouring of every element in the image. I create my art using Photoshop in a simple way without using many of the resources it has…

GIVE HARLEY QUINN A REALISTIC LOOK To me, the appeal of painting digitally is simple. Unlike with traditional media, I can create a piece of art without waiting for the paint to dry! In my early days of working digitally, I had plenty of fun trying to get to grips with the software and while I explored more about digital media, it was also interesting and challenging. I also worked using traditional media, which made it easier for me to understand what to do with digital art software. I’m still trying to improve myself and especially ways to get my illustration done in the fastest way – by applying different digital methods, and by experimenting with different layers and effects. I’ve learned a lot from online tutorials and got some…