Comicky tutorials and walk-throughs...

jasonjason
edited February 2007 in Comics
One of my classmates asked me if I knew of any good comicking tutorials/walkthroughs after he came across Kazu Kibuishi's excellent walkthrough of his process on the Copper comics. (FYI, Kazu has also posted scans of his process on Daisy Kutter, which are a bit more squint-inducing than the print version, so if you don't have a copy yet, go pick up the TPB of Daisy Kutter...it's a good book.)

So, without further adieu:

It's hard to beat Kazu Kibuishi's process walkthrough, frankly. Here are a few others that I culled...and I noticed after the fact that almost all of these folks are our age or a few years younger:

Veteran indie comicker Jessica Abel has a rather thorough walkthrough of her process.
http://www.artbabe.com/comicsandart/diy/diy_make.html

The late Seth Fisher (phenomenal young artist who only two days ago fell seven stories to his death from the roof of a club in Osaka...) has a three-step process that's almost more of a tongue-in-cheek to other walkthroughs. You'll see what I mean. (R.I.P., Seth.)
http://www.floweringnose.com/i_how.htm

Les McClaine is another crazy-awesome young comicker guy who creates comics for all ages:
http://www.evilspacerobot.com/comics/jonnycrossbones/process/index.htm

Jeff Zubkavich was renowned in webcomic circles about five years ago, primarily because of his nice use of photoshop, the secrets of which he posted on his site.
http://miracle.comicgenesis.com/Tutorials.html

I hadn't really liked the American manga style until I read Dirk Tiede's work. Chicago cops + paranormal phenomena ...and a love of the artform.
http://www.dynamanga.net/ps/tutorial.html

There's also the all-on-computer process explanations of John Allison's Scary-Go-Round and Jeph Jacques' poorly-named Questionable Content:
http://www.scarygoround.com/index.php?date=20050926
(and the next four strips, through the 30th of Sept)
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.questionablecontent.net/walkthrough.php
(archive.org has the pictures on one date, and the text on another. bizarre.)

A few more are listed at:
http://xrl.us/cxpedtut (comixpedia.com)

And this is not specifically comicky, but it's a classic for the zine scene.
http://www.reddingk.com/img/reproguide.pdf

Three more that I didn't know where to put:
http://www.polykarbon.com/tutorials/index.htm
http://www.figma.com/secretsofart.shtm
http://www.comiccolors.com/frame_tutorials.html

And that should be about all...

Please add to this thread if you know of other good tutorials for comicking. (I harvested a few of these from an old thread on zwol.org's Reinventing Comics boards.)
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Comments

  • jasonjason
    edited February 2006
    Addendum:
    K. Thor Jensen salvaged Brian Bolland's digital inking tutorial that was previously lost to the intarweb. The text is oh-so-very-tiny, but the information is quite helpful.
  • jasonjason
    edited February 2006
    Also forgot Jerzy Drozd! Jerzy and collaborator Sara Turner have some very detailed walkthroughs of their respective processes (both on paper and on computer) at their MLAT Comics page:
    Jerzy on Comic Illustration
    Sara on Comic Coloring
    If I recall correctly, both are collected from their series of blog posts on the subjects.
  • HamelinHamelin
    edited February 2006
    Have you found any on optimizing filesize? Because I know these pngs I make should be smaller.
  • ApathyApathy
    edited February 2006
    You should be able to twiddle the settings when you save them.

    I guess it depends on what program you're using.
  • Drooling IguanaDrooling Iguana
    edited February 2006
    From what I hear, Photoshop does a really lousy job of handling PNGs. Try re-saving your images in The Gimp.
  • jasonjason
    edited February 2006
    You could also use a utility like the free PNGCRUSH on the PNGs after you make them, or use an online compression utility. I've also found knowing what Sub, Adaptive, Paeth and all those filters mean quite helpful, even if Photoshop's support, as DI says, isn't as good.

    There's also a whole free O'Reilly book on PNGs out there which has a short section on practical compression tips.

    j
  • HamelinHamelin
    edited February 2006
    I'd use that PNGCRUSH program, but it's command line. Why is it only command line?
  • Drooling IguanaDrooling Iguana
    edited February 2006
    Because all the best things in life are command line!
  • HamelinHamelin
    edited February 2006
    I disagree!
  • jasonjason
    edited March 2006
    Regardless of command lines...here's another comicky walkthtrough to add to the pile.
    Dean Trippe (of Butterfly, BFFA, and helping-start-the-batgirl-meme* fame) has a process tutorial on how he draws a typical Butterfly webcomic.

    *No, I'm not going to link to that.

    Also, don't know how comicky this is, but Disney animator Harald Siepermann has some very interesting character design walkthroughs on his blog:
    Jane, from Disney's Tarzan
    Yzma, from The Emperor's New Groove
  • stefstef
    edited March 2006
    I really liked the walkthrough of Jane's character design. What I'd really like is a tutorial that showed how an artist set the foundation to draw a character consistently.

    Occasionally one sees "character sheets" as bonuses in comics-- developmental drawings of the characters which show them from several angles, key expressions, postures. Is there a standard way to do this, or is it no more beneficial than a lot of unstructured drawings of a character in someone's sketchbook?
  • Drooling IguanaDrooling Iguana
    edited March 2006
    Odd that the designer put such an emphasis on the character looking "British," since in the original Tarzan novels Jane was from Baltimore.
  • jasonjason
    edited March 2006
    There are a lot of varying things I found on the internet when looking for character model sheets...but a good starting point is probably this tutorial from Larry Lauria:
    http://tooninstitute.awn.com/lessonplan/model.htm
    He really can't draw to follow his own advice, but if you just read the printed words, it's better.

    I guess the general purposes for model sheets are to show:
    - height comparison of characters
    - rotation--view of the character from most angles
    - emotion--the facial expressions and body language of a character

    There're a few repositories of character model sheets that might help as well:
    - http://www.animationmeat.com/modelsheets/modelsheets.html (wow!)
    - More Tarzan character sheets (lots of broken img icons!)
    - http://www.thegremlin.com/hb.model.sheets.html (Hanna Barbera)
    - http://home.fuse.net/irongiant/page44.htm (Iron Giant)

    I'm still not sold on character sheets, personally.
  • NatoNato
    edited March 2006
    Character sheets were a huge, huge help for my not-an-artist self when I was working on my two-page story for the McCloud course lo those many moons ago. Taking the time to work out my characters' designs, measure out their proportions, and place all the requisite details on their bodies made it a lot easier to draw them in various poses later, since I could refer to the master design if I had any questions. In a way, it made them more real and 3-D in my head.

    'Course, I still cheated like mad in drawing them. And they weren't human, so none of that pesky anatomy or realism for me. (=

    robotsketch.jpg

    -- Nato
  • jasonjason
    edited March 2006
    Hyung-sun Kim's been comicking for a long time, and while his comics have a tendency to be gleefully crass, he's also got a great tutorials page on his site:

    http://kungfool.transpect.net/tut/index.htm

    ...chock full of pages detailing his own technique (on paper and computer), and amazingly thorough (and illustrated!) art critiques of submitted comics art, as well as video critiques/tutorials that you can download. (WARNING: if you get offended by obscenities or crass sexual humor, or if the people-where-you-work do, beware. The first half of the video tutorial kicks off with language your mother likely wouldn't approve, and is cringe-worthy until he stops the side-commentary captions.)

    These caveats aside, H.S. is classically trained and is extremely good at diagnosing just what's wrong with a drawing, explaining how to fix it as well as the theory behind it, and marking-up photo examples from real life to help show his point. Whether you're trying to draw things as they appear in life or in a Manga/Manhwa style, H.S. has dissected both techniques and enjoys sharing the secrets.
  • stefstef
    edited March 2006
    Jason, I would desperately love to access Hyung-sun Kim's tutorials, but I can't even get the videos to download, much less play. What stupid thing am I doing wrong, here?

    His awesomely brutal critique linked at the bottom of the page rocked. I wish I had a teacher who would rip my work apart like that. If that kid didn't run home crying, I bet he got a lot better after that detailed analysis of his drawing.
  • jasonjason
    edited March 2006
    If you loved that critique, Stef, be sure to check out the other nine! They're sublime. He even goes to the lengths of searching adult web sites for (clothed) images that match the poses of submitted pinups, just to show the mistakes in anatomy and perspective.

    The video tutorial is here...and it unzips into a folder with an .html and three .swf's:
    http://kungfool.transpect.net/tut/0001-4non2.zip (12MB)

    If you still have problems, let me know and I'll e-mail it...although honestly, the art crits and the plain ol' html process tutorial are a bit better.

    j
    (just finished going through all of the art crits, and ...man, awesomely brutal is right...!)
  • jasonjason
    edited March 2006
    A great tutorial on perspective for technical illustration, found thanks to the Drawn! blog. Kevin Hulsey also has a tutorial on how he made a massive* cutaway illustration of a cruiseliner in Illustrator and Photoshop.

    * "massive" as in "took 9 hours to export from Illustrator to Photoshop on a G4"
  • jasonjason
    edited March 2006
    ...also, this was on the Make: blog recently: how to make a one-side-of-one-page, one-cut minicomic.

    From the same folks who brought you an interview with the inimitable Lark Pien.
  • kirbykirby
    edited March 2006
    Well i'll favorite some of those to take to look atfor free time
  • HamelinHamelin
    edited March 2006
    You should edit your original post to compile all the kickass information into this thread into a super-awesome walkthrough of art!
  • jasonjason
    edited April 2006
    (Yep, Hamelin, this is getting a bit unwieldy...)

    New comjo* site http://comicfoundry.com has what will probably become an ongoing column in which they follow the process of comics artists. This go-around, it's a look at the early-pencils-to-digital-paint process of Danica Novgorodoff on her recent book A Late Freeze.

    * comjo = comics journalism
  • jasonjason
    edited April 2006
    Another spin on the "brutal art crit" discussion earlier:
    "How to accept criticism.", a short, incisive piece by the super-talented Jesse Hamm.
    My point is that some scenes are about swordplay, not botany.
  • jasonjason
    edited May 2006
    A few more things found recently:
    [size="+1"]Pocket Cartoon Course, a 1943 pamphlet with quaint tips on how to cartoon all sorts of things. Peppered with useful information. And information like "Remember a cow is always milked on the right side." Y'know, for when your comic has a gritty crime-fighting dairy farmer.
    Onezumi Tutorials, very enthusiastic and screenshot-laden photoshop / vector-tools / marketing tutorials. (Biting tongue so very hard.)
    Dumbrella Helps You Not Suck - Artists & Tutorials is a thread on the Dumbrella "Comics Are Better Than TV" forum that seems to be similar in goal to this thread, only powered by the burning passion of a million Dumbrellites.[/size]

    (i just finallyfinally finished my masters thesis so now i can catch up with the intarwubs.)
  • jasonjason
    edited May 2006
    Apparently there's also a Course in Webcomics at NYC's School of Visual Art, taught by Tom Hart.
  • hlavcohlavco
    edited May 2006
    I checked out that 1943 pamphlet, and it has certainly improved my drawing techinique. Adding small shadows under each character makes them all fit in a lot better.
  • jasonjason
    edited July 2006
    Since there was an earlier discussion on character sheets, this may be helpful:
    MAKE: magazine posts links to tutorials on making croquis for fashion design.

    Croquis (pronounced something like "croaky") is the term for the fashion figure sketch, and Project Runway participant Katy Gerdes provides a nice how-to on her blog, linked by MAKE: above.

    Yes, croquis is essentially tracing. Nothing wrong with that for character design, although it can get you into trouble when you trace Sports Illustrated instead of actually drawing characters in your mainstream comics...
  • jasonjason
    edited July 2006
    Another tutorial, this time one on figure drawing. The figures in question happen to be anthropomorphic gangster felines (don't panic! it's more Disney than Furry), but it's a pretty good general figure drawing tutorial, and funny, to boot.
  • hlavcohlavco
    edited July 2006
    Grilled cheese can be quite lethal.
  • jasonjason
    edited August 2006
    Another resource for aspiring artists:
    http://www.drawspace.com/
    Tons of tutorials by Brenda Hoddinott*, a former forensic artist for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and author of ...for Dummies and Complete Idiot's Guide to... drawing instruction books.

    Only hitch: you can only download one tutorial every two weeks, unless you subscribe ($20 for 3 months access, which pays for the server fees, as I understand it, and which would easily let you download all of the PDFs). New tutorials are being added all the time, and the quality of the lessons looks pretty good (I checked out the one on Facial Aging), even if the substance of a particular lesson isn't enough to last for two weeks of practice, IMHO.

    But I'd say that free expert tutorials are free expert tutorials, so why not pick something you're not too good at (perspective? hands? feet? baby face proportions?) and check it out. (And if everyone checks out a different one, they could share whatever they learn in a new thread in the Conservatory perhaps? nudge nudge </motive type='ulterior'>)

    jason

    * Either she's a goofball, or she takes some of the zaniest photos. Seriously, you've gotta check out this site if just for her bio photo.

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