Here’s a pic I drew behind my table at an MCM Comic Con last year, just making use of time and drawing pens…
Recently I thought I’d try colouring it with Photoshop.
Here’s the Background I layed down… 
And colours of the characters in the foreground…
And the whole kaboodle…
I hope to make a print of this soon!
Lots of fun making this recipe comic for a competition which is part of the Ligatura International Comics Culture Festival in Poland.
The recipe is based on something my son came up on the spot with one day. Its real name is Spy Soup for reasons best known to my boy. It could have turned out awful but was actually pretty tasty and he’s made it many times since.
I hope other folk there try making it themselves!
To finish up my blog series on the details of making an installment of Lucy the Octopus please find a short video overview of the process. Cheers!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs, The Foundations of Writing, click here!
For Part 2: Script, Lettering & Layout, click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
For Part 5: Erasing, Scanning & Cleaning Up click here!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs, The Foundations of Writing, click here!
For Part 2: Script, Lettering & Layout, click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
For Part 5: Erasing, Scanning & Cleaning Up click here!
So we’re on to the final leg of the mission to create this Lucy the Octopus comic strip. The physical drawing has been completed, scanned into my mac and cleaned up ready for a dusting of colour…
This is probably my favourite stage of the work. It’s the home stretch and my brain doesn’t have to work as hard as when I do other parts of the process. It’s also cool to see how easily a splash of colour can bring an image to life.
That being said, I’m not suggesting that colouring in general is an easy task. There are many comic colourists who not only put much more detail and time into their work but are infinitely more skilled. A great colourist can control the mood of a scene, suggest complex lighting and texture and help depict the physical structure of the characters and objects in a comic panel.
My own colouring rules however (for a typical episode of Lucy the Octopus at least) were developed to make things as quick and easy for myself as possible…
LUCY THE OCTOPUS COLOURING RULES
1) No lighting
Generally, I colour characters and objects as though they are unaffected by light sources falling on them.
So Lucy and Puffy are the same colour and tone regardless of being out of doors or in, as below…
This saves a heap of time, and I’m happy with the flat look it gives the comic.
For a few special strips, such as in the panel below, I added one lighter tone and one darker shade to each character or object. This limited range of colour variation is far from naturalistic but adds a small touch of dimension and lighting.
2) Repeated colours are consistent, strip to strip
The way any given colour looks to the human eye, varies according to what colour it is placed next to. An artist can chose to consider this carefully or ignore it completely.
Guess what? I go for the easy option and ignore it.
By this I mean that virtually everytime you see a character in the strip, such as Lucy’s sister Patricia below, the tone of their skin, hair and any clothes they may wear are identical. This is regardless of whether it’s night or day, whether they are inside a room or outside in the street.
I’m never considering what tone of yellow should Patricia be today?
The above panels are from strips done over three years. I always just copy the exact tone from the first time I ever coloured her (below). On Photoshop this is done using the eyedropper tool.
The technique of repeating the exact shades of colours for characters is similar to how animated cartoons are often made, especially ones on a tight budget. The colours, design and backgrounds of Cartoon Network’s Samurai Jack were especially an inspiration in making Lucy.
3) Limit coloured lines
Changing the outline of part of a drawing from black to anything else can look great and be an effective tool. Lucy’s patches are coloured with a blue outline, so it’s hard to avoid using this technique altogether, though I try to limit myself as much as possible.
As well as the patches you can see coloured outlines below on the air bubbles around Puffy and the KLIK sound effect.
4) Fill or Colour underneath the lines?
There are plenty of online tutorials on the subject so I won’t go into too much detail, but for those who don’t know, there’s essentially two main ways of colouring work on Photoshop.
Arguably the most straightforward is to click inside the outlines of the shape you want to fill with colour, using the PaintBucket tool, and voila! The shape is the colour you selected. I use this for 95% of my colouring on Lucy.
The second technique, which some folk use for their entire colouring process (as do I on some other projects) is to create each block of colour stroke by stroke using the Pencil tool. You do this by creating a duplicate layer of your linework, (keeping the initial layer safely unadjusted if you need it) setting it to Multiply so that it’s essentially transparent except for the linework, then doing the colouring-in on another new layer below.
Now a couple of things worth quickly mentioning that I do in the majority of Lucy strips, though happen not to in Episode 93…
5) Shadows
As I said earlier, I don’t generally add lighting to my Lucy panels, but I do add simple ground shadows to characters and objects. This is usually done in Photoshop by forming an ellipse shape with the Marquee tool, then filling it with a solid colour…
I think I picked up this shadow style from Peppa Pig.
6) Photographic Textures
One design aspect that I could have saved a lot of time by not including in the Lucy strip is the use of photographic textures added in Photoshop.
I like the feel they give the strip though and the contrast between rocky and sandy backgrounds with the flat blacks of colour of the characters and other subjects such as the spaceship and sea creature in this example…
I also add a wooden look to Lucy’s guitar, Ramani’s bass and a few other bits and bobs. Since doing the panel below I’ve generally stopped adding wood to Geary’s drumsticks as it’s not really noticeable once the strips are reduced to print or online publication size.
Okey dokey – let’s look at Episode 93 specifically…
STEP BY STEP COLOURING EPISODE 93
I start filling in spaces with blocks of colour, beginning with the characters that take up the most space…
There’s not too many decisions to make here. Colours are dictated by the characters’ previous appearances in the strip…
Same goes for the school bus…
Next up I colour the sea monster in Panel 2.
I leave its other appearance in the final panel for now as I have something else in mind for that…
I use the Magic Wand tool to select Miss Faridani’s hair and draw in the blonde streak…
Using the PaintBucket tool, I click on the outline of Lucy’s patches in Panel 4 to change their colour.
I want to do the same to the outline of the sticker on the glass behind her. However, as that shape is connected to the speech bubble above it, if I just clicked on the outline of the sticker I’d change the colour of the outlines for all connecting linework – practically the whole strip.
To avoid this I select the linework with the Magic Wand tool and just colour the bit I want to change using the Pencil Tool…
Earlier when I was laying out the position of each character in pencil, I was very much aware of how the colours of each of them would impact where they ended up.
For example I might avoid two bright pink characters being placed next to each other, so as to maintain contrast and definition within the image.
In this way, you could say the colour process actually began back at the penciling stage.
I carry on filling in the colours of the characters whose colours are determined by the previous appearances in the strip.
I also start to make choices as to the colours which are not predetermined, such as the background of Panel 1.
I base my colour choices for backgrounds on what will make the main subjects of the panel (usually characters in the foreground) stand out. This can mean using a less intense colour as in Panel 1, or a contrasting colour as in Panel 2 and 3.
For the final panel I decide to colour all the subjects in one colour – a rare bit of mood colouring for the Lucy strip). To do this, I remove the purple I’d already put there, then colour on the layer beneath the linework.
I add a background colour to Panel 4.
Now I want to add some highlights to the windows of the school bus to give it a reflective glassy feel.
If I started adding highlights (professional technical term up ahead warning) willy-nilly, then it would be tricky to remove them from the areas which aren’t supposed to be glass.
So on a new layer above the linework, I map out the glass areas.
Here’s those masked areas without any of the rest of the drawing just to show you…
Now I can select all these areas using the Magic Wand tool, hide the layer with these masks, then add my highlights on a new layer. For this I use the Paintbrush tool with a soft brush.
Below again are the masked areas without the drawing, this time with the white glassy highlights. They’re not naturalistic in where they might fall on the curved glass of the bus. Instead I add them according to what works best over the character positions and existing layout.
Now to try something else for that last panel, as it doesn’t sell the peril of the scenario as it is…
Red is good to express danger and emotion, but not sure it works as a background here, so I change the actual subjects within the panel to red rather than blue and drop the background tone altogether.
Right… just a few details to go. I change the colour of the sound effects, adding a white outline around the AAAAAAARRGGHH to make it pop a bit more…
Incidentally, if you’re curious as how much of the colour was done by pointing/clicking within the linework and how much was done with the Pencil tool on a layer below, here’s that lower layer by itself…
Anyhoo, just putting the finishing touches to the colour work. I add white lines to give a metalic finish to the bus and change the colour of the caption in Panel 1, the copyright text and my signature.
For those sort of details, I like to repeat colours that have been used elsewhere in the episode. It helps tie the colour composition together.
So we’re done!
Almost.
I find it’s virtually always worthwhile looking at a seemingly finished strip with fresh eyes the following day (deadlines allowing). You pick up on a few points that can be improved and sometimes even discover why you had a niggling doubt as to whether a strip is working or not.
So in this case I decide the movement lines in the last panel would look better in red, matching the other elements of the panel.
Then one final thing is bothering me.
Anyone who’s been reading all of these process blogs (Bless you!) may have picked up on a recurring theme. Even though you can divide the process of work into different key stages…
Writing
Lettering
Layout
Pencils
Ink
Colours
…at any point you might be considering future stages or adjusting details from earlier stages. Case in point, is my final tweak on this strip. Not a colour adjustment but something directly relating to the dialogue from the writing stage…
In Panel 4 Lucy and Kate debate holding on to the window handle.
Kate says “SHUT IT LUCY! WHY SHOULD I LISTEN TO…”
I realise there’s a possibility that readers may take the words “SHUT IT!” as a reference to shutting the window rather than just Lucy stopping talking.
Not the biggest disaster, but I do want the strip to read as smoothly as possible without there being any confusion even for a fraction of a second, so I change Kate’s dialogue, making sure that the new words still fit comfortably in the given speech bubble…
Pheweee!
Now I’ve filled 6 blogs with not only my general techniques for making Lucy, but also explanations of tiny details. Hopefully it gives a decent overview of the thought process involved.
It’s important to remember that most of the creative choices I’ve discussed are split second decisions and not as drawn out as they may seem when spelled out in writing. Solving the problems along the way makes for fun moments that take a creator step by tiny step, closer to the comic looking in reality like it does in their head.
Down the line, I will use the full size Photshop file when creating the layout for the printed comic using Adobe InDesign.
Now though, I use the Save for Web function on Photoshop to create a low-res JPEG of the episode (980 x 335 pixels). I then schedule it on my WordPress site to be published online on the desired date.
Then we’re on to the next strip! Bear in mind, by the time I’ve finished one strip I’ll most likely have written, lettered and layed out panels for several upcoming strips so I can dive straight into the penciling again.
Thanks for reading – hope it was vaguely informative and remotely interesting!
Stay tuned for the final special entry in this blog which should tie everything together!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs, The Foundations of Writing, click here!
For Part 2: Script, Lettering & Layout, click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
For Part 5: Erasing, Scanning & Cleaning Up click here!
For a video overview click here!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs, The Foundations of Writing, click here!
For Part 2: Script, Lettering & Layout, click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
So where was I? Oh yeah, I’ve written the strip, drawn it in pencil and inked it. Now, I’m almost ready to take the strip onto my mac and play with it there.
ERASING
Before we finish with the drawing on paper though we need to get rid of all those left over pencil marks.
Some comic artists do their pre-ink drawing in blue pencil. This is super handy as it generally doesn’t get picked up when the image is scanned into the computer. So blue pencil artists can feel smug that they can miss out the whole erasing stage. Personally, I like to work in traditional lead pencil (albeit a mechanical one), though maybe one day I’ll jump on the blue pencil bandwagon.
Anyway, for Luddites like me who still want to use an eraser, here are some tips (which are expressed far better in The Art Of Comic-Book Inking by Gary Martin). Seems hardly worth mentioning how to do something so simple right? If you’ve ever ruined a drawing by scrunching it up through careless erasing or smudging inks by letting tiny drops of spit land on the paper while blowing eraser crumbs away you may think it’s worth taking a moment to consider careful erasing!
So first up, I make sure I’m holding the paper firmly in the section that I’m erasing at the time. I use a good quality, medium textured eraser.
I erase the pencils from the paper methodologically, area by area.
Then I bring out Captain Brushtastic! You may have a different name for your Draughtsman’s brush. Either way, I can’t recommend this beauty any higher! It’s so speedy, brushing away leftover eraser bits, and no spittle on the paper from blowing them away – hoorah!
I double check I haven’t missed any pencil marks and place the paper in my scanner.
SCANNING
I use an A3 Mustek Scanner (sang to the tune of Mustang Sally) to scan the A3 paper. Most likely it’s not the best quality hardware in the world but relatively affordable for an A3 scanner. I had one that broke down only after 5 years of loyal service so was happy to get another.
I’ve heard folk adamantly insist on the correct settings to scan ink work, and others adamantly insist the polar opposite. Let me show you a few possibilities for scanning black and white linework…
The following image shows the strip scanned as Greyscale. You can play around with the contrast and brightness etc afterwards but this is what the pure scan looks like…
Another option is to adjust the contrast of the scan itself, rather than doing it afterwards. Below the contrast is set to 88. We get something close to pure black and white…
The way I generally scan my Lucy artwork is on the Line setting. Like this, the scanner looks at the picture and tells every pixel that makes up the digital image to pick a side – black or white? So this is not appropriate for any inks with grey washes, but for pure black line work and blocking, it’s just right.
CLEANING UP
Looking at the scanned image, I check that there are no unwanted marks caused by dust on the scanner or anything else. If so I use the Photoshop pencil set to white and clear these up. I try not to be too super precious about tiny marks.
Now is where those arrows I added while inking come in handy. These point out any areas which need cleaning up at this stage, so I get these sorted out along with any other bits and pieces I’ve noticed.
Now I take my scanned image and add it as a layer to my original Photoshop file of the comic strip which included the panel layout and lettering.
I set that layer to Multiply (which means I can see through it, except for the black linework). I adjust the size of the image so it sits tightly over the original panel layout. If necessary, I rotate the image a touch so it’s lined up as perfectly as possible… 
I tweak the position of the lettering, including the copyright line and remove the panel guides and notes.Now the strip is ready to fill with a rainbow of love, in other words, colour!
See you next time for the final part of this series!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs, The Foundations of Writing, click here!
For Part 2: Script, Lettering & Layout, click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
For Part 6: Colours click here!
For a video overview click here!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs (The Foundations of Writing), click here!
THE SET UP
Right – so I’ve completed the first 92 Lucy the Octopus strips and I’m about to write the script for Episode 93, which will come to look like this upon completion…
The previous strips set up the story for Lucy (uncool) and Kate (cool) to be knocked out of a school bus, so ultimately they’ll be forced to spend time trapped together in a deep chasm.
Before the arc kicks off properly I decide to run this one-off strip (Episode 89) I’d had in my head for a while, to reconfirm the relationship between Lucy and the cool girls without foreshadowing the upcoming story… 
The true start of the arc begins with Episode 90 which introduces the idea of our heroine going on the school trip and reconfirms to us how bad a parent her dad is. It’s good to establish this idea as he’ll be popping up again in this story line in Episode 99.
In Episode 91 the reminder of how Lucy is viewed by the cool girls in the school from Episode 89 should pay off. Miss Faridani’s dialogue also works as exposition, letting the reader know the characters will be traveling a long way from home…
Episode 92 is a chance to show the scale of the danger the characters are facing while still keeping the typical humour of the comic in the dialogue. This is the first time in the strip the characters have faced any physical danger, so hopefully that’s an interesting new element for the readers.
So that’s where we’re at. Now what happens next?
WRITING THE SCRIPT
Plot wise for Episode 93 all I need to happen is for Lucy and Kate to be knocked out of the bus.
As with all newspaper style comic strips I try to establish all the reader needs to know in the first panel. The final panel needs to be a satisfying punchline, resolution or cliffhanger. Any panels in between the first and last progress between the two in as entertaining a manner as possible.
The opening caption says all we need it to if this was the first Lucy strip the reader had ever come across.
For some strips (like this one!) I sacrifice clarity to new readers in exchange for pay offs for longer term readers.
You can’t spend every strip re-establishing character and premise for the sake of newbies but if you can do that while being entertaining, funny and serving the story that’s of interest to long-time readers, everyone wins.
It’s definitely a balancing act.
Here’s the full script that I wrote…
As you can see, it’s pretty sketchy stuff. When I’m writing a script for myself I don’t need to add much detail as I can already picture what’s going on in my head as I write. It’s good to get the dialogue as tight as possible at this stage but the action notes are just reminders.
When I write a script for someone else to draw I need to give much more detail. Below you can see the the visual description taken from the script for a couple of panels from Rosie and Jacinda, followed by the finished art. My friend Zarina Liew drew it.
Classroom of about twenty 14 year olds – first day of new term and friends are chatting to each other about their Summer break before their teacher comes in. At front of class (and panel) is Daniella looking awesome in new outfit and chatting to two cliquey friends also fashionably dressed. Couple of boys, Kyle and his friend are looking their way (clearly eyeing them up) and talking.
Other kids sat down and talking happily except Jacinda. She’s sitting alone waiting to get another year of school over with. The desk next to her is empty. Jacinda should not be the central focus of the panel – she should almost look like a background “extra”.
LETTERING
Back to Lucy Episode 93, and I lay out my text on a pre-existing template, using Photoshop. I have templates set up for 3, 4, 5 and 6 panel strips.
In this instance I knew the panel spacing would be irregular so I just plonked the lettering over any of them to get a sense of the whole canvas area of the strip.
I print out the lettering template on bog-standard A3 paper. As you can see I create two Lucy strips on one piece of paper.
Using a lightbox, I trace out where the panel borders (if known) and lettering for the two strips fall, onto good quality drawing paper. I tend to use a mechanical pencil.
Then I tape the paper on to my drawing board and using the horizontal bar and set square I rule out the panel borders.
Putting the lettering down before the drawing is very economical timewise. It shows me exactly how much space I have for my drawings. Plus I don’t have to waste time drawing anything that will be covered up by speech bubbles later.
Now it’s down on paper I can really start to see how the strip will flow.
And in this case… I don’t like it!
INITIAL TWEAKING OF WORDS AND LAYOUT
I’ve never had to do this before for a Lucy strip but as it’s an unusually action based episode I’ll forgive myself – I go back to my lettering template and I make some changes…
A note about that dialogue:
I had to make a decision as to how much Lucy says before being cut off by Kate. It’s more natural for Kate to cut Lucy off earlier in the sentence, but the reader needs to see enough of it to be clear what Lucy is intending to say.
She can’t get as far as “KATE! DON’T HOLD THAT HANDLE! IT OPENS THE BACK DOORS…” as Kate needs to impulsively cut Lucy off before learning that information.
“KATE! DON’T HOLD THAT HANDLE! IT OPENS THE BACK…” doesn’t flow well to me from a humour / rhythm perspective plus it could read as if Lucy’s managed to finish her sentence (which for the sake of the story, we don’t want).
“KATE! DON’T HOLD THAT HANDLE! IT OPENS THE…” gives just enough info and flows well.
This is of course extreme minutiae, but it’s the kind of detail that can make or break a strip, in terms of clarity and comedy.
With these changes in mind, I adjust my panel layout on my drawing paper, as before using the lightbox and drawing board…
Coming up in Part Three of this blog, I start to actually draw stuff – yeah!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs (The Foundations of Writing), click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
For Part 5: Erasing, Scanning & Cleaning Up click here!
For Part 6: Colours click here!
For a video overview click here!
So designing the cover for an anthology’s a tricky thing. Do you focus on an image representing one of the stories inside, or make reference to all of them? What was I going to put on the front of Tempo Lush Tales that would encompass what the book’s about and make people want to pick it up?
After researching other anthologies (both comics and regular ol’ wordy books) I settled on trying to get an overall vibe of the collection across in a single image. There’s a variety of styles in the book from dark satire to softer sweetness so I hoped to come up with something that would bridge common ground of all the ideas in the book without focusing on any specific story or character.
I wanted something that showed something of this Earth but with a fantastical twist – something like a flying whale! This was the perfect image but far from original – a quick google of the term brings all sorts up, plus I was already a fan of the whale sequence from Disney’s wonderful Fantasia 2000, so didn’t want to ape that.
I considered all sorts of flying objects and animals – very hard to find something that hadn’t already been done. I eventually tried playing with the concept of giant flying pineapples. See my early messing around with the idea on Photoshop below…
Even as a very rough depiction of the idea, it wasn’t quite gelling for me. I had plenty of other work to be getting on with so I put the cover aside for a few weeks.
As the deadline for the release of the book was closing in, I turned to artist and designer, Darker Chi Lynch, to see if she could do better than my own attempts.
She was smart and tried quickly getting down on paper loads of possible directions the cover could take, based on talking through my concept for the collection with me…
We both kind of liked the cubes and the big eye thing. Darker tried playing with the cubes…
…but didn’t feel it was quite right for the project. It was a little mathematical and we needed something more organic. 
The eye definitely seemed the way to go. We talked about the concept of having the eye in the knots or the rings of a tree trunk…
Suddenly things were clicking.
When you cut a tree down you can count the rings of the trunk and tell how many years it had lived for. We liked the idea of the eye being a spirit from within the tree, able to tell not only how old the tree was but many more stories.
It also made sense that cutting the tree down releases those stories, as paper from the tree would is turned into pages delivering stories to a reader.
Darker did a mock-up on Photoshop of a potential cover, which was pretty close to the final result – it just needed polishing.
It was helpful to see the colours she envisioned at this stage.
A tree happened to have been cut down in front of a neighbour’s drive. I sent photos to Darker for inspiration.
She got out her brushes and ink and went to work on the trunk image for the cover as well as the stars hung up with string.
She had a few stabs at the title text and the central eye…
She did multiple eyes after we discussed using them as part of the interior design of the book too. We hadn’t decided what would go where yet or which eye would make it on to the cover.
Darker combined the new art with the colours and textures of her earlier Photoshop rough. She tweaked the title lettering a little, making it white with a shadow to really make it stand out.
And there you have it. Thanks very much to Darker Chi Lynch – hope I can work with her again!
The fantastic Lisa Woynarski is taking part in the intriguing Trans-Plantable Living Room as part of the Green Stage Project.
Trans-Plantable Living Room is a living, edible performance space, grown by community gardeners, which will host interactive performances during September 2013 in Cardiff and London.
I drew this this illustration for the performance book.
lucytheoctopus.net will kick off with a week of daily strips before settling into regular weekly installments every Wednesday.
In the mean time have a look at some of the characters in Lucy’s world!
Being an illustrator rather than a fine artist, using watercolour with an ink line seems to come a lot more naturally to me than watercolour alone. Not that I’ve come close to mastering the technique of course.
Watercolour and Ink Painting 24.1.12
Watercolour and Ink Life Painting 24.1.12
Sometimes it’s nice to pick one area of a painting (such as the figure) and add colour only there. This creates a nice contrast between two different textures.
Watercolour and Ink Life Painting 7.2.12
After doing the below image in just watercolour in class, I felt it needed a touch more definition, so I added outlines in Photoshop at home. Hmm… would be interesting to try a life drawing straight into Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.
