Digital Art Process

Standardizing my 2001-era fumbling, self-taught process of making comics without paper

first page of Dead by the Pool
Process example from "Dead by the Pool"

One clear advantage of working digitally over ink-on-paper: you never run out of Paint Bucket at three in the morning. Here's my software flow, mostly using Adobe Creative Cloud products:

  • Photoshop (and/or Corel Painter): art with a drawing tablet or touch screen device
  • Illustrator: assembling each page, merging the art with lettering and borders
  • InDesign: pagination, create PDFs for print or web comics

Does making comics without paper sound like fun yet? You'll need a computer, some rather expensive software, and a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet or touch screen device. If your gagets and killer story are in place, let's begin:

From Photoshop to PDF in Five Easy Steps

Adobe Photoshop: Pencilling
The selection, resizing, layers and "soft pencil" tools are the closest things to my traditional drawing methods (tracing paper, Xerox, scaled copies) I've found so far. Using paths to control perspective is an added bonus.
Work actual print size at 400ppi, save this pencil phase as a TIF that will be imported in the next step.
Corel Painter: Inking
The anti-aliasing is "tighter" than Photoshop's, making a much cleaner ink stroke. Painter X, the latest version, has terrific brush and texture controls. The page rotation tool's a life-saver! Inking happens quickly, brushing way outside the planned borders.
Import the pencil TIF from step one on a separate layer. Trace over it in "ink", Save As a TIF (with slightly different name to avoid overwriting your pencil TIF.)
Adobe Illustrator: Lettering + Bordering
This is where all the vector stuff happens. The first step is importing the final inked Painter TIF in Illustrator, then sticking it in a compound path of the panels. I then letter with Blambot fonts (Letter-o-matic) in custom word balloons. Once everything's set, each page is saved as an indlidual EPS.
Place your inky TIF in an Illustrator document. Make a Compound Path of panels, then use this path as a Mask for your inky TIF. Do your lettering and sound effects on a new Layer. When you're happy, make an EPS file of your page.
Adobe InDesign: Pagination and PDF
A collection of the final EPS files. Page numbering and common elements are controlled in the Master pages. This file is used to generate the PDF.
Collect your EPS files in a single InDesign document, using its Template and Type Style tools to your advantage. If you're working Grayscale, make a Production Black containing values for CMY and K. Long story, but your imported graphics and InDesign elements will have to be colored this way.

I hope this page is helpful. Working completely digitally isn't the revolutionary technique it was when I wrote the first draft in 2005. A lot of you've gone a lot further with it than I have. If you've any tips or hints that I've missed and might save a young cartoonist a few hours of grief, so share! The karma gods will bless you.

David Marshall, retro-posting from Inman Square.