Tutorial 003 - Inking

Next up I ink my picture. I use a fairly archaic method of doing this via a dip pen and ink. I use a normal dip pen handle you can get from any art shop coupled with Deleter art supplies "G" nibs (they're designed for manga artists and I've recently discovered just how good they are, especially compared to other nibs I've used). You can get them from all sorts of online mail order places, they're quite common (I think).

I use Pelikan Tusche A drawing ink. It's very very very smooth, though not quite as black as things like Windsor and Newton ink. However, the advantage is that it comes in a plastic bottle which won't break in transport - speaking through experience here. I like it. It's pretty pricy though - probably about twice the price of other inks, but OOOH it's worth it. It's good value if you buy a quarter litre or so, but you'd have to get through about 50 sketchbooks to use that amount.

Tutorial 002 - Roughs

I use my pencil to sketch out the design, then use Photoshop to scan it in. As the pencil is quite light it doesn't really show up very well. In this scan, I've got the settings as "300dpi Colour" so it'll be a nice resolution and look snazzy when printed out, should you want to print it out, but you can't really see much yet.

So, what I do now is use curves to up the contrast nicely. CTRL+M brings up the box thus -

I now click on the diagonal line 1 square along and 1 square up and drag it down to 3 squares along and 0 squares up thus -

>>>>

This will make my picture much more clear. Although it looks quite yellow now, I could happily send this off to my publisher and know that they'd be able to see exactly what was what.

If I wanted to make it less yellow, I'd press CTRL+U to bring up the Hue/Saturation box and drop the saturation right down - maybe even all the way down, but I like to leave a little bit of colour in there and only go to -80 or so, which makes it look like this -

Now all I need to do is draw a marquee around the image ("M" brings up the marquee tool), then go to to the menu bar at the top, press on "Image", look down the list and click on "Crop" and hey presto! The finished rough -

I can now email this off to the publishers.

Tutorial 001 - The right equipment

Firstly I make sure I've got the right equipment.

I use Daler Rowney A4 spiral bound drawing pads 150g/m2

and faber castell grip 2001 pencils. The reason being that they're both cheap, do the job well and are readily available en-masse from Sussex Stationers.

I also use a PC or Mac running Photoshop, and a scanner and a wacom tablet with all the buttons turned off (as they constantly get pressed by mistake otherwise) and the mouse in the bin/recycling (as it's not very good). I also use email for sending small pics, and www.mediafire.com for sending big or lots of pics.

Cavemen Story - Macmillan Poland

This is an internal page from a commission for Macmillan Poland about 2 groups of cavemen who cause each other all sorts of mischief.

Captain Rainbow - Watts Publishing

This is the cover for "Captain Rainbow". A salty sea dog who needs a new boat. You can buy a copy of the book from Amazon

The review on Amazon says -

Captain Rainbow decides to buy himself a new boat. He goes shopping on the internet, but he doesn't quite get the boat he had hoped for!

Which pretty much sums it up!