You have probably guessed we are going to use a PC to create the artwork for a graphic novel or comic book, but wait till we show you some surprising examples.
Let’s start with this picture of a high school guy.
It looks like a standard comic book drawing, right?
Well it’s really not a drawing at all! And that's so cool about the things we are going to show you.
In fact it’s a photo that was purchased online for $1. A little Photoshop magic, and taa-daa, comic book artwork.
Here is the original photo, from a royalty free web site (you can find out more in the Resources section of this site).
As you can see, the photo was cropped to get the head shot.
Then by using a few simple filters, the photo was altered, converted really, to give it the feeling of having been drawn and colored.
The background is a simple gradient, on a different layer. We removed the original background in Photoshop.
The black frame is just an edge on the top layer.
The balloon is a circle and a triangle, which was curved using one of the standard Photoshop tools. The two forms were joined, by collapsing their layers, then adding a 2 pixel (px) stroke to the outside.
If it sounds complicated, its not.
As this site evolves we will show you step-by-step how to do all these kinds of tricks.
The whole process only took 10 to 15 minutes. For a comic artist it would take that much time to make a very rough draft. Included in the 15 minutes was the time to make the artwork, the coloring, and the type.
In know, it is very cool.
To achieve the effects you can see above I used Adobe Photoshop and some plug-ins from Alien Skin.
You can also use Adobe's Photoshop Elements with the same plug-ins.
On the Resources page you can find a link to learn more about Photoshop Elements, which has all the functionality needed to make comic book art. And you can also add plug-ins to extend the products capabilities.
You don’t always need plugins, some times they just make things a bit easier and faster.
The key points of this example are quality and speed.
Using a royalty free photo, you can quickly use the parts of the photo you want and get rid of the rest.
Then convert it to the comic book style of your choice (see a few more examples on the next page), add some text and some balloons, and you are done.
