I am not a movie snob.

Using Channels to isolate underdrawings

My drawing/comicking process is always changing, like everybody’s, and right now, I’m trying to figure out how to do the hand-drawn stuff faster and better. I’m sure someone else in the universe has thought of this before me, but I figured out a neat trick recently that may be of interest for people who prefer doing preliminary sketches by hand (or can’t afford a 24” Cintiq).

[By the way, sorry if this gets rambly. I’m mostly writing this for myself.]

First, some context:

I do a few passes of preliminary sketch when I do hand-drawn art, in order to correct mistakes and composition and tighten my drawings. It’s a lot of “extra” work, but I think it benefits my drawings.

I scan my pencils in, then print them out in 7% cyan (effectively a non-photo blue) to ink over with a brush, markers, or whatever. A lot of people do this, and it’s great; it lets you digitally tweak your pencils before inking (if needed), and acts like a back-up in case you screw up your pencils egregiously at the inking stage.

BEFORE I even draw my final pencils, though, I often do tiny thumbs, then roughs, then loose pencils. My thumbs are practically scribbles — just detailed enough to create a panel breakdown in Illustrator. I print the panel borders out in 7% cyan and then draw in the figures and background roughly. If I scan my thumbnails or roughs in, I might scan a page three times before I’m done inking, which is time consuming and a waste of paper.

Now, a lot of artists have gravitated to Non-Photo Blue Colerase pencils, and I love Colerase, but the Non-Photo Blue is too light for my taste. Instead, I use Light Green (20052) for very rough sketching and Blue (20044) for somewhat tighter, rough pencils. The Light Green is dark enough to see, but light enough that it doesn’t compete visually with the Blue when you’re tightening things in the next pass. (I will use Non-Photo Blue with either color, to do perspective grid lines and things like that.)

When you scan these roughs in RGB, you will see the green and the blue pencils in the full-color file, of course.  But if you show only the green channel of the file, you will only see the BLUE pencil drawings (even where the two overlap). Yes, that is correct — with the red and blue channels hidden (showing only the green), you will see the BLUE pencils. The two colors stay almost entirely within the blue and green channels so that I can easily separate them in Photoshop (I haven’t tried using the red channel with a third color yet) in order to make grayscale art from just my Blue pencils, yet I’m also saving my Light Green roughs at the same time.

With the right scanning software, most channels will let you scan individual channels (as gray, naturally) — so you could scan just the Green channel to get the Blue pencil artwork in a grayscale image file.

Take a look at the photo gallery for the full color view, as well as the two colors separately. You can also see the inked art at http://www.multiplexcomic.com/strip/702

This process saves me the extra step of scanning in my roughs, it’s both easier and better (more precise) than using a lightbox, and also uses less paper.

Thoughts?