I memorise poses, hands, faces in simple structures, train them so I can draw and bend them without reference.
I don´t know if this really counts as a shortcut or is just part of the learning how to draw
Reference slows me down and makes my drawings stiff because I try to stay too close to the reference
and often the poses are not good or don´t fit with my cartoony style
Excellent idea, honestly I wish I designed my shots more with reusing backgrounds in mind. Would save a ton of work haha.
3D model gang represent
The best shortcut of them all, endless practise and repetition. Ngl, probably part of why I am able to redraw the same hand pose over and over again without much thought, is because I've trained myself to draw it.
My shortcuts aren't usually shortcuts without force of habit and repetition, but usually they are:
Script + thumbnail done at the same time (Script in PC with StimuWrite, then copypasted to Google Doc for basic grammar or typographic errors, Thumbnails in traditional with pencil, just big enough and understandable to take a picture to redraw on top with my tablet)
Add speech bubble and dialogue, if you don't have to send high-res files with no dialogue to anybody you can excuse yourself with those parts to avoid needing to do unnecessary inking or coloring
3d models and backgrounds
Lineart with a bigger brush in a vector layer, then thin out. Confident strokes for main lines and shapes, leave detail for last
I use one single brush for sketching, and another brush for inking
Have prepared a color palette to easy select base colors, shadows and lights
Coloring and shading by using the Fill With no Gaps Tool3 CSP asset
Save your backgrounds and Vector Lines, you can re-use or tweak them a bit
Using references is good, a trick to avoid copying them or redraw a lot is to trace the basic shapes, then morph a bit to match your style (Obviously better said than done)
If what I'm doing is solely mine, I don't bother in making it perfect, looks wonky? Ok fuck it, moving forward. I'm not getting paid nor receiving tips for it.
keyboard shortcuts. You can also customize them to better suit your hand position.
reusing/tracing backgrounds. Draw one background and use it multiple times.
panel templates. Create a default and adjusted if needed. It’s so much easier than starting from scratch. I also feel like the premade panels help me to organize my thoughts better.
The 3D Models in CSP are absolute time savers in helping me get references for the more complicated scenes in BLACK OUT. Additionally, it pretty much just helps me skip the whole process of sketching out and figuring out anatomy since I do give myself the time crunch of finishing and getting a chapter out each month. Despite that, I don't exactly use 3D models for EVERYTHING.
(Here's one example that I didn't use 3D models for)
Yo, I did something similar when UBERNATURA was a comic.. Not this exact handpose, but depending on how the character was feeling (despite their personality) they'd do a specific hand pose
Also eyes are based on one's nature, and not on their emotion so faces don't have to go through a lot to portray emotion
This is such an efficient way of doing things. I myself have a basic color pallete for the entirety of trespasser saved as swatches in my Photoshop, and use a seperate document for specific scenes to always have all the basics at the ready when I need it. Really speeds up the process.
Livesavers these things! I have even gone as far as editing shortcuts I would always accidentally fatfinger haha. The amount of times I started typing text instead of rotating my canvas is inumerable.The text tool is no longer bound to T but to H instead.
People able to design their scenes so they can reuse backgrounds make me jealous.
Honestly, if your sketches are clear enough to serve as lineart, why the hell not go for it! Also creates a nice loose/dynamic style in my experience.
3D model gang rises up once again. 3D modeling has been such a Godsend, makes my life so much easier.
I feel seen!
For Photoshop users:
1) if you spin your canvas round a lot like I do, clicking the crop button once orients it upright again.
2) you can animate GIFs for your comic in Photoshop - like this
For Cintiq users: invest in an Express Key Remote and assign commands to each button for much faster working speed. I can't work without it now.
For general digital artists:
1) if what you're drawing doesn't look right (especially at the linework stage), cover it up with a layer of white, reduce the opacity and trace the whole thing again. I find this helps highlight problem areas and can make the drawing more cohesive stylistically. It's is also good for warm-ups.
2) Drawing on an enormous canvas can reveal qualities in your brushes you may not have noticed while using them on a smaller one.
Crop to reorientate has been such a Godsend in my workflow, that I've set up C as a shortkey to reset rotation in pretty much any program that will allow me to do it.
Ugh same, I cannot live without expresskeys anymore. I'm also lucky to have one of the older Cintiq models that still had the expresskey build into the device itself. I'm so sued to them by now, that when I start working in a new company one of the first things I do is import my wacom settings to the worktablet haha.
If it works it works right
I can respect that. There is something about the act of creating itself that just feels so satisfying to do.
I love this, now yor panels aren't just part of a comic book anymore, they have become animation keyframes!
That's one thing that helped me to determine the poses in panels, I started to treat them like the keyframes of animation.