Hand drawn comics? How best to upgrade?

[Qing]

Hi,

I'm sure there are others like me that have hand drawn comics on actual paper. My question is, how did your eventual upgrade to digital go? Tips, tricks, anything that might help me convert to digital.

I've got Procreate on an iPad pro, got the pie-in-the-sky dream, I'm just waiting on an Apple Pencil now. I had one that fell into the paperwork vortex beneath my bed and I can't seem to find it.

[jwabeasley]

I do my comics traditionally - a scanner and Gimp is all the digitization I need. People appreciate hand drawn work more and more.

[wolflu66]

If you are already skilled in hand drawing and traditional art, then transitioning to digital art would require you to become familiar with drawing software (I recommend mastering Photoshop first), understand the concepts of layers and masks, and then you can happily start drawing.

You can gradually familiarize yourself with the remaining software functions while you're drawing.

However, I must admit that in an era of AI proliferation, the value of traditional art will be further enhanced.

[moontokkym]

Moving to digital art isn't an "upgrade", both traditional and digital art workflows have their pros and cons. The main pro of digital is speed and flexibility because you can more easily adjust composition and colour if you made a mistake. Traditional art has the advantage of a more unique look, stands out more, and also if you ever get popular, the sale of the original pages is a really good revenue stream for artists.

I work with both traditional and digital comic pages and illustrations (even within the same book, the "dream sequence" pages of Petrichor are all traditionally inked) and like both @jwabeasley and @wolflu66 said: if you're already proficient in traditional art, all you really need for digitising is a scanner and a drawing program for adjustments to correct scanner issues, and if you want to hybridise your workflow more it'll be more a question of just learning to use the software in a way that replicates how you use paper, rather than necessarily re-learning to draw. Procreate is pretty 1:1 with tradi art in terms of sketching from my experience, and the brushes have way more texture than the average Photoshop brush, which is cool.

[ryoko]

I've always drawn out my comic pages by hand in pencil on Deleter paper, then scan them in and ink/colour digitally with CSP using a drawing tablet, and I've done that for the past 10 years for both my series on Tapas. My first series that I just finished is approximately 3000 pages long and that was all drawn by hand.

As some people have said, it's not an upgrade per-say to go digital, it's just a means of creating made easier and for me less expensive because I don't have to buy inking pens or colouring pens. It's also way easier to fix things like line errors or changing the size of stuff. It also saves time with the free assets available on CSP such as the perspective tool.

Now getting used to using a drawing tablet took time, so if you are making the switch or just using a digital process in tandem with a traditional one, you'll have to play around with what works for you.

[kyupol]

Used to draw them on paper (using pencil and marker pen) then scan and color in photoshop...

[AshanaArt]

As someone who does both, I don’t think digital is necessarily an upgrade. Both have some advantages and disadvantages. Digital is faster since there are more tools available, and it has more flexibility then most traditional mediums. Traditional artwork usually takes longer and it’s not as forgiving, especially with mediums such as ink and colored pencil. However, it has more texture, and looks more three dimensional depending on your style. I personally use procreate for my comic art, since it’s a lot faster and digital works pretty well for slightly more stylized art, and traditional colored pencil for my realistic artwork- I haven’t been able to get the same level of texture and three dimensionality digitally. At the end of the day, it comes down to style/personal preference. If you do decide that digital is the best option for you I’d recommend experimenting with the brushes to see which ones work best for your style. I’d recommend only picking a few since it’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed. There are also a lot of tutorials on leaning the program itself you can watch.

[simplykit]

hand drawn on paper till the day I die! woohooo!!!... though i do scan it and make tweaks on corel draw app

other than that theres not much i wanna change

still looks acceptable to me...

.

.

[lizardlullabye]

I find that my original hand-drawn picture will always look a bit different when I change it to digital counterpart. But anyways, here's a rough attempt to make the digital picture look closer to the hand-drawn one.

(1) Typically, scanning works better than taking a camera picture. With the camera, you might have to adjust a slanted plane-angle or poor lighting later which looks funny and is more work (see poorly-light photo above for reference) Oh, and if you drew on the back of scrap paper and see the "scrap" side on the scan, put black construction paper or anything that blocks light behind your drawing when you scan.

(2) Adjust picture with drawing program tools (under "Edit" for clip studio paint) to roughly clean-up so the picture looks closer to the original drawing. This is rotating the picture so it's less crooked, transforming if you took the picture at a really funny plane-angle, and adjusting the levels and contrast/brightness, etc. (tonal correction). This is case of playing around with tools to see what they do. If you mess up, UNDO button.

(3) Draw on picture to edit mistakes and such. This is where you might use layers and play around with brushes, etc. to touch up line work or manually fix colors. After which, hopefully your digital picture looks closer to the hand-drawn one.

For drawings with dark lines, I sometimes add a color layer above it as a "darker color", "multiply" or "darken" layer. Like a coloring book.

Overall, just play around with whatever tools you have for drawing (pencil, ink, paper, drawing program) to find what works for you. Everyone works different.

[Lensing]

I love hand drawn comics and I would always prefer a badly drawn
ballpoint comic over a mediocre/good digital comic.
The hard part is to make the digital illustrations look natural and imo
there are only a few artists who achieve that.

Here are some things to avoid which are typical beginner mistakes
that I did and which made my art look ugly:

• too much saturation
  -too many colors
  -not enough contrast
  -no variety in brush sizes
  -no variety + knowledge about brush style (smudge, soft, hard)

[ambermdo]

At first, I would draw on paper, and they looked more like sketches. After I learned about Illustrator, I started scanning the drawings and using it to clean them up.

[Hugerat]

The only digital aspect I really rely on is lettering and colouring. Otherwise, I've never totally felt the need to "upgrade" to digital.

[thepenmonster]

Digital has a lot of shortcuts and tools to help cover up holes in your skills.

Bad line? No problem. Drew the head to big? S'cool. Backgrounds take too much time and effort and you'd rather be drawing your "OC"? Easy peasy. FUCKING HANDS?! Snort.

There is no hard line between "tool" and "crutch" beyond the voice in the back of your head. And the good news is that the readers will never know nor care!

BUT...

Both traditional and digital require the same thing. That you sit down and put in the time to get good with them. The only valid advice I have for you is to just start doing it. And keep doing it.

[ShidoDraws]

With whatever program you use every program works pretty similarly. The basics of what you need to know is the layer settings and your brush options.

The layer settings are your friends, they won't talk to you until you interact with them. The basics ones that you have to know is the delete button, new layer button, clipping/masking layer button, blending mode (for effects) and folders.

The clipping layer tool is my favorite, it's a basic one but a huge life saver in the digital art world. It's kind of like a masking tool where you auto select a layer and edit within that layer's boundaries. The clipping tool is where you clip other layers on top of the bottom layer. I like it because you can always go back and change/remove the layers you want off without redoing the entire layer.

Blending mode is just a mode where you can change the mode of a layer, every new layer will start with the normal mode. What each mode is? They're just basically shortcuts for all the artist dummies like us, they can turn the brush you're using and make it a different color than what you initially picked. I recommend only using these modes when you're making final touches, it can make your drawing really noisy if not careful unless that's what you're going for.

The folders are basically just a place where you can tuck all your messy layers and put them in the corner and just forget about it, just like how people clean their mess.

As for the brushes, I'll let you play around with it yourself. Personally, I try to minimize the amount of brushes I use since I like the stay simple. The four brushes I use is the normal pen tool, the airbrush tool, outlined brush and a stamp brush. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp.

Now, these aren't everything you need to know, just basics.

Edit: Forgot the mention the select tool, the keeper of all tools. The program I come from has a short cut for selecting an entire layer which is ctrl+T or you can use the select tool, it's an icon of a circle or oval line that crisscross. With this tool you can select a layer or just parts of a drawing and move it to the position that you want. It's helpful in a way that it saves some time.