How to Scan Your Comics - Part 1

For part one, I'm going to start with the basics: scanning black and white line art to create a bitmap for black and white reproduction.

A bitmap has only two color settings, black, and white. You may be thinking, "great! my drawing has only two colors, black and white", but the transition from paper to print isn't always that straightforward. You know all those photographs of movie stars with alarmingly sheer black shirts on? Well that shirt probably looked opaque until someone shined a very bright light on it. A similar principle is at work with your scanner. That scanner can only see your image as it looks when a very bright light is shining on it, and this light will highlight any inconsistencies in the thickness of your ink, creating mottled patches in areas that should be all black. Your goal is to take your scanned greyscale image, and decide which of those grey pixels should be white, and which be black.

For this example, I have chosen an antique image which is tiny, dark, and complicated, which will require a bit of fiddling before it looks good (as you'll see below).

It is possible to scan directly to bitmap - plenty of artists do, but you run the risk of losing a lot of detail. In a direct-to-bitmap scan, you are allowing the scanner to make artistic decisions for you. I tried it with the image at left, and this was the result- not exactly ideal.

Your minimum print resolution for line art should be between 1000 and 2000 DPI. 1200 is standard, 800 is doable, but at that point some eagle eyed readers will start seeing pixels.

So erase your pencils, dust off your art, and prep your scanner. I don't want to make any extra work for myself, so I remove any dust or fingerprints on the glass with a lens cloth (an old t-shirt will work in a pinch), or blast it with a bit of compressed air. If the scanner bed is really dirty, it can be cleaned with a tiny bit of rubbing alcohol on a low-lint cloth.

You'll want to scan in grayscale at highest DPI your computer can manage- preferably a bit higher then your final print resolution. Through trial and error, I eventually settled on 2,400 DPI for most images, but that's because I'm a maniac with a pile of external hard drives to store all my massive files. If you're reproducing your artwork at a 1:1 ratio, then can scan directly to your desired print resolution, but often the print size is going to be smaller than the actual artwork, and you can eek by with less. Make sure your scanner is set to jpeg, the scanner was designed primarily for photographers, and will default to the much larger TIFF file if I'm not paying attention.



As you can see, my scanned image came out much murkier than the original.

scan

photograph of original image

Now that you've scanned your images; I want you to stop, put down the stylus, and save yourself a new version of the file (I usually label them "scan" and "edit").

In fact, if you are in the midst of scanning the masterwork that took you 3 years to write and 8 years to draw, pause now and burn a bunch of CDs to mail to trusted friends (then repeat this process again with the final print files). Everyone has a hard drive horror story, and you'll be glad to have the extra backups if your hard drive expires after you've sold half of the original pages.

Now, open your duplicate copy in Photoshop, and make sure it's still in grayscale.

For this time I am  working entirely with levels, so hit command+L to bring up the adjustment panel, and start nudging the black and white arrows closer to each other. Start with very small adjustments, zooming in and out as you go.

Screenshots of the work in progress, click to enlarge

Keep an eye out for potential problem areas like fine lines, or dark areas with white highlights. You can zoom way in to see how some of the fine lines are doing.

At a certain point, those minor adjustments will become almost imperceptible on your screen, and at that point you can start getting more bold, and really move those sliders around.

When you are happy with the result, SAVE it, and re-size the image to your desired print size and resolution by going to "Image" > "Image size". Here I decided on around 8"x11" at 1,600 DPI. Leave the "resample" drop down alone for now, we'll revisit that later.

Once your image is the appropriate size you can convert it to a bitmap. Go to "Image" > "Mode" > "Bitmap", and the output settings in the dialog box should already match the resolution of your jpeg. Not click on the "Method" dropdown menu and select "50% Threshold". Hit ok, SAVE your bitmap and you're done!
 

 click to enlarge the images below.

This week: Dogs are clenching rocks in their paws.

This post was inspired by a tweet by Elanor Davis about 2 weeks back. She tweeted "Before I die I hope I'll be able to draw a dog leg without getting super confused halfway through."

Animals and their weird anatomy can be really hard to draw out of your head, and Elanor's post prompted me to do two posts on hard to draw animal stuff. I decided I should do one on the horse, which was last week's post, because EVERYONE has trouble drawing horses, except a few freaks of nature that leave the rest of us seeing through green lenses. (By the way, was the horses post helpful to anyone the way my people anatomy ones were? Haven't heard any feedback on it yet.) Now this week, this one is dedicated to Elanor.

So, here's a wolf skeleton, the platonic ideal of a dog shape. Compare it to the structure of a horse and you'll see it shares a lot of characteristics, but there are differences too. Just like with the horse the curve of the spine is actually convex but the vertebral ridges make it seem concave. The pelvis is a lot narrower but has a similar structure. The ankles and elbows and lower but the general idea of how they're arranged is similar. And the tall, narrow ribcage and long downswept shoulder blades are almost the same.

Here's a great illustration of the leg from many angles:



Now, I won't dwell on the body much in terms of shape and proportions, and I'll tell you why in just a bit. But I will say that just like with my horse post, unless you want to draw really realistically, you only need to know where masses of muscle start and end to get the shape of the leg right. Here's the basic shapes of the skeleton:

And here are the start and end points for the muscles. Notice that they're basically the same as the anchor points for human muscles? Our quads start at our iliac crests and go just below our knee joint, and so do a dog's. Our hamstrings start at our ischiums and go just below the knee, and so do a dog's. The muscles at the back of our arm start at the shoulder blade and attach to the humerus and elbow, and so do a dog's. We may be all twisted around but we're all built on basically the same plan.

Now, I said I wouldn't get into proportions or shape too much, and here's why: through breeding we've twisted dogs into all sorts or forms. There are no set proportions for a dog. Researching this post I found a great website called skeledog.com that sells t-shirts depicting the skeletons of many popular breeds of dog. Here's a couple examples:


Now, these don't conform to wolf proportions at all, but they do conform to my start and end points. All of them, no matter how weird. Muscles still pull on pretty much the same places, no matter how those places are arranged, or in what animal.

Once you know how to fill in the masses of muscle the tops of the legs are pretty simple. What I think is by far the most confusing bit of a dog are it's paws. There's all these little bumps that look like joints, digits poking out of weird places in the middle of it's leg, it's total mayhem. Sort of like with neck muscles, it's really not so complex, but if you don't know what's underneath it's sort of hard to parse what the hell is going on. So let me offer you a clear, easy to remember description that will aid your memory: dogs are always clenching five rocks in their tiny, withered hands.

Just follow me on this one. Here is a human hand in several poses, and next to it is a dog hand, drawn without it's pads or it's fur:
That bump on the wrist is the most obviously different thing from the human hand, but you actually do have it. It's called the pisiform bone, and on dogs and cats is really prominent. The rest of the dog's hand is actually very similar, it just looks withered. The fingers are actually shockingly long and thin, but you can't tell when the pads are on them. I've drawn them straight for simplicity, but they're actually very knobby.

Now let's add the pads:

As you can see that brings us most of the way towards the hand becoming a paw right there. Note, even though the pisiform bone sticks out and UP, the top of it is covered by the flesh of the arm, (look back up the the lines you draw for the masses of flesh on the arm, the line goes down from the elbow to the top of the bone) and the pad on it actually points DOWN. The little thumb has no pad on dogs. As for the rest of the fingers, they appear to be ever clutching a handful of little rocks. When the dog stands, it stands on the mounds formed by these pads, as if they were platform shoes.

Here at last is the same drawings with the fur filled in. Now it's a paw, not an exhibit from the Mütter museum.


I don't actually recommend drawing paws out like this every time, but thinking of them this way will hopefully keep you from getting confused about all those bumps and sticky out bits on the paw. Remember: dogs are always clutching rocks in their paws.

Let me know if these are actually helpful. See you next week!

This week: Draw a horse, of course.
Sorry for the wait! It's been quite a little while since I did one of these anatomy posts and I forgot how much more prep they take. So!

First let me say, the mission statement for this post is NOT to give you all the tools you need to draw a perfect, realistic horse. How many of you draw in perfect photorealism? Basically none, right? So what good does that do? I won't even be giving you an overview of all the major visible muscles like I did with my earlier anatomy posts. Nope, my mission with this post is simple: make it so your horses don't come out like this:
Or like some weird dog thing or whatever. My mission is to give you the tools, in the form of some basic shapes and a little anatomical knowledge, to draw a horse that looks recognizably like a horse, and not a deformed cat, in any position.

I'll start with the skull. Horse skulls seem terribly alien, and they are. They're not like our heads at all. Making them odder still is the fact that while they inform surface anatomy, they don't look like a horse head the way that a skull looks pretty much like a noseless human head. As you know, I loathe basic shapes in drawing books that act only as gestural masses. I favor teaching basic shapes that you can actually build anatomy onto, even hand muscles on if you want to, or that you can use to check the correctness of a drawing you've done quickly. My choice for the horse skull is a sort of a rounded 3-sided pyramid. The back of the skull is a flat , rounded triangle narrower than it is tall. The pyramid, which if stood on it's base would look more like a lopsided Chinese mountain, is tall and leans toward the short edge of the triangular base. The tip is blunt, blunt enough for a set of horse's teeth into. Finally, I like to draw two lines down from the acute angle of the triangle down to the end of the nose, as a visual guide both for the center of the face and to remind me that that part of the horse's nose is very narrow.

As you can see in the above drawing, my next step is simple: I extend two sets of cones out at a slant from that nasal bridge, which will fill out the structure of the horse's eye sockets and it's nostrils. Just by doing that you have all the structure you need to flesh out the head and alter the shapes as you like for the horse you're drawing. I chose this shape both because you can easily create real anatomy from it, and because it's easy to rotate in space to create hard-to-draw angles.

You can also use this shape to easily draw the skull, which is important to draw if your horse is going to open it's mouth:

The next thing you need to know about horses, and all four legged animals actually, is that their ribcages and shoulder blades are in a radically different position. Our shoulder blades are flat on our backs, and along with the collar bones form a loop around the top of our ribcage. Four legged animals have shoulder blades that point down, and they have no collar bones. Our ribcage is shallow front to back, and relatively wide, whereas in four legged animals their ribcage is taller than it is wide. The anatomy looks as if a human were squished at the sides and pulled front to back:
Here's a lovely anatomical illustration to show you what it really looks like:

The most alien thing about horse anatomy (and other four legged animals) is the way huge vertebral ridges affect the contour of their back, and in the case of horses, their neck. If you feel your back and neck your spine and beck bones are pretty much near the surface at the back, right? Not so with horses. a huge ridge of vertebral bones between their shoulders (called the withers by horse people) sticks way up from their back, and huge muscles extend from there to the back of the head. This means the neck bones are buried closer to the front of the neck than they are the back. Furthermore, even though the line of a four legged animal's spine is a convex line, the shape formed by this ridge makes a horse's back look like a concave shape. Another ridge of vertebrae, along with the pelvic bones, make the back higher, making the spine seem even more concavely curved. But it's not.
You can see these two ridges VERY clearly in the photo of this horse:

His spine is almost straight in this pose, but it looks bent because of these structures.

Next we'll move on to the pelvis. As you can see, the pelvis is the widest part of a horse:


But from the side, the pelvis is so this you can basic shape it as if it were a sheet of cardboard and not lose much accuracy. Which is exactly how I treat it. I draw the pelvis as a triangle of cardboard that's had it's end nipped off, and a fold made in it about 2/3-3/4ths of the way to the narrow side. The two sides of the fold get balls glued on representing the hip sockets.
With this shape, you can draw a horse's rear in absolutely any position. Remember that the tail passes under the top of the hips, curves over it, and the tail hangs down past the end, like in the drawing below:

Those are the basic shapes you need for the body. For the legs, well, I can get you started, but those, like human hands, demand study and practice. There's no way around it. It does help to remember what joints on the hose correspond to which joints on a human, however:



Now let's put these all together. Here's a horse I sketched with these basic shapes:
And here's how I drew him, step by step:

Note that the shoulder blade sweeps way forward an an angle, it doesn't just point down. And the short, stumpy humerus sweeps back an an equally aggressive angle. The elbow does not go below the ribcage pretty much ever, and it can't extend hardly at all. Unless you're drawing a horse in an extreeme position, you should draw the shoulder blade and humerous as if they were an almost immobile, rigid structure.
Note how the back of the elbow sticks, way, way up, to give the muscles that will sweep down from the whole shoulder blade a big handle to pull on. You need to draw this so when you draw the huge lump of shoulder muscle it looks basically right.




When you fill in the muscles, remember that you know about human anatomy. You know the calf muscles pull on the bottom of the femur, so just draw a line from there to there. You know the quads pull from the top of the pelvis, and the butt muscles from the sides and bottom, so draw lives from there to there. The idea here is not even so much to get exact muscles right, but to make the structure fit together in a way that comes out making sense no matter what lose you're in. If the leg is bent or stretched, the muscles start and end in the same place, so a line drawn between them will pretty much look right. Horses actually have fat little pectoral muscles which make their chests poof out a bit at the base of their necks, so make sure to draw that. Same deal, remember your human anatomy: from the sternum to the humerus, right? Same thing, just no collar bone.
Some really basic proportions will help keep you in check. I hate books that list people's bodies in terms of head measurements, both because the head is round and uneven and there's too many heads to really visually count. I can't picture seven heads very easily and I bet neither can you. But horse heads and nice and big and long and straight, perfect for measuring their own bodies. Here's a diagram, and below some helpful proportions:

• The ribcage is about 1 head tall, 1.5 heads long, and 3/4ths if a head wide.
• The body, chest to ass is about 2.5 heads long.
• The neck, if you uncurved it, is about 1.5 heads long, and ends up being about 1 head away from the body.
  
• The pelvis is about 3/4ths if a head long, 1 head wide.
• The distance from the elbow to the ground is 1.5 heads. (Makes sense, right? If it were farther the horse wouldn't reach when it fed. Horse legs are proportionally shockingly small.) If you draw a line half way down from the elbow, the front leg "wrist" is just under it and the back leg "ankle" is just over it.
• The "knuckles" are roughly the same level above the hooves.
• If you're concerned about drawing the legs sticking too far out, a circle drawn with it's center as the elbow in the front and the hip joint in the back, with the standing leg as the radius, gives you pretty much the full range of motion.
• One important point is that the "wrist" joint cannot flip forward, it only bends backward or locks straight. Even with the leg extended forward, the shoulder joint never unbends very far, as you can see in this photo:

The proportions will vary between breeds of horses, and horses of different ages. Foals have tall skinny legs, draft horses are stockier and stubbier. But these proportions will give you a horse that's basically horse like and not a cow crossed with a kangaroo.

Finally, there's the issue of where to put the horse's legs. Well, that depends on the speed they're going. Again, like with drawing hands, knowing the basic anatomy will help you, but you need to draw them and look at them carefully to get them right. I think the most useful thing is slow motion videos of horses in different gaits. Horses actually change their leg arrangement completely at different speeds, so you need to know how fast you want your horse going before you can figure out what the legs will be doing. Here's some great videos I found at 3 different speeds:


walk



trot



gallop



Note that these don't cover fancy military gaits or anything.

Finally, a few details that people often get wrong:

• Horse ears are straight on the inside edge, rounded on the outside edge. They can swivel them around to show different emotions.
• Hooves don't stick out on the front and back. They mostly follow the line down from the "knuckle" in front, and in the back they curve out.
• Sometimes, they can bend their "finger" back just above the hoof, like on the bottom left.

I'll end with a behind the scenes treat, a photo of all the horse drawings I did in research for this post:

Next week I'll be back to explain dog's legs. Seeya!

This week: Your hand doesn't bend here.

So, it came up several times this last week with several coworkers, who in my case are artists, that they didn't realize the bones in your hand don't bend in the location illustrated in the title. I can sort of see why someone might think it, so I'm just gonna toss this out there for people. In fact, your bones don't bend at either that line, nor the line seperating the palm from the fingers. The pad at the top of your palm actually comes both a little above and a little below your knuckles. Your knuckles are roughly in the middle of the pad, as you can see in the illustration:

So when you bend your fingers down, the pad, which makes the bones in your palm appear longer than they are, gets bent down. This makes the palm seem to shorten and makes it look like the palm bones themselves must be bending. The phonomenon is easier to understand from the side:

If you really want to prove it to yourself, fold your hand while looking at the back. You will see that the back does not change in length at all.

Knowing that the pad comes above and below the knuckles also helps you draw palm lines more accurately. I can't tell you how many students I've seen draw a hand with the top fold line in line with the knuckles, who then try to fit the lines of the palm onto a palm that's too small to fit them into. It's especially a problem for young artists who draw "realistically", meaning they hatch and shade too much and observe too little. It is a problem 100% of the time for those guys who seem to know how to draw every single gun known to man, in perspective, but can't draw a back three quarter view of a head or a garment that hangs naturally to save their lives. Those of you who have been to art school know the ones I mean.

Oh, and check out this recipe comic from Laura Park! Isn't she the best? That's a rhetorical question, obviously she is, duh.

See you next week!

This week on Comic Tools: Eraser Shields

In the course of penciling comics, sometimes you end up with little distracting lines that you want to get rid of, but they're so close to lines you want to keep that erasing one might accidentally erase the other. It's a common problem when drawing fiddly, intricate things like faces, or as I've chosen for this example, skulls.


My usual solution to this problem is to form a point on my kneaded rubber eraser and use it to erase only the lines I want gone. If you do this, make sure your point isn't long and floppy like this, or you won't be able to press on it hard enough to erase.

Make the angle of the tip as obtuse as you can, and the tip will hold up to much harder erasing before losing its shape.


However some artists, like my girlfriend, press their pencil into the paper like a marine trying to stab through body armor, and kneaded rubber erasers aren't enough. Here's her eraser, worn to a blunted nubble:

How is she to erase single lines with this, without erasing everything around them? That is where eraser shields come in. An eraser shield is just a paper-thin piece of steel slightly larger than a credit card, with holes of various shapes and sizes cut in it. You cunningly select and position the holes to mask off the lines you want gone, like so,

And then erase them.

You have to be careful about checking your placement, though,

lest you remove lines you in fact want to keep:

They really ought to make these in clear flexible plastic for better positioning. It wouldn't be too difficult to make one out of acetate, though. Any material that was thin and stiff enough would work.

Anyway, here's the cleaned pencils,


And heres the skull all inked up:


Sorry I haven't been getting to comments yet, my keyboard is broken and my spacebar has been dead all week. I've been inserting every space by copying and pasting, writing this. I have a friend with a new one, though, so hopefully that'll be sorted out soon.

See you next week!