Stick Figure Sketchblog & Webcomic Creator @ Stewped.com

Recently I started using PNGOUT, a command-line program that amazingly reduces the size of your PNG files without any loss of quality. It’s tantamount to sorcery, it works so well. As most of my comics are currently black & white, I export them as PNG files because, unlike GIFs, they can contain meta data for organization purposes. That is, if I remember to tag things as I create them.

In the screen caps below, this little tutorial shows you how I reduce my comics to almost HALF their original size. You can even download the original and the optimized one to compare on your own, if you like. This was on a greyscale image though. Don’t expect these kinds  (more…)

A while ago I stumbled across Tony Cliff’s site and it on it there was this amazing tip for coloring your flat colors in Photoshop. It’s a very simple button on the layers palette, near where you lock your layer, called Lock Transparent Pixels. Instead of having to worry about flatting your characters and objects with very different colors so that you can easily select them with the wand tool later, you just click this button! It locks the transparency of the layer so that anything that’s got a filled in pixel, stays at that transparency.

For example, if you have pixels that are 100% transparent(0% opaque), 50% transparent(50% opaque), and 0% transparent(100% opaque), they will stay that way when you color over them!

The completely 100% transparent pixels won’t accept any color.
The 50% transparent pixels will accept the new color, but stay 50% transparent.
The 0% transparent  pixels will be 100% new color.

You don’t have to waste tons of time making and saving selections!

Watch the video I made below for a quick overview, it’s only 5 minutes. Blow it up to full-screen for the best results!

Then, if you want a static tutorial, check out Tony Cliff’s flatting tips with the lock transparent pixels button–which he learned from Kazu Kibuishi.

Well, no use beating around the bush. This is probably the most offensive comic I’ve ever made. Your imagination is what makes it so terrible, so you are a willing participant in this atrocity.

In the end, I made a nice animated .gif file of the drawing process.

Did you know that the most important part of drawing a comic is including space for the word bubbles? When you are creating your thumbnails for the comic, be sure to include the general shapes of the bubbles, if not the words. That way, your comic won’t look super cramped and sad when you have to try to add the word bubbles and the dialogue in later.

baby graper process gif

Here’s the second in this series of Word bubble tutorials using Photoshop. Hope you find them informative. Both vids can be found on the video tutorial page.

Check out this video tutorial I made so you can see how I make word bubbles in Photoshop CS4 using paths.  If you want to see this tutorial as a sequence of still images, go to the CS2 Word Bubble Tutorial.