Comic Con notes

Scott Robertson and Neville Page's Creative Design Panel

For video reference on an animal check out Corbis Motion:
http://www.corbismotion.com/

Or check out Animal Planet. Go to the Natural History Museum or buy a bone clone online of the weird animal you want to study.

Paint over reference photos! Aspects that affect design include proportion, stance, silhouette, symmetry, graphic, and value. Graphic refers to logos, text, numbers, bar codes and things like that that are a part of the design of vehicles. Always think about features and function when designing. What does the character or transport or prop have to do in the story? What features make the character, transport, or prop unique? Performance and personality shape your designs. Is your character tall and lanky or short and stubby? It affects how they move, their speed and attitude. Think about material. I think he was referring to surface textures, is it leather, skin, metal, wood, dust, water etc. Being constantly aware of all of these things and applying it to every one of your designs would make a great portfolio.

Breaking in and Staying in the Comic Book Industry and Building an art portfolio - Andy Schmidt and Zander Cannon

http://www.comicsexperience.com/

You need 3 things to get into the industry:
1 - talent (everyone has it, you just need to constantly develop it further)
2 - persistence (keep trying for reviews, submissions, even cold calls)
3 - be nice

to stay in the industry you also need 3 things

1 - talent
2 - professionalism (being able to deliver your promises on time)
3 - be nice

Actually you need to have at least two of the three things.

For portfolio, show 4-6 pages of FINISHED art. One Cover only. Get a professional script to draw from from.

http://www.comicbookscriptarchive.com/archive/the-scripts/

Include published work. Show it to someone who works with a similar style to get the most constructive critique. If you can't, then ask the reviewer who else he would recommend showing your portfolio to. Ask him if it's okay for you to draw more pages and send it to him in the future. Get his email or mailing address for submissions. Basic pay per page is around $170 per page for a penciller.

Ron Lemon - Inventing dynamic poses for Illustration

Characters with eyes spread further apart are usually preyed upon. Their eyes can give them more peripheral vision to look out for danger. Characters with eyes closer together are usually hunters. They focus on the prey that is in front of them.

Anatomy notes:
the 10th rib is marks the bottom of the rib cage
the bottom most part of the pelvis form is the pubis
older characters have more swollen obliques (love handles)
the top of the pelvic mass is the iliac crest


Digital Inking with Brian Haberlin

http://www.digitalarttutorials.com/tutorial_detail.php?id=22

download pixel blender plug-in for photoshop cs5 and use the oil paint option. lower brush scale, increase stylization. use with unsharp mask, threshold, and finish with clean up and detailing or fixing quirks. New in CS5 is wet media set of brushes, the bristle brush used at 1% is nice for sketching. Puppet warp lets you create control points like joints to warp. To thicken lines after inking, do gaussian blur, then use levels or threshold. Use liquify, warp under transform, smudge. Scans should be 10x15" at 600 dpi. Create a layer between the scan and the inks as if it was vellum. Fill it with 50% opacity white so you can see what you've inked and what you haven't.

Create your own edge brush by drawing a tall triangle and turning it into a custom brush. Click on control direction for more options. Create a hairy brush for fur and grass textures. Use white to go over dark areas to add more depth. Create a selection and fill it with rake brush textures in black and put white back over it to create more contrasting textures. Creating a rake brush is also very useful. For a quill custom brush change the round shape into a flattened oval and change the tilt angle, turn on texture - roundness jitter, spacing to 1%, use pen pressure and dynamic smoothing. A charcoal blending brush can create a nice blending and natural medium effect for some comics.


Comic Coloring and Digital Painting with Brian Miller

http://www.hifidesign.com/

color holds, also called knock outs is a technique that paints colors right over the inks. create a special effects layer separately for easy editing. Use negative wand tool. after flatting colors, check the transparency lock so that you will only paint on your selected color selection without altering the transparent portions. Use screen mode on brush settings to paint light into a dark initial tone. start with the darkest shade and paint light into it.