Comic Guide
By Dr LeNTo

What you need:
- Photoshop
- A reasonable scanner
- A printed comic template (just four boxes in a word document)
- Fine liner (for the outlining)

Tools of the trade

1 – Rectangular marquee tool
Circular marquee tool
2 – Move Tool
3 - Polygonal lasso tool
4 - Magic Wand tool
5 – Paint brush
6 – Eraser tool
7 – Paint bucket
8 – Type tool

Step 1 – Drawing and scanning

The first part of any comic is drawing out the characters onto a comic template (a simple template can be created on word in five minutes). Draw on the characters and foreground on the template using ordinary pencil followed by a fine liner (non permanent, black and about 0.5mm in size). Leave the background blank. If you have a tablet you can use can scan the pencil image into the computer directly and use Photoshop to draw in the lines. Many professional comic artists use this method, but not being made of money I use the cheaper option.

After the lines have been redrawn in black ink you can erase the pencil and scan it into Photoshop. Use the “Transform – scale” and “Transform – Rotate“ icons under the edit menu to position your comic. It is important you do this before step two. What you get is an image that is made up of lots of shades of gray.

Step 2 – Black and white

Select the “Magic Wand” tool and set the Tolerance to 55. Also make sure that the Contiguous option is turned off.

Click on the center of one of the drawn lines and use the pencil tool (set at large diameter) to colour all the lines in Black.
Set the magic wand Tolerance to 100 and click on an area of white, colour this area in white.
After this use the navigator to go close to the lines and colour any grey dots that might have been missed into black. What you’re left with is a black and white copy of your scanned image.

Step 3 – Basic colour

Use the rectangular marquee tool to give the comic a border and the magic wand tool, with contiguous ON, to select areas you want colored and the paint bucket tool to colour them. Don’t worry about the background, that will be taken care of later.

Step 4 – erasing the white

right click on the background layer and select the option “layer from background”. Click ok and create a new, blank layer. Move this layer beneath the background layer

Use the magic want tool to select all of the white areas in the background and use the eraser tool to get rid of them.

Step 5 – Shading

Use the paint brush on the basic brush style. Use the diameter of 100 and hardness around 13%.
Using the magic wand tool select areas of colour and use the brush tool to shade where appropriate (Best to use are the colours only shade darker then the previous colour. To make this simple and consistant make sure your colour palette is set to “Only web colours” like below.


Step 6 – Backgrounds, middle grounds and extra images

By now your comic should look something like the image above. Now is a good time to put in the background. Get a new template and repeat the above steps to produce a background, and any middle ground images that you might need

Note that you don’t have to repeat the background over again if it doesn’t change. Often one background can do several comics, and several backgrounds can share the same template. This just saves time and temperament.
To add the background to the picture merely use the Rectangular marquee tool and copy it. Then Paste it behind the fore ground picture. Pasting several times and transforming the images to fit the front panel is most likely needed. Also foreground images like the guy with the club can be added in this way between the background layer and the foreground image.

Step 7 – Titles and text
Your comic should be looking close to finished by now. Now all is needed is to give it a name and a title and the words that make it understandable.
Use the Text tool to type out these and the Move tool to position them where desired. These text layers should go over the foreground. Now all is needed is the speech bubbles beneath them…so onto the next step!

Step 8 – Speech Bubbles
Last of all are the speech bubbles.
Create a layer above the foreground but beneath the text. Using the circular marquee tool (right click on the rectangular marquee tool to get a menu) Draw out circles of White around the text using the tool and the pencil tool (with a large diameter). Use the transform – scale tool on each circle of white to the right size for the text BEFORE you deselect the shape and move onto the next one.
The comic should look like this:

So you have the bubbles in place and looking good, time to attach the speech to their owners. Use the polygonal lasso to draw a white triangle on the white layer, have the tip of the triangle pointing to the mouth or head of the speaker. Also connect different speech bubbles that belong to the same person with a square shape using the same method.

Not for the black outline. make sure you are on the white layer with nothing selected. Go to Edit -> stroke and you should get a option like the one below:

Use the settings in the image with 1px or 2px width and a black colour. Click ok and your text boxes should have a black outline.


Your comic should now be finished. Merely save it as a .PNG or .Jpeg as well as keeping a Photoshop .PSD; .PDD Version as well so you can make changes if necessary.