Chewing Pencils

In part 1 of this tutorial, I outlined two approaches to producing a cartoon image using a mix of traditional media and a computer. I then went on to describe the tools and technique I used to produce, scan and clean up an image ready for some more heavy duty digital manipulation.

In this second installment, I will take the scanned and cleaned cartoon through to a finished product by treating the image as if it was a single piece of flat paper, using only the paint brush and fill bucket tools to add colour, and the text button to add some dialogue. I will set some artificial limits on what I do to highlight the pros and cons of this technique, but will point these out as I go.

One of the advantages of using the fill tool in your graphics softwre is that it is quick. Large areas of colour can be added in a single click. But it does rely on the shapes you wish to add colour to being closed. That is, if you are wanting to add colour to a dress, and there is a gap in the outline of the dress, using the fill tool will fill not only the dress, but the background and any other ‘open’ shapes with the fill colour as well. This means that you must use the paint brush tool to fill in any gaps in your image or, alternatively, use the mask tool to mask off areas you want to colour and using the fill inside the mask only.

But speed gives way to quality, and this is seen in interface between the filled colour and the drawn line. I coloured my image below using the fill tool, and on the screen, the results look ok.

However, on closer inspection, there appears to be white dots scattered along the line between the colour and the black of my outline. The enlarged section of the cartoon guy’s head shows this most clearly.

Because of the bleedproof, non-feathering paper I used to begin with, the non-jagginess of my lines means that these white pixels have been minimised. Had I used normal paper, the white dots would have been very pronounced. It doesn’t show up much on the screen, but if you send your image like this to the printer, the results are terrible.

There are ways to get rid of these white pixels:

1. You can use your paint brush tool and manually paint over each of the dots with the appropriate colour. This is time consuming, but gets the job done.

2. You can set the tolerance level of your fill tool to somewhere between 10% and 50%. In the coloured image above, I have the tolerance level set at 0%. This means that even the slightest variation from the colour I click on with the fill tool (white in this case) will indicate the filling should stop. A higher percentage tolerance means the fill colour will ignore slight variations in colour, covering a higher proportion of the image. It works well, but does cause the fill colour to bleed across your outline. This too can be very obvious when you send your work to a printer.

All that is left now is to add some background colour, the border and some text. Remember, I am treating this image as if it is a single, flat piece of paper, so there is no moving things around once they are set in place - just the simple undo/redo, but no objects or layers. That’s for part three…

To add the background colour, I use the mask tool to create an elipse, and then fill the mask with colour. The text is added using the “Comic Book Commando” and “Arial” fonts, while the line to the dialogue is added using the line tool. The border is added using the paint brush tool set on ‘caligraphy’ and drawn using the mouse.

The cartoon is now finished, but not what I would call acceptable. The layout isn’t great, the colours could use some tweaking, and some tints and highlights would go nicely. But using the single layer makes adding these things very difficult, and not really worth the extra time.

To finish the project, I now save the image in three formats: The native format of my software (CPT) at 600dpi; a TIF file at 300dpi for printing; and a GIF file at 72dpi for web display.

In part 3 of this tutorial, I will complete the same cartoon using objects and layers to get a much more acceptable, and easy to work with cartoon.