Cartooning and Illustration Tips
Below is a convenient guide to several of the cartooning / drawing / digital workflow techniques I’ve posted on the site. Got a cartooning question or need some pointers? Hit me up and I’ll answer it on the blog.
Hardware
Manga Studio
- Manga Studio 5 or Sketchbook Pro 6: Which is better for comic making?
- Manga Studio 5 Hidden Gems: Posable 3D models
- My Custom Brush Settings for Manga Studio
Photoshop
- Dramatic Lighting Effects Using the Gradient Tool
- Scratch Disk Not Available and How to Fix It
- Creating a Flexible Comic Strip Panel Layout using Adobe Photoshop
- Customizing Your Color Swatches for Comics
- My Photoshop CS6 Customizations
- How to Make Word Balloons using Adobe Photoshop
- My Coloring Process: Step by Step
- Getting the Sticker Effect
- How to Add Halftones using Adobe Photoshop
Sketchbook Pro
- Customizing Your Brush Palette in Sketchbook Pro
- Getting a Killer Sketchbook Pro 6 Digital Inking Brush
Workflow
- Color Calibrating the Yiynova MSP19U Tablet Monitor
- The Two Can Technique: Making Poses more Dynamic
- 50 Things I’ve Learned About Publishing a Webcomic
- Automating File Uploads to your Webserver using a Mac
- Improving Your Focus by Blurring Your Desktop Wallpaper
- My Coloring Process: Step by Step
- Inking Times: A Visual Look at Process
- Drawing Outside the Box
- Zen and the Art of an Uncluttered Dock
- CocoaPoTrace: The Easy Way to Go from Raster to Vector Line Art
- 5 Reasons Why You Should Buy a Wacom Intuos5 Tablet
- What I Use
The Mentor Experiment
- Silhouettes and Animal Anatomy
- Week 5: Barry’s Critique: Drawing Hands and Arms
- Drawing Arms and Hands
- Head Design
- Week 3: Barry’s Critique: Body Proportions
- Week 2: Barry’s Critique: Action Poses
- Week 2: Kyndra’s Critique: Action Poses
- Understanding the Torso with the Floursack
- Attitude Poses: Kyndra’s Critique
Resources
- Font Resources Every Cartoonist Should Bookmark
- Chris Wahl’s Brushes (highly recommended)
- How to Make an eBook for the iPad and other tablets
Recommended Reading
These are books I have read and strongly recommend.
- The Mad Art of Caricature Tom Richmond
- Creating Characters with Personality Tom Bancroft
- Character Mentor Tom Bancroft
- Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators Mike Mattesi
- Force: Character Design from Life Drawing Mike Matessi
- Layout and Composition for Animation Ed Ghertner
- Making Comics Scott McCloud
- Understanding Comics Scott McCloud
- The DC GUide to Digitally Drawing Comics Freddie Williams II
- The Animator’s Survival Kit Richard Williams
