From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating fan art - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

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Creating fan art

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(pistons whirring) (gears clunking) - [Instructor] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. This is going to be a fun movie, mainly because I get to share with you some very cool comic book art by my good friend and legendary comic book artist, John Beatty. So without further preamble, let's get started. Now, John has done comic book art for the last 30 plus years. He's done stuff for DC. He's done stuff for Marvel. And I originally met John about 11 years ago, not in person. He actually listed to a podcast I was on and sent me an email, and we've been in contact ever since, and we've become friends. And I was finally able to meet with him personally a couple years ago when I spoke in Florida where he lives. And he's just as great in person as he is through his emails, but his art is fabulous. He's a brilliant inker. And I just want to show you some of his artwork. Here he is in the works of inking. I believe this is the Punisher character on one of the comic books. But look at the detailing of the hair. It just kind of blows me away. And it's really fun to watch him ink. He posts some of his videos online and it's just really fun to watch him ink. So really great process. He's a skilled craftsman when it comes to it. And with comic books, you have different people who do different things. You have the pencillers. John's an inker, so he takes the pencils somebody drew, he inks them, brings them to life like this one here. This is one of the original boards that they take and then scan in. Here's another one of Batman. This one's really cool. I love how he did the cross-hatching detail in the background, and it just has a lot of character to it. Really nice, really fun. He does a lot of different characters over the years in different kind of classics such as Captain America. Then you have Hellboy, the Punisher, and of course Batman, which is, it's Batman and Spider-Man the two best known for from what I understand. But because he's a friend, he's always going to these conferences, and he has his own booth, and he signs all kinds of stuff for the fans who really follow comic books inside and out. They know exactly who he is. And so I asked him if he would let me brand him. I wanted to help him to promote himself, and this is what I came up with to brand him with. His art does all the speaking, so I didn't want to get artistic with it. I just wanted to brand his name because it's his name that's directly associated with the aesthetic he's most known for. And so these were part of the brand assets that I created for him that he's using now, and it's worked out really great. Now in trade for this, I'm a big fan of the Flash. Growing up he was my favorite comic book character. So John, as a way to say thank you, he inked me a Flash. I told him, "This is going to be featured in DVG Lab, "'cause I'm going to take your inking "and I'm going to play the part of the comic book process, "but I'm going to colorize it myself using your outline." And he said, "OH, I like that idea." So that's what I'm going to do here. Now, many times you could Image Trace this. I don't really care for Image Trace. I would rather keep this a TIF image, but because some of you might wonder about it, I might as well show you. So if we go Image Trace, turn this on, select this TIF image, and we'll trace it as tight as you can. We'll go a hundred, and then this way, and then we're going to turn on Ignore White. We don't want white to become shapes. And we'll hit Trace. Now that we have it traced, we'll expand it. And we have all of our art. We can close this now. Now, this doesn't look bad, but let's zoom in on it. You know, I don't like this wobbliness you get when you trace it, and it's not horrible, but I just don't like it that much. I don't like the aesthetic. If I turn on just the TIF image, you can see the difference. I like this a lot more than this. kind of shifted a little bit when I traced it too. But I prefer the TIF image. Now, that's just me. If you want to go with the vector, you could, but in this case we're going to stick with the TIF, and we're going to go ahead and do that. Now, before we move forward, I'm just going to kind of knock this down transparency-wise. So we're going to knock this down to 40% like this, lock the layer, and on a layer above it, I'm just going to start building my shapes. What I mean by that, we'll go here and select an outline, is we're going to zoom in, and I'm just going to create all the shapes that are going to fall behind this outline. But we're using the outline to guide it, just so we know where to place our anchor points. But this isn't complex. As long as we stay in the middle of this path, we'll be able to accomplish what we want. So that's all I'm going to do here, is I'm just going to build out all my shapes and just go from one point to the next like this. And we're not going to do the whole art, obviously, this way, but I did want to you how you can approach this. Most of the coloring, obviously, when it comes to comic book art, nowadays is done using Photoshop, which makes complete sense. But I'm kind of doing it in vector here just to show you if you ever wanted to do something like this, you could use the same approach. So we'll get down here. It doesn't take a lot of work to do this, like that. And you don't even have to get curves as long as it falls behind. Doesn't matter. Do this. Go here. Pull this out a little more. And this. Pull this down. This is where you might want to turn off Smart Guides, Command + U, 'cause it will want to try to snap. And this is where you'll want to get really precise with it, because it gets down to the nitty gritty. So we're going to zoom in here and might move that here. So we're going to go like this, and here, here, and connect it. And I'll bend this one out, bend this one out like this. And I think that's going to work. And then the only other part is we're going to do the eye. So I'll start with something like this. As long, once again, as long as it runs past or in the middle of the outline artwork, and here's where it gets a little tricky. We'll do it here like that. You might wonder about this, but it'll make sense in just a second. Adjust that. Since we built the outline of everything, the perimeter that is, we'll just clone it. Select this shape, and using Pathfinder, we'll intersect it to get everything there. We'll build the other elements we're going to need for the eye, which is going to be the white of the eye. So we'll do this. Go down here. And once again it can go off to the side. Go here. Like that. We can take the shape we already built. Clone it, Command + C, Command + F. Intersect it to get the white of the eye. And then we can use a simple elliptical shape, a circle. Like this, and just position it where it should go. Something like that. Select the shape we already built, intersect it to get that, and then the last part will be the highlight. And it'll go something like that just to cover that area. We could even move it in a little bit on this side like that. And that's all I'm going to do is create all of those elements that make up the interior shapes of that area. It doesn't take a long time to do that, and usually as I'm doing this for this case, we want to use some of the same colors, so this is where I'll have a tonal family set up. And this is the red I've established and the shading color I'll eventually use. And all of those I should point out were informed by me looking at samples of other comic book illustrators who've done Flash, and I like some of the colors. Don't much like this red down here. It's too kind of bloody. I like the brighter versions. But golds and reds and darker values of red to make up the hues of shading. Those are all cues that I'm going to capitalize on. In this case, I'm going to take this, and we're going to color it. Actually, let's color the eye first. That'd be easier to see, so we'll go in here. This will all the tone of the skin here. Then we'll select this will become the white. And then we're going to use this for the eye. This will be the highlight of the eye. That'll be white, and we'll use this for the red. So we don't have everything, but if we turn on the outline above it, that looks pretty good. It's going to work fine. And that's all I'm going to do to build out the rest of these shapes. And this shows all the shapes built here, and once again, like I did on the eye, you can see I have this chin shape. And I built that after I built the outside perimeter, so I'll take the outside perimeter and clone it, Command + C, Command + F. Select the face, the bottom part of the face that is. The nose, mouth, area, chin. Intersect it, and that gives me everything I need there. So this is where we'll just go ahead and select all the shapes that are the same color. Here's his skin tone. We'll select those. Send those to back because some of these shapes will be on top of it, like white. White's easy. It'll just be white. Color his eyeballs white. And the color of the inside of the eyes will be this blue. This will be white again. We can sample the mouth. This will be the red. We'll sample that. That's on top, so we'll send it to the back. Then we'll sample this. This will be gold. I don't even know what they call this, like the wing on the side of his head, gold. So pretty simple fill color shading, but once we turn on the outline, that looks pretty good, and we haven't even done any of the detailing yet. So that's where the detailing comes in, and this is why I refer to other people and how they handle the detailing. I'm not a comic book artist, but I understand the principles of where you place shading and highlights and all that. But these gave me all the cues, and so I just printed out a black and white, like this, and just started shading on it with the pencil to figure out where will I put the shadows on this? And where will highlights or back-lighting like on the back of his neck go? And this kind of is the way I defined it. And I could have just referenced this on my desktop and then built it, but in this case I scanned it in, placed it here, and this guided my vector building of all the shapes that make up this that's showing here. Let me zoom in so you can see this. You can see that, especially over here on the face, how all those shapes will make up. That's going to work great. That's going to print really well. And these are where I'll go in. I'll turn off the shading now. We don't need that. We'll keep the other stuff intact here. We can turn off the bottom inking because we're using one right on top here anyway. And this is where all of these shapes that will make up part of his eye. If we go up to the tonal family, and we'll sample the shading on his face. We'll select that color. and that'll end up being the shading. And that's what we're going to do is we're going to apply different colors here. So maybe his eyes are going to take on this kind of shading here to make up the shadowing on his eyes and in the teeth to define some of the shapes down there. That's all we're doing here. And then on this outside shape here, this is like the highlight. This will be white, so we'll color this white. Get of the rid of the outline. And then this is going to be colored yellow, but it's going to be a diminished yellow. It's the same usage of yellow. We just dropped it down in terms of its value. So it's zero five 60 zero instead of zero five 95. So we've diminished the hue to work good in a shading color. We'd apply the same kind of aspect to all the shading here. We'll turn that on. You can see how that looks, turning the shading on. So that's all we'll do, but we're going to jump ahead here, and I'm going to show you once again the base coloring look like this, and if we go to turn on our own layer where we organize the base fill colors here, then we add the detail colors on top. You can see how that looks. And then if we drop the outline on top of that, boom. Look at that. That just looks really really cool. But it's at this point that I was looking at this and I'm going, you know what, I don't really care for this shading red. I think it's a little muddy. I think it could be handled better. So if we select that shading color in our swatches palette. It's right here. If we open that up, I'm going to go ahead and adjust this, and I'm going to make a better shading hue because if we look at the base color, the base color red is zero 95 90 zero. And if we look at the shading color here, it almost had the same values for the primary colors, which are magenta and yellow, and I think we can improve on that, so we're going to knock down the cyan to 20. We're going to knock down the magenta, and we're going to cut it in half to 45. We're going to do the same thing to 90. This is going to be around 45. But then on the black, we're going to give it a little more black, 35. And so we've created a very muted dark hue of the red. And if we click OK, that doesn't look good at all, but that's okay because we're not done. We're going to select inside, select the muted color, go to Transparency, and we're going to set this to Multiply. That looks better, but still, we don't want the value to be 100%. We're going to do 65% and apply it, click out, and boom. That looks way, way better. It looks richer, but I think there's even one more thing I was thinking about when I was looking at this. I don't mind black, but I think this would look a lot better, instead of the stark black, to have it a nice rich dark red. And as soon as I did this, I'm like, oh yeah. That looks classy. I like that a lot more. It's warmer, and I think this is going to work really great. Now, in a previous movie, you saw me create what are called zip tones, and we're going to use that in this one. What is a zip tone? Well, if you watched a previous DVG Lab movie, you already know that. If you're watching this and you didn't watch that, I'm just going to explain it to you really quick. So if we have this, here's the fill. All we did is we created a pattern fill that looks like this. It's like a half tone, but it's an imperfect half tone, which goes great with this kind of retro style of inking on this Flash. So that's what we're going to do. And all I did is I created shapes that align where I think this aesthetic would look really cool. So we're going to go ahead and get rid of the outline, select the fill, and go ahead and drop this in like that. And I just think that looks really, really cool. I think that's going to work great. And so we're almost done with this Flash print, but of course we're missing the key thing, and that is Beatty's signature, 'cause it's his art essentially. I just colored it. I played the part of the colorer. And what I'm going to do though is I'm going to make a nice art print and leave off his signature. Then I'm going to send it to him and he's going to have to sign it, so when I get it back I can frame it and put it on my wall in my studio because I'm one of his biggest fans. I think he's absolutely brilliant with his artwork, and thank you, John, for letting me feature you in this DVG Lab. I was honored that he agreed to let me do this. And comic books are a process made up of different creative steps. One artist tends to pencil, like I said. John does impeccable inking. And I did an okay job of coloring this, I thought, but obviously they would never use Illustrator. They use Photoshop. It goes a lot faster, which makes more sense. I can't imagine doing a whole comic this way. Man, that'd take forever. That said, it was a blast, and thank you once again, Mr. Beatty, for the cool Flash artwork. And be looking for that art print soon. I'm going to be mailing that out so you can sign it and I can have an absolutely cool piece of artwork to hang in my studio. Thank you for watching DVG Lab, and until next time, never stop drawing.

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