Sketch Charlotte

Wally Wood's "22 Panels" is a famous collection of little tricks that you can use to make your comics panels more visually interesting. Wood was a master of comic storytelling and shows it here by breaking down his craft to a few basic tenets in a way that informs other less experienced artists but that also shows how effortlessly this came to him.

Joel Johnson, a writer in NY, bought Wood's drawings in an auction and shares hi-resolution scans of them for the first time here.

Just as useful I think. Click below to see the larger image. (found via The Beat)

I found this tutorial on scanning and using Photoshop Channels for coloring under your line art to be very helpful. As for the coloring I was previously just creating a separate layer for the line art and setting it to "Multiply" and coloring underneath it. I think that works as well and involves less steps but the Channel method is working well for me so far so the jury is still out.

Here is the tutorial. Some other comic-related topics are covered like planning your pages, covers, etc.

What do you guys do?

Okay maybe I'm going overboard with the tutorials but since Herc and I were talking about inking techniques last night and I just ran across this brand new inking tutorial today I figured I would share.

Tom Richmond seems to be a MAD! Magazine artist and he is pretty thorough with his descriptions of techniques and tools that he uses. Some of the key takeways for me:
- Draw with the ink, don't trace your pencils lines or else all the life will be drained from them
- Don't be afraid to constantly re-work a line (apprently Hirschfeld did this and still made it look like one bold, confident line).
- If you're going to cross-hatch, use it sparingly
- tricks to creating atmosphere in your backgrounds is to keep your lineweights light and dont' run your lines of different objects together (you'll have to look at that part to see what I'm talking about)

It's a pretty good tutorial, worth taking a look at: Tom Richmond's Inking Tutorial

Of course, there is no single right way to draw an indie comic (or any other type of comic). But I found Jessica Abel's DIY tutorials extremely helpful when creating my first-ever narrative comic--lots of great stuff on materials, panel setup, scripts, lettering, inking, not to mention production and distribution... perfect for people who want to at least know what the rules are before they break them.

http://www.artbabe.com/comicsandart/diy/index.html

Her La Perdida series (now out in graphic novel form) is good too.

This is a panel by panel critique by the late great Alex Toth of an early Johnny Quest comic by the also great Steve Rude. Toth is unrelenting in his criticism but it shows how much damn thought that guy put into his work. Everything he says is dead-on. Although there's a lot to learn from reading through this I can't help but feel a little depressed by it. If Steve Rude who draws like no one's business could be considered that sloppy then what the hell am I doing picking up a pencil?

Click here to see Steve Rude get his ass handed to him by a master.

This is a very cool new site that asks various comic book artists to list and describe the tools that they work with. Always interesting to hear what other people use and why. Among the artists interviewed are Hope Larson, Jim Rugg and Ryan Dunlavey.

Check it out.