Penciling Comic Books Digitally
One of the benefits of digital penciling is you never have to buy paper. Lots of people don’t even read traditional comics: they get their fix on the digitized screen.
Old And New Ways To Draw Comic Books
Comics have been around forever. Technically they go all the way back to the beginnings of history in Mesoamerica and Mediterranean cultures.
The good news is we don’t need stone carving tools to draw hieroglyphs, and today, we don’t even need pens or pencils or paper.
It’s actually a bit of a transition learning to draw intuitively on the screen. You have the choice of digitized screens or digitized tablets, which one you choose will depend on price and preference.
The first real knack of digital illustration is trying to limit the parts of your working experience that are going to degrade the quality of your process. For example maybe your computer is slow or not particularly good. There are ways to limit the impact of the resource drain on your computer no matter how old it is (rest assured, they were designing and drawing on computers even back in the days of 233 megahertz processors.
But for most people, the real knack is learning the program in depth, as thoroughly as possible. Those in the video game world will know the difference between keyboarders and “clickers” (this means people who have all their moves programmed into macros or keys, as opposed to manually clicking all the actions in a game with the mouse).
Like video games, your graphic design experience will become a lot easier (and faster and better) once you learn all your keyboard shortcuts.
And programmable workstation Actions are even better than keyboard shortcuts. For one thing, learning the shortcuts in your program means you’re learning the program. For another thing, learning about the actions you can use as a designer will teach you about how to get all the annoying parts of your illustration process out of the way quickly, to immediately focus on your design.
Armed with the know-how about how your program works, and the least repetitive, least exhausting ways to achieve your goal, allows you to direct your energy and creativity towards your product.
All this is to say that once you learn how to operate your workstation intuitively, that’s when you can really get immersed into your illustration. At that point you can draw, ink, and paint just as naturally on screen as you can on a page, and it’s that sense of naturalism that ensure your digitally created illustrations equal or surpass the level of authenticity and effect that another artist might create using traditional tools.
