(Warning: Wall of text ahead. If you’re not interested in drawing, there’s probably nothing interesting in this text for you )

There have been occasions when I’ve been asked just how I do when I draw, how I get such smooth inks, how I color and so forth and so on. I’ve put up some brief clips on youtube in the past, showing my process, but they’ve been sloppy and… well, not that educational. The latest person who asked was Salvatore Iovene, who requested on Twitter that I’d do a tutorial on how I did the latest character drawings. So that’s what I intend to do; shortly talk about the steps that I went through when drawing the Leslie picture. The same process correlates to the Isaac and the Houston picture, more or less.

(I’m not going to get into how I get smooth line art and how I lay down colors all that much in this tutorial. However, I am intending to do a digital inking video, and show how I do it. I’m currently thinking about just HOW I should do that.)

I’ve divided my process into six steps with six images each. The first five are entirely done in Corel Painter IX. In the seventh, I’m moving over to Photoshop CS3. Here we go!

Step one: Rough sketch

At this step, I open up Painter and select Pencils – Cover pencil. This is the brush I use for all my sketching. I don’t worry about layers or anything like that at this point, I just start sketching, and I always begin with the head. And when I say I begin with the head, I mean I start with a plain circle, which I add some stuff to to make Leslies head shape. (If you look at the picture above, you can see that starting-circle crossing his nose and mouth and going up through his hair, highlighted in blue).
I then use his head to measure out his body. I know his head to body ratio is 1/3, meaning that I can fit his head three times in his body, and that his torso and his legs are one head high each. I’ll just keep adding shapes and rough details until I think it looks enough like Leslie to move on.

Step two: Clean sketch

In case I’ve created additional layers, except for the canvas one, I’ll drop everything at this point (meaning, I’ll flatten the images). I’ll end up with all my lines on the canvas layer again. I then choose “lift canvas to watercolor layer”, which turns the canvas into a new layer (and, obviously a watercolor one, which means you can’t edit that layer without either committing to it or using the watercolor brushes). In doing this, it also sets the layer to the “gel” layer mode, which sucks. So I change it to “default”, and bring the opacity way down.
I then create another layer, and re-sketch the entire thing, paying more attention to details – and try to make it actually look good (you can see some of the changes I made, like his expression). I know a lot of cartoonists that’d just skip this step and go straight to the inking from the rough. I’m just not that good at improvising my inks.

Step three: Inking

This is a delight. Once again I’ll create a new layer, and start inking with the Pens – Scratchboard tool. I pay attention to making the long, big lines (and particularly the outlines), thicker – and the small, short and less important ones (like the pockets on his jeans, and the facial features) thinner.
Many people seem to like my line art, I do too actually, but how do I get that smoothness? Well, it’s a combination of the scratchboard tool (which is GREAT, I can’t get this line quality in Photoshop. I just can’t.) the fact that I draw every line really really fast, and the fact that I let my lines overlap each other and erase the extra parts later. Scott Kurtz explains how he does just this, in this video.

I do just like that, expect he works in Photoshop, and I working in Painter. And I might even flick my pen even faster than he does. (I hit undo a lot. A LOT).

Step four: Laying down the flats

NEW LAYER again. With the inking done, I select the Pens – flat color brush, and start tracing around the lines with the color I want, and then just fill it. Scott Johnson explains that part in one of his videos, so in case you don’t get what I mean, check that out.

However you do it, this is an easy step. Just get those flat colors in there, all in the same layer.

Step five: Shading and highlighting

If you read the strip (which I HOPE YOU DO) or know my art style, you know I usually cel-shade when shading. However, I didn’t for these pictures.
What I do is that I select one color “block” with the magic wand (I usually start with the skin color), select the color I want to shade with (which is usually a darker, more saturated, more purple tinted color. Sometimes it’s less saturated, though), and then just shade lightly with the Tinting – basic round brush. I’ll keep darken the colors where it makes sense, and throws in some highlights on the opposite side. I then smudge all the colors with the Blenders – just add water brush, to make the transitions more gradual.

(I won’t go into more depth than that, I’m assuming you know how to select good colors, and that you know some color theory and whatnots… cause I’m no good at it. Here’s an EXCELLENT tutorial on that subject; I STRONGLY suggest you read that).

Step six: Photoshopping

At this point the image is basically done, but I want to add some finishing touches. So I save it as a .PSD, and fire up Photoshop.
I have a texture I’ve made myself, from several other free textures, that I just slap over the image in a new layer, with the layer mode “soft light” (just play around with the layer mode and opacity if you’re not sure, and see what it gets you). I then create a new layer, set it to screen, select a big brush with a brownish/orange color and start adding some wicked highlights to the left side. Mike Krahulik has a clip that shows how.

And that’s it, more or less. I like to change my line art to a very dark red, to smooth out the image, and of course I also added the shadow underneath, but other than that, I’ve got nothing further to add.

I hope at least some of you enjoyed reading about this process (and it actually felt good to get a little bit serious for once, I have a tendency to do that when I try to explain stuff). I really enjoy tutorials myself, so. Both written and in video form. I’ll try and make a video tutorial soon enough.