Layers (Patreon)

Hi all,

I just moved to a new apartment, so I have very little time today to do a full comic. Instead  I prepared a behind-the-scenes post for you all.

I thought it might be interesting to take a single comic panel and show you all the layers that go into it. Usually when I show you how I create a panel of my comic I show you each element in the order I create it. This time I'm going to show you the layers of the comic, in order from the top layer down to the bottom.

For this post I chose the top panel of #726.

The top section involves the framing of the comic, which is made up of three main layers: the panel borders, followed by the comic title, and finally a white fill layer in between the borders. This fill layer hides any work that fall outside the border layer, so I can freely draw past the frame without having to cut out the extra.

The checkered background you see here is the default view within Photoshop indicating transparent areas of a layer. When I draw my comic, I usually have a white background over the transparency to help me see what I'm doing. I'm leaving the checker in this images so you guys see the elements of the layers I am talking about more easily.

The next section is the dialogue. On top I have all the text of the comic, followed by the speech bubble inking, and finally the speech bubble fill (usually blue in my comics).

Any text that does not fall into a speech bubble, such as sound effects, sometimes need a little extra help for visibility. Think of subtitles in a film, if they are the wrong color or not outlined, they can often lose visibility depending on the background of each part of a film.

I used to stroke all my sound effects, meaning I would put a black outline around them. This works well for visibility, but it does nothing else for the text, and makes it look flat. It also can disrupt some fonts and cause issues with kerning. Instead I try to place the text in a location without a lot of background disruption and a lot of contrast. If that isn't possible, I make a drop shadow without feathering (crisp edges). You can see that the "SLAM!" text is fully visible even on the checkerboard background.

Next I have my main foreground ink layer. I faded the checkered background here a bit just to make the ink easier to see.

Under that layer I have my shading layer.

And then my color layer:

In reality I draw the shading after I color. In photoshop, my shade layer is a clipping mask on top of my color layer. A clipping mask is basically a layer bounded by the layer below it. So I can freely draw my shading "over the lines".

The next layer in this particular panel is a white "glow" from the open door behind her. To create layers like these, where I need something to have a glow effect, I usually create a shape in white (or whatever color I need), and create a blur effect (in Photoshop, I use gaussian blur).

This layer needs to fall on top of the background but behind the foreground, hence why it is located here. In reality this layer was one of the last I created, so in this context, it might be a little difficult to see at first.

However, once I start to add the inking of the door in the background, it will start to make sense.

The doorway ink is actually 3 seperate layers.

First is the "motion" of the door:

Then the door frame:

And finally, the wood details:

Next I have the color layer for the door and wall. This is actually in two layers. The top layer is a grunge layer, which is a clipping mask on top of the color layer. I basically use a sponge brush to add texture to the door. In this case it was a white brush. You can see the textured spongey patterns on the door here. For more use of this brush, see my other post.

Finally, the bottom-most layer is the outside background. I simply used an old background from another comic. The glow on top of it is so bright, you can't make out most of it:

Now that the dreaded move is finished, and I have some more time, I'll be posting some throwbacks this week.