Pig Pickin 2

Well, the creek stayed where it was thankfully, so here is the color version of Tuesday’s sketch as promised.

Zodiac Crayons

Like every other child on the planet, crayons were my first drawing medium, and as an artist, they hold a very special place in my heart. Diem Chau has taken crayons to a completely new place that I could have never gone. In my mind’s eye, I see picking one of these up and having to fight the overwhelming inspiration to draw with it. By the way, but my favorite is my sign.

Liquor Labels

Continuing in the cartoon series of booze labels, I present two new labels that I’m kinda fond of. Notice the skulls blended into the background of the vodka label to give a bit of texture.And two revised versions that are a little more on the practical side from a production and printing standpoint, although maybe not so much from a marketing point of view:

Wizard Bock

These are a couple of mock beer brands I had to create and get out of my head. Even though I’m not a drinker, I do enjoy looking at the label designs. Aside from the initial hand drawn cartoon portions which were turned into vector art, these were created entirely in Illustrator.

Fish ‘n’ Chips

Here is a commissioned Illustrator cartoon that will be put on a dark blue background, on the stern of a boat named “Fish and Chips”. I’m sometimes surprised and often honored by being chosen as the artist for many of my client’s projects. Some of the more unique uses that have been found for my cartoons are on orthodontic devices, children’s prosthesis implants, enameled pins, cake decorating software, quilt designs and vending machine graphics.

Shading Cartoons in Photoshop

Shading cartoons with Photoshop takes some creativity at times to achieve the results you want, especially if you change your mind (or the client changes it for you) after hours of work. If you’ve used a color in a large area that doesn’t look quite right after you’ve added texture, highlights and shadows, it probably won’t be easy to go back and recreate or repaint that area from scratch. Well, with a little forethought and the help of layers, color, blending modes and levels, you may be able to save yourself some time and avoid completely reworking the area. This can do wonders for your sanity and blood pressure if you are up against a deadline.

I use the Magic Wand on the line art layer most times to make my selection and expand it if necessary into the line art to insure I have the entire area covered. Once you have your selection made, create a blank layer above it in the layers palette. Choose a color and fill the area that you need to alter. The color at this point doesn’t really matter, it’s essentially a placeholder for the final color we will be using in the next step.

Neatness is always nice, but since we are using a completely separate layer for this step, we can easily go back and use the eraser to cleanup what we don’t want. When you have the area covered, erase any stray marks that are outside the area to be altered. It may help to add a white bottom layer as a temporary measure to see the color areas you want to erase. Now in the layers palette, lock the transparency of the new layer with the color you’ve just laid down. You will be changing the color on this layer to something more suitable to your needs, if it isn’t already.

If you need to lighten the area, choose a color similar to the area to be changed, and fill the locked layer with this color. With the transparency of the layer locked, only the areas colored already should fill with color. Then change the layer blending mode to Overlay in the layer palette.

To darken, choose a similar color and fill the locked layer, but change the blending mode to Color Burn instead. Remember that you can experiment with the Opacity setting in the layers palette to fine tune the blend mode results. In addition, it’s easy to try different colors and blending modes since our color is on a layer by itself and the layer transparency is locked, making color changes a simple matter of picking one and then hitting Option-Delete.

Often I will use this method as a way of adding shadows and highlights to my cartoons without being destructive to the underlying color. Being on a separate layer, it has the added benefit of being able to easily put continuous shadows and highlights across areas of different base color with a natural look.

Channels and Line Art

If you scan your inked cartoon and save it as a TIF, the scanned image is white to the edges, obscuring anything on the layers beneath. We need a method that will let us isolate the cartoon lines and place them on any background we choose. We could change the blending mode of the image layer to Multiply in order to let the lower layers show through the white, but deleting the white altogether allows us maximum freedom to manipulate the cartoon and extend our options for the final image.

Additionally, this workflow allows us to color the outlines of our cartoon to match the adjacent areas of color rather than being limited to just black outlines. I’ve included an example at right, where most of the outlines are a gradient of orange and red. Note the black outlines that I’ve left around the eyes.

Open your high resolution cartoon TIF and go to the Channels palette. You will see a single composite RGB channel and each of the Red, Green and Blue channels broken out into layers. Drag any one of the Red, Green or Blue channels to the new channel icon at the bottom of the palette to create a copy or Alpha Channel.

Switch back to the Layers palette and make a new, empty layer by clicking on the icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Then from the Select menu > Load Selection… . This will bring up a dialog box with a pull-down menu for our Source/Channel. Pull this menu down and select the new channel that you made earlier. In the same dialog box under Operation, make sure that the radio button for New Selection is pressed. Hit OK.

Back in the Layers palette in the new layer, you will see the ‘marching ants’ indicating an active selection. (If the marching ants are marching around the edges of your file window, your cartoon lines are not selected and you’ll need to go to menu Select > Inverse.)

Once you’ve made sure the marching ants indicate the outline of your cartoon, fill the selection with black. Now you should see just the lines of your cartoon with no white fill inside or out, and the checkerboard pattern, indicating transparent areas, should be visible behind the lines.

*If you are going to use color outlines, as shown in the bird’s head example at the beginning of this post, you’ll need to lock the transparency of the line art layer at this point.

Now that we have the line art isolated, we have no use for the black and white scanned layer anymore. Double click that layer to change it’s name to something other than Background which will unlock it and allow you to delete it.

Finishing your cartoon is now just a matter of creating a new layer to hold the color. Background elements can be placed on additional layers as needed and pulled to the bottom of the layers stack in the palette.

Color Choices

Cartoons are generally colorful for lots of reasons. Most often it’s because they are directed at children (note the bright packaging designs of candies that will catch a child’s eye at the checkout counter) and color means fun, or just because bright colors match the mood of the artwork.

Almost immediately after I created my first small website and began displayed some of my cartoons, I was surprised at the number of emails specifically commenting on the bright colors.

When I start out to create a cartoon and begin to draw it in my head, I generally have a good idea of what the final color scheme will probably be. As much of my work is displayed and used on the web, I try to confine myself to a web safe palette, leaning toward the primary colors (red, yellow and blue) as much as possible. Even within these three colors, I will tend to use the brighter shades when I have a choice. With those self-imposed guidelines, I’m practically guaranteed a cartoon that looks cheery and fun.

In addition to my primary color choices, I take great pains to avoid using black and grays, except of course, in the line art portion of the cartoon. Because black can be so overpowering and kill the life of the cartoon, I avoid using it if at all possible and substitute a dark red or green instead. For example, usually my cartoon car tires are shades of dark blue-green. It works because it close enough in value to black and people will easily accept oddball coloring in cartoons.

As I begin to color, I start by first adding any colors that are specifically required such as skin tones, or clothes that need to match previous drawings, or colors that a client may have asked for. Once those specific colors are laid down, I have a basis for a relationship with the other colors, so I can move on and make those choices.

Keeping with any one color range can be useful in certain situations, but if you’re not careful it can make the cartoon visually tiring. Unless I’m after a particular look and feel, if I find myself adding too much of one color, say red, I’ll search for places to add yellow as an offset and balance out the image, and give the viewer’s eye a place to ‘rest’. Along that line of thinking, it’s important to watch for colors that create ‘vibration’ when placed together. For example, red surrounded by blue of a similar value can cause eyestrain, and in the case of text, be very difficult to read.