Friday, March 02, 2007

I FEEL THE NEED FOR SPEED...lines

Now that my Iron Man Hypervelocity series is shipping from Marvel I'll be able to show you some of the new tricks and techniques I've deleloped.

As a recap to some new folks who have linked to this blog, I'm showing how I have used Adobe Illustrator 10 to draw comic books. I draw directly in the program using a Wacom Intuos 2 on a PC. The best way to get the most out of this blog is to start from the beginning lesson.

I cover all the basic things you need to do from the get-go to get up to speed using Illustrator. I cover all the tools and palette options that I use while drawing in Illustrator. I've also stuck with Illustrator 10 for the most part because the pencil tool is better there than in later versions. It's in wider circulation than the newer programs and won't cost you a lot of money to get if you don't own Illustrator already. I'm sure you can find cheap versions of Illustrator 10 on eBay.

While I've been drawing Iron Man:Hypervelocity for Marvel during the past year I've found a need to draw tons of speedlines in many different directions. There are many ways to create speedlines.

Here I'll show you a really quick and simple way.



7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is awesome thanks for the free tutorials. Do you do the colouring also in illustrator? I mean how do you achieve all the effects in those Iron Man clips?
Keep up the good work
Peace
Fola

PS. Nice to know we share a passion for hiphop and indian movie soundtrack music :)

Unknown said...

Fola,

Nice to meet you here. Thanks for the kind comments.

I don't color the artwork on Iron Man. I just illustrate it in black and white. My buddies down at guru-eFx color Iron Man as well as a ton of other books for Marvel. Check out their website at www.guru-efx.com and if you are interested in coloring in Adobe photoshop they wrote a how-to book on digital coloring called, How To COlor For Comics. I drew the cover!

Did you go to Myspace and add me on your friend list yet? Keep in touch!

Gary,
Thanks for the comment, man. I'm glad this lesson helps. There are a few more lessons for the speedlines so check back soon.

Though I'll drop hints here for you...

You can make the speedlines the same way here but with strokes and no fills. You just draw a straight line across and copy and paste a bunch in a staggered stack. Stretch it the same way as in this lesson, but go in and change the thickness of a bunch of the strokes to .25,.50,.75,.1 and a couple of .2's for a really cool look. This works great when you don't need to see the thin side of a speedline. For example when the speelines stretch from both sides of your panels.

Another lesson I'll be touching on involves linking to this page for a plug-in that will save your life...

http://www.graphicxtras.com/products/ai_plugins.htm

but mainly...this link...

http://www.graphicxtras.com/products/aiplugin23.htm

You may worship me at any time...

:P

Unknown said...

Hi Brian,
I just wanted to chime in and say that I tried out your inking technique and am really digging it. It's actually very similar to a technique I used in Photoshop, using the lasso tool to trace over a sketch and fill in with black. But using Illustrator to do it is so much better IMO, what with it being in vector and all :)

Anyway, I really like what you've managed to do and I definitely have to make a point of dropping by the local comic shop and pick up Hypervelocity when I get the chance.

btw if you wanna check out some of my art I have some old stuff at my website here:

http://wildcard.geofront.com/

and I have a sketch blog with some more current stuff here:

http://bsharp.livejournal.com/

Thanks for the tutorials, it's some good stuff!

=-- Ben Nunez

Silvio Spotti said...

That is so wicked.
I love the art.

DivaLea said...

Denham!
I just wanted to say that: "Denham!"

Lea Hernandez here. While I am, thanks for contributing to the benefit for my family. Now you can go "shucks."

I had no idea you were doing this. I am sleepless tonight (hell YEAH Claritin D makes you alert--makes me about ten lerts) and Googled "illustrator CS tutorials manga," and here I am.

NICE stuff, dude, and thanks for sharing it.

Any way to make a brush that's a bit rougher and a little dirty so it looks more like pencil? I have CS but I am on l'il wobbly baby legs with it.

PhilRules said...

Alright - first off, awesome work; I love AI and your work is a breath of fresh air in vector work. However, I can't figure out how to get the free transform to add perspective to my objects. When I try using the free transform tool all I can do is rotate and resize the objects, not change any of the perspective angles. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but you might be able to shed some light on the subject. Keep up the good work!

Unknown said...

Phil--You have to hold down the CTRL key to stretch it into perspective.

Just select the object and hit ctrl.

You can also hold the alt or alt and shift for extra angles.

Hope that helped