TWCL

[nothinghappenedtoday]

Darc wrote:

The white outlining is interesting, but I keep thinking, "I'm a ghost" for some reason. I love the idea of fading the background. Neat!

Ha! I was thinking that it looked like The Glow from "The Last Dragon"!
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nothinghappenedtoday.com

[LovelyLuke]

Yeah, somehow I think I'll avoid the white outlines then ;]

Here's the second page is anybody is interested.



Thanks again for all of the comments and responses. They're all very helpful and I appreciate y'all taking the time out to help!


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www.pintsizepixel.com

[henspacecwb]

If you ever get a chance to read Gary Martin's book 'The Art of Comic Book Inking' you'll get some good tips on using black and white to separate the different depths. I know most of it won't be relevant to your style but the general idea of trying to keep the different tones at different depths still hold true.

smbhax.com wrote:

There's a halftone fad lately in webcomics...

Oh no. I'm part of a fad. Damn it.

Of course it has it roots from the printing process but it's been applied as a stylistic choice long before Manga studio came around. Grief I've still got some Letratone lying around somewhere.
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[smbhax.com]

Darc wrote:

Yes, I did think before deciding to use tones. I use them because I enjoy the result. And, what it comes down to is since I'm the one doing the work, I get to decide. I don't play well with others apparently. I also don't remember Photoshop ever telling me to use tones. ;) I wasn't aware I had to run things past you for your approval first. I'll be sure to do that next time. :lol:

I really hope nobody ever beats themselves up over anything I say, because I'm not worth it. I don't expect or even want everyone to share my opinion; what I do want is to generate a productive discussion in which I can gain insights from other people's perspectives and by being forced to think through my own. Running things by me was not at all what I meant. Sometimes I express my opinions a little too forcefully, although I never *intend* them to be personal attacks. If I had thought anyone following the behavior I described was likely to read my post, I would probably not have written it at all.

I apologize for not being clear enough at the start of that post: what I was referring to are comics that tone everything, all the time.

Your use of tone is quite different from that phenomenon, because you use it very selectively, and in conjunction with grays. The way you use it is much more effective as a texture in defining surfaces that stand out from the other texture types in the image, and the incorporation of gray moderates the tone's internal contrast, making it easier on the eyes (henspacecwb's is differerent too, since they use tone selectively as background contrast).

What inspired your use of tone?
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[smbhax.com]

Spencey wrote:

I'm sure it'll also look pretty good when a print collection is made from a webcomic using this technique (or at least when using this technique well).

I don't know enough about actual printing to answer this, but my *guess* is that it would actually be counter-productive, because then you'd have print tones, which are at a much finer resolution, having to form themselves into the bitmap tones; at high enough print resolutions it wouldn't be a problem, but at lower resolutions you'd start to have speckling along all the minute little surface areas of the bitmap tone dots, so they'd look like...dotty dots?
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[smbhax.com]

henspacecwb wrote:

smbhax.com wrote: There's a halftone fad lately in webcomics... Oh no. I'm part of a fad. Damn it. :) Of course it has it roots from the printing process but it's been applied as a stylistic choice long before Manga studio came around. Grief I've still got some Letratone lying around somewhere.

Yeah, but it seems to me its prevalence in webcomics has gone up of late. The older webcomics I can think of (hardly a comprehensive list) don't/didn't use tone, whereas if you go browse say comics on SmackJeeves, it's very common. I think newer software *has* made a difference in how widespread it is, and maybe other things like the increase in black and white manga appreciation in the West, and the fact that many of these webcomics aren't looking ahead to getting in print, so they feel more free to include what are mostly computer-screen-specific effects like bitmap tones.

I'll admit that calling it a "fad" isn't entirely accurate, since that assumes that this overuse and let's-tone-everything kick will go away fairly soon. That was just wishful thinking on my part. ;)
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[smbhax.com]

LovelyLuke wrote:

Yeah, somehow I think I'll avoid the white outlines then ;] Here's the second page is anybody is interested. Thanks again for all of the comments and responses. They're all very helpful and I appreciate y'all taking the time out to help! [image]

I like that faded background look you've hit upon, it is definitely effective in pushing the background back. And I agree with Spencey and Darc that losing the white lines was the way to go when using the fade.

In the first panel of this one, you have a background/foreground collision where the bottle hits the leg of a background character; since they're both in the same value range, they merge together and collapse the sense of space. If you want to avoid that, watch your silhouettes carefully and keep them from colliding with each other when they're supposed to be at different depths. Another thing you could try would be to doing a sort of half-fade on the background characters, so in gray value they're midway between the foreground and background values.
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[Darc]

Sorry. I was joking about passing things by. I tend to get snarky when I'm drawing all day and forget that doesn't translate too well in text. I'm too much of a stubborn twit to change my ways.

I had a big buffer when I made the switch from color, so I played around with solid greys for a bit and didn't like the look. I also kept wanting to shade the greys like I did the colors. Part of the point of going grey was to make things go a little faster so, the greys weren't working well for me. I tried the tones, then found I could vary the value of the tones and do some quick shading with the sun-fade filter. It seems to work okay so, I've been doing things that way since.

While I can do crosshatching and stippling I don't want to for this comic. I've a few other, smaller comic ideas. Maybe I'll do that for those.

But yeah, sorry about my snark. What program's promoting the tones? Is it a newer version of Photoshop?
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[smbhax.com]

Darc wrote:

What program's promoting the tones? Is it a newer version of Photoshop?

For tones specifically the one I'm aware of is Manga Studio, and most of the overuse candidates I see appear to be Manga Studio-generated. I don't see tones listed as a bullet point for Photoshop CS4 on Adobe's site.
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[LovelyLuke]

smbhax.com wrote:

In the first panel of this one, you have a background/foreground collision where the bottle hits the leg of a background character; since they're both in the same value range, they merge together and collapse the sense of space. If you want to avoid that, watch your silhouettes carefully and keep them from colliding with each other when they're supposed to be at different depths. Another thing you could try would be to doing a sort of half-fade on the background characters, so in gray value they're midway between the foreground and background values.

I knew something was off, but I couldn't put my finger on it! Thanks, I'll fix that up now.
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www.pintsizepixel.com

[henspacecwb]

LovelyLuke wrote:

Here's the second page is anybody is interested.

As smbhax suggested, getting a slightly different tone for the background characters in panel one would push them to the background a bit more. This is what I was getting at when I was talking about trying to separate the image into layers and sort of isolating them by using a tonal value at each depth.

smbhax.com wrote:

For tones specifically the one I'm aware of is Manga Studio...

I think you're spot on about Manga Studio. Although you can half tone in Illustrator and the Gimp etc. (can't afford Photoshop so I don't know about that ,it's much harder work. And if you halftone in raster packages you run the risk of interference patterns when rescaling.

Manga Studio keeps its halftones as vectors even in the cheap version so it prevents interference patterns appearing when you scale. Hmm -- sounds like I'm writing an advert -- wonder if they'll send me commission.

Although I now feel a bit like a turkey voting for Christmas you're probably right that it might be overused and that is probably driven by the availability of the low cost software. Me excepted of course; my stylistic decisions are always driven by the purist of motives and never for simple expediency
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[Darc]

smbhax.com wrote:

For tones specifically the one I'm aware of is Manga Studio...

Ahh, thanks! I'm still on Photoshop 7 and will probably have to upgrade eventually (though I'm trying to avoid that for as long as I can). I was a little worried I'd end up with an even more bloated version of PS with 3,000 tones. At that point, my computer would just rollover and give up.

Hmm... vectors. That would be nice.
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[henspacecwb]

smbhax.com wrote:

What inspired your use of tone?

I'd been reading Gary Millidge's Strangehaven and really liked the way he used half tones in the backgrounds even though he was using traditional inks everywhere else. (It was the the first one. The new ones are different.)
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[munkymu]

smbhax.com wrote:

Yeah, but it seems to me its prevalence in webcomics has gone up of late. The older webcomics I can think of (hardly a comprehensive list) don't/didn't use tone, whereas if you go browse say comics on SmackJeeves, it's very common. I think newer software *has* made a difference in how widespread it is, and maybe other things like the increase in black and white manga appreciation in the West, and the fact that many of these webcomics aren't looking ahead to getting in print, so they feel more free to include what are mostly computer-screen-specific effects like bitmap tones. I'll admit that calling it a "fad" isn't entirely accurate, since that assumes that this overuse and let's-tone-everything kick will go away fairly soon. That was just wishful thinking on my part.

But is the problem the adoption of tones or their use by artists who haven't figured out how to use them right? Any technique can take the reader out of the story if it's done poorly, and most of the artists I see on SmackJeeves seem to be using tones to hide the fact that they can't -- or don't want to -- draw backgrounds.
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[smbhax.com]

munkymu wrote:

But is the problem the adoption of tones or their use by artists who haven't figured out how to use them right? Any technique can take the reader out of the story if it's done poorly, and most of the artists I see on SmackJeeves seem to be using tones to hide the fact that they can't -- or don't want to -- draw backgrounds.

Hm, that's a good point, although if they could limit the tones to backgrounds I'd be a little happier about it.

Speaking of the background question, here's an interesting recent atrocity:

http://ninelivescomic.smackjeeves.com/comics/733597/ch-2-page-33/
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