Galaxion

This article was originally published at Webcomics.com.

If you work with traditional media like I do, as much as you love it you may occasionally find yourself envying the digital artists who can copy or move images around with the swipe of a tablet pen. But if you know a trick or two, you can do all this stuff almost as painlessly as those digital artists and still have a nice-looking piece of original art to sell– all without Photoshop!

In this example above, I’ve just finished penciling this page, but now that I look at it I realize I really need to add in another panel in the bottom row.  You might imagine for us traditional-media-users that would mean the tedious exercise of erasing and redrawing everything. But if you have the secret ingredient– tracing paper– the process can be as easy as the digital method. (Well… almost.)

You can buy tracing paper in pads, but I happen to have a big roll of it that I bought from a dressmakers supply store (it’s used to make and design patterns) and has lasted me for years and years. Cut a piece to fit over the area you plan to shift, and tape it down lightly to keep the paper from moving around while you trace.

Be sure to go over all the lines—it’s easy to miss an area if you’re not paying attention.

Once you’ve done the whole thing you have a copy of your original drawing, and you can go ahead and erase the area on your paper that you’re fixing.

Next, turn over the tracing paper. With a soft lead pencil (such as the 4B I used in the photo), rub graphite over the reverse side of all your traced lines.

When you’re done, turn the tracing paper back over and position it on your Bristol board (or whatever drawing paper you use) so that the image is where you want it to be. Tape it down, and re-trace the drawing to transfer the graphite. Again, be careful not to miss any lines! Here I used a purple pen so I can easily see which areas I’ve traced.

Below is what my page looks like after I’ve finished the transfer. I’ve successfully shifted the two images over (I decided to move the figure in the right-side panel beyond the border for effect), and now I have room to put in the extra panel I wanted. The pencil lines are a bit light, but I can quickly go over them again if I want to darken them.

And here is the completed penciled page:

You can use this same method to make a mirror image of your drawing, if you ever realize mid-way through penciling your page (as I occasionally have) that the panel would look better inverted. To do this, you trace your drawing as above, but instead of coating the back in graphite, simply flip the tracing paper over and trace the lines to transfer the reversed drawing:

The tracing-paper transfer is also an excellent technique for copying a background from panel to panel without having to re-draw it each time, or for reproducing a static panel for those comedically frozen moments. It can be a big time-saver! When you ink the panels they will inevitably look slightly different, so your art doesn’t look like you lazily resorted to the dreaded copy-and-paste.

So if you’re using traditional media, you don’t need to despair when you make a mistake. Who needs Photoshop!

Recently this came up as a topic of discussion on one of the forums I follow. My first thought was, gosh, I still use mostly low-tech methods to create Galaxion–meaning I draw and ink on paper– so surely such simple techniques would translate to a simple set of tools. Paper and pen, right? And ink. And the pencil. And the eraser, too. Hmm. Just how much stuff  do I use? Well, I decided to gather it all together and take a picture. I had to stand on a chair.

What you see here are only the things I use on every single page. I have other tools I pull out occasionally, like circle templates, tracing paper, and other sizes of tech pens, which for simplicity’s sake– ah, the irony– I left out of the photo. What the heck is all this stuff? Left to right, top to bottom, I have:

• An old yoghurt cup for water to clean the brush at the table
• Canon brand smooth Bristol paper, 14×17, which I trim to 11×17 for each page
• Clear plastic ruler, for drawing margins and panel borders
• Deleter Black Ink #3, one of the nicer inks I’ve tried
• Zebra Brush Marker, large tip, for inking word balloons
• Pentel Clic eraser
• Zebra Brush Marker, medium tip, for emphasis lettering and inking straight lines
• Uni-Ball Alpha Gel Kuru Toga Mechanical Pencil, size 0.5, “B” leads
• Copic Multiliner, size 0.7, for all other lettering
• Winsor Newton Series 7 brush, size 1, for most of the inking
• Ames Lettering Guide
• Mono brand eraser, large
• Kneaded eraser
• T-square
• Rolling ruler, for quickly drawing parallel lines
• Straight-edge ruler, for inking straight lines
• Scrap paper to remove excess ink from brush
• Rag to remove excess water from brush
• MacBook (and Photoshop CS2), for cleaning up art and adding grey tones
• Wacom Intuos 3 tablet

And here’s the tool that didn’t fit on the table:

I purchased this monstrosity, the Brother MFC-6490CW scanner/inkjet printer, because it has an 11×17 bed, so I can scan my pages whole instead of having to scan in parts and stitch them together, which is what I had to do before. Much easier.

For those of you who are most interested in the pens and stuff, here’s a close-up of those:

I talked more about some of these items in a blog post from a couple years ago. If you’re wondering why some of the tools have tape on the ends, it’s merely there as away for me to mark when I started using them (I write the date on the tape). I’d been wondering how long some of my tools last, especially the brushes, which are expensive. My current one has only been around since the beginning of the year.

Why so many tools? Why, for example, do I need three different erasers? Well, I suppose I don’t. I like the kneaded eraser because it’s gentler to the paper and it doesn’t leave any of that eraser dust, but for some jobs it just doesn’t cut it. I like the Clic eraser because it gets into small spaces easily, and I like the large eraser when I have to erase large areas, or when I’m cleaning up the pencil lines after I’ve finished inking. Each does a different job well, or at least represents a reasonable compromise. For example, I used to use Rapidographs for lettering because with the ink I could get a much darker line (markers are never as dark), but they require a very upright position to write with. I’m not happy with the greyer line I get with the Copic Multiliner, but it does make all the hand-lettering easier. So I’m using that for now, until I find something better. Meanwhile, the Rapidographs are still good for making straight lines. And speaking of…

These are even more tools I realized should have gone in the first picture. A non-descript pair of scissors to trim the page, a Koh-i-noor Rapidograph, size 4 (or 1.2, depending which numbering system you like) that I use to ink the panel borders, the Ultradraw ink that goes in it, and a big fat soft brush. The brush is completely trivial, since all I use it for right now is to gently brush away eraser dust (too often I just use my hand, and then end up smudging the pencil lines). I had it lying around so I figured, why not.

So, yeah… that’s a lot of tools. Maybe art tools to me are like kitchen gadgets to people who like to cook– there are so many specialized tools that do specific things really well. I know my kitchen drawers are full of  little gizmos I consider indispensable and I don’t even enjoy cooking all that much. Could I pare it down to one knife, one big spoon, one pot, and a frying pan? Sure. But I probably won’t, because I like my gizmos.

These days more and more artists are switching to purely digital work, which means their entire list of tools is a computer and a tablet. Or maybe only just a tablet, if they happen to have one of those fancy Cintiqs. Think of how clean my desk would be. Makes switching to digital almost tempting. Almost.