Procreate Murders
Here's a test comic (well, half of one) that I made in Procreate today. I love the pencil tools in this app. No other program has a pencil that feels so free to draw with.
But colouring a page in Procreate is a nightmare, and it's not a lot easier if you take your line work into Clip Studio (which I used here) or Photoshop. Having spent two decades perfecting the art of colouring fast using the paint bucket on hard 1-bit black and white lines, I find colouring by "painting", ie the way a 4-year old fills in their colouring book, dispiriting. I feel my limited lifespan slipping away as I do it. Clip has some good tools that will cut into feathery lines by a few pixels if you're flood filling but it's not an exact science and the process can produce some odd artefacts. But I'm still working it out.
It's all moot really, as the iPad hurts my eyes to work on for too long. It's a seductive device that constantly calls out to be played with, but maybe it's safer just to crack out the old school pencils and have a bit of a scrawl.
Comments (9)
Greasy black... my biggest weakness, especially in b&w or grayscale comics. Like... your latest from Destroy History. A second part with this effect could be very powerful.
Yes, the coloring is a bit of a nightmare in Procreate. The coloring process in Procreate for making comics (and its associated frustrations) is actually what led me to check out Clip Studio Paint. Much, much better coloring experience on CSP.
I feel like every digital tool out there is fighting for the coveted tag line "Should be perfect, except".
We want some new sort of tool here. The pencil is nice, but we want to flood colours under it, so you don't get the holes and sparkles. This means we want to have some narrow but invisible line to stop the flooding at the bottom of the stack, and the 8-bit pencil at the top, and the flood in the middle. Or maybe a magic flood with soft edges so we don't get a sharp boundary between the inside and outside colour. I use 'gimp' and that's about as user-friendly as a cornered rat, but you can write your own plugins. But we once had a nice tool where a live feed from a camera went into the editor's alpha plane, so you could draw with an actual pencil on a digital picture. Cool but never made it into production.
There's a tool that works virtually as you describe in Clip Studio Paint. Clip lets you choose between pencil and vector layers, and you can set the fill tool to fill to the vector line, rather than the feathery pixel edge that sits on top of it. Which should be perfect... except, hilariously, it doesn't fill the vector line itself. So you end up with a white hairline between your fills.
I loved it when she popped out of the laundry basket in this comic. One of my favorite Lottie moments.
Mine too!
I'm loving the texture of those lines!
Isn't it great? it's almost greasy, such a fun line. It's from the Essential Maxpack on this page - the MaxU 2B pencil. https://maxulichney.gumroad.com/