Painting a Graphic Novel using photoshop Elements

Painting your comic book pages.

As an old time comic book artist, I having drawn many many pages for comic book publishers
in the sixties. I still enjoy that contact with paper pencil and ink. I have recently road tested some of the software using the computer to create my new graphic novel. Correl painter is a great,but complicated bit of software. Also a full adobe photoshop will bend your brain. But as illustrator I still prefer the pencil to a good drawing surface to create my new online comic art creation. So I did a road test with the shorter version of (adobe's photoshop Elements 8) and it did just I needed. Also it is fast in creating full color comic book page.

Old time comic book pages drawn for major publishers were draw at (11x17 )in size. You can still draw your comic pages oversize then reduced to image area. . So you.ll need to scale down the pages to manageable size. I now use Strathmore Bristol. 11 x 14. You will still need to xerox your final pages to fit on the scanner bed. 81/2 x 11 before scanning into photoshop Elements 8. I discovered that you will need to change your inking style to your comic art pages. Since the color is trapped in areas to be filled with each color. This is not very difficult if you pay attention that all your drawing points are enclosed. The look of the new comic book pages have is a cold air brush look. Classic comic book coloring pages of the past were flat colors. The flat colors give a clean look to your comic book pages. I prefer a bold clean look to my comic book pages. I like a strong look with strong blacks and pop with bright clean colors.

The bottom line for me is that artists don't really need all the fancy software and tablets. to create a comic book or graphic novel. I'm not interested in becoming a computer tech. I want to create an interesting story and publishing on the web. I perfer my drawing board then color
using this great software put color to my to my work.