I think that first one was just a crop from a page, unaltered. (So the answer for that one is âstart with a scan with coloring you like, and donât mess with it.â Probably kind of disappointing? Although it might be worth mentioning that comic book coloring has changed a lot over time; I work mostly with older comics, stuff from the 80s and modern digitizations of it, and the colors there tend to be a lot flatter than stuff from the last two decades or so.)
The second one is pretty similar, just with a texture for a background.
The basic thought process on most of my icons like that is: - Pick a scan you like the coloring on. - If youâre using a texture as a background, match it to the coloring and quality of the scan. (If the scan is an old, faded comic, especially one that uses halftone/dotted coloring, you want to use faded/papery textures rather than the kind of bright/smooth texture I used for the second Corsair above.) I can pull up some examples if thatâd be useful? - Upping contrast can help a lot with faded scans, although you have to be careful not to overdo it. If you do this, fiddling with the brightness as well is usually a good idea.
The third one is where it gets a bit fancier. I didnât save the .xcf file (if you like I can try reverse engineering the icon to be more sure of the steps?), but this is approximately what I did, starting from the cropped panel and working in GIMP: 1. Used Free Select to get a layer of just the character I wanted, erased the background edges. 2. Copied just the glasses for a second layer (and erased around them in that layer). 3. Went to the character layer and used the Colorify tool to convert it to grayscale. (NB: I mightâve first copied the layer again, and used color to alpha to get just the linework and layer that on top of the grayscale. I donât think I did that in this case, but I did it in some of that batch.) 4. Added a texture as a background. 5. âŚ. Saved. I thought I was done at this point. Then I noticed that the background was a bit too orange, so I went back and upped the contrast a bit so that itâs redder. This had the effect of also losing some of the grayscale effect on the character, though thereâs still some gray in his jacket. The first version of the icon is here: https://i.imgur.com/Bmy0fOF.png
I hope that was of some use! And if you've got any follow-up questions I'll do my best to answer them.
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Re: Maker Thread
Date: 2019-06-03 01:25 am (UTC)The second one is pretty similar, just with a texture for a background.
The basic thought process on most of my icons like that is:
- Pick a scan you like the coloring on.
- If youâre using a texture as a background, match it to the coloring and quality of the scan. (If the scan is an old, faded comic, especially one that uses halftone/dotted coloring, you want to use faded/papery textures rather than the kind of bright/smooth texture I used for the second Corsair above.) I can pull up some examples if thatâd be useful?
- Upping contrast can help a lot with faded scans, although you have to be careful not to overdo it. If you do this, fiddling with the brightness as well is usually a good idea.
The third one is where it gets a bit fancier. I didnât save the .xcf file (if you like I can try reverse engineering the icon to be more sure of the steps?), but this is approximately what I did, starting from the cropped panel and working in GIMP:
1. Used Free Select to get a layer of just the character I wanted, erased the background edges.
2. Copied just the glasses for a second layer (and erased around them in that layer).
3. Went to the character layer and used the Colorify tool to convert it to grayscale. (NB: I mightâve first copied the layer again, and used color to alpha to get just the linework and layer that on top of the grayscale. I donât think I did that in this case, but I did it in some of that batch.)
4. Added a texture as a background.
5. âŚ. Saved. I thought I was done at this point. Then I noticed that the background was a bit too orange, so I went back and upped the contrast a bit so that itâs redder. This had the effect of also losing some of the grayscale effect on the character, though thereâs still some gray in his jacket. The first version of the icon is here: https://i.imgur.com/Bmy0fOF.png
I hope that was of some use! And if you've got any follow-up questions I'll do my best to answer them.