Hi folks!
Today, I’m going to cover how I generally do Black and White toning in my comics.
When I was participating in an Original Character Tournament ( abbreviated as OCT ), I had created a quick guide on how I process my tones. It was something to help folks get into comics, but it wasn’t a very comprehensive guide that covered the logic behind my choices. I wasn’t very happy with it, so it has now become this relic that people pass around between friends.
I finally set aside some time to edit this thing, hopefully it looks okay!
The logic between the steps are mostly for printing purposes. In printing, there’s a certain point where a printing past a specific darkness or lightness will end up being black or white. I’ve found that anything under 10% black and over 70% black makes negligible differences on how the printer sees those tones.
When I work, I always think of my art as a product to be printed, even if I don’t. But this kind of thinking gives me a safety net in case I decide to print it, and it allows me to imagine how my comics might look on different monitors. Because every screen is so different, someone with a cheaper monitor might not get to see the full range of tones and hues as other folks, and might make my work look dark or muddy. This is a small prevention measure for myself.
That’s cool, but how do I use this?
If you’re not worried about printing, you could just potentially just use the eyedropper on the provided tones. It will give you a direction on how you should tone your comics by limiting how many steps you get. I do this for a lot of my doodles, because I know I’m not printing it and am simply practicing.
Okay, but I am worried about printing my zine/comic. How should I go about this.
If you’re an indie artist, then even if you don’t prepress your comic entirely correctly, most printers nowadays can handle it. ( Sorry to all my printmaker friends…this is my big opinion. )
It’s not ideal for your quality, but it will get the job done and most readers don’t notice there’s any issues with the comic ( unless it’s too dark, but hopefully this guide will prevent that 😉 ).
Let’s revisit this part of the image, shall we?
Before you tone, you can make separate layers with different percentages. That’s why the numbers are on the guide! It’s the opacity! Doing it this way gives you faster editability, and if you hire a prepress person to touch your files in the future, you’ll make their lives easier.
There’s some more steps to ensure the quality of the print, but maybe a topic for another time…
While I am not an expert at printing or prepress, this book from Iron Circus is an excellent resource for those who want to know how intense book production is. You can learn a lot about how to think in terms of print and taking control over your quality!
I have provided a sample page from my comic SOFTLEAD. I had printing in mind while working on it, and thus I created layers with the techniques I explained in this post!