#alcibiade.tutorials

---------------------- Black and whites areas

I use the lights and shadows as ways to make the panels easier to read and understand, and convey certain things, so my first thoughts are always: does it makes the picture get easier to read and does it convey what I want to express? To people who care about accuracy, it must look very messy though, because accuracy comes after these two main points. ^^" I really hope that it doesn't show too much and that it's not too frustrating to look at my pictures if so..

I consider the light as a tool in two different ways:

Extra-diegetic way (yes I sound very pretentious): As a way to bring attention to a certain part of the picture while ignoring the "true" lighting rules of the scene depicted. Basically, I don't mind bending reality to express something that realistic shadows wouldn't. Keep in mind that the higher the contrast, the more easily you are drawn to a certain area. So, if I really want something to be seen, I'll keep it as a mostly white shape surrounded with a black background, or the other way around, even if it's not correct in terms of of the light works in the 3d imaginary space of the panel. You can also find a way to make the whole frame of the picture dark but bring light to the center, to give a sense of unity. The most important thing to remember is that in my opinion, you can act as big opportunist if it makes you picture appear prettier and more readable, lol. I'm personnally very unscrupulous. In the picture below, the background is entirely dark so you can focus on the bird and the rain easily.

-This way of doing things make the pictures look sort of artificial, because you willingly bind the reality behind the panels to make a certain effect, but it can be super useful in terms of storytelling because it can convey things that strict reality can't. It's much easier to cheat with a pencil than a camera, so I tend to use it a lot because it's fun. Plus, it gives a somewhat theatrical effect to the story, which is really cool in my opinion. Switching a scene from normal light to black shadows on an abstract background is super dramatic for example and I like doing that.

-If you keep as a shadow shape a character that should be portrayed normally, you give it a feeling of emotional distance or mystery. But if the character itself is clear but is surrounded with shadows, it makes them feel isolated. Here, Marisa and Alice are both kind of locked in their house, behind the window. They were supposed to look like they're behind bars. The three last pictures are supposed to show Marisa moving forward, like a small light lost in the darness.

-I really like making backgrounds because I want people to get the general feeling of the place where the story happens, but because I don't want my smaller panels to be too crowded, I generally replace the background with abstract round light effects to highlight some of the main elements or some pretty ornaments, like stars, spider webs... If I still want the background to be seen but can't add it behind the characters, I'll add small panels that zoom on some of the background's details, like dolls, light sources, anything that can be relevant to the story (directly or indirectly).

-I create my storyboard / composition while keeping the shadows in mind from the beginning, because they're a very useful tool to create resonance between panels from the same page and I can use them to isolate a certain panel with the light or dark around it, for example. The page is made of a lot of pictures, but seeing it as one big picture made of several points of interest makes it much funnier and enjoyable to make in my opinion. So I try to avoid anything repetitive if possible.

Intra-diegetic way: As a way to help people locate the point of view of the camera in the scenes or bring attention to certain details. I use a lot of light devices in the scenario of my comics to have the opportunity to make very contrasted scenes and bring people's attention to certain areas. The characters will have a candlestick, make spells that produce light, be under a streetlight, next to a window, or in front of a screen, for example. They will do things at night because all these light devices will make a stronger effect of everything around is dark. Some elements also attract light an make pretty white-on-black effects in a large black area, like spider webs, the moon, the stars, strands of hair, etc. The picture below are one of my favorites, because they sum up a lot of the things I'm explaining in this whole post.

That way, if a scene has a lot of back and forth in its panels (shots and countershots during a dialogue, for example) I'll use the light source and the characters' shadows as a way to locate them easily in space; because if you can't immediately tell where the camera is looking and where it's located, the manga can become exhausting to read, in my opinion. I also like using a character's shadow to make them look threatening. And if I can't fit all the elements I want to put in a single picture because it's going to be too crowded, I can also take the character out and only keep its shadow on the ground to indicate where they stand.

I think that it's really fun and convenient to do that, but one thing to remember is that in the end, pretty much all your comics will take place at night and have very recurrent elements, lmao. I don't mind it personally, so it's fine, but if you read my comics, you'll soon notice that I love stories that take place at night (not only for convenience, though), skyscrapers with light from the windows, or cyberpunk stories with very bright computer screens. I hope that no one will get sick of it, because I still love doing that, lol. But it works very well if the point of your story is to imply that there is darkness in a happy story, or happiness/light/hope in a dark story, I think. But yeah, it's not super original.

----------------------More devices

-I tried to find examples for each way, but to be honest, everything is always a mix of the two. An example of something that can be seen as both an "inside the story" and "outside of the story" light device is blackening the foregrounds. It's not super interesting to explain that, but honestly I think it looks pretty and direct the eyes where you want them to look at while ignoring others. In a way, shadows are meant to tell you which part matters, and which part doesn't. And also which parts look like they don't matter but actually do... hehehe.

Because in that story the narrator never goes out of the house, the forest oustide is always pictured as very dark. Except when whe actually goes there near the end of the story. These panels below are the forest's appearances in chronological order within the story. As you can see, I also use it to create a frame to the picture and make the house or the characters stand out.

---------------------- Halftones

-Just in case, I made a halftone tutorial a while ago. Maybe I should do it again and make it better, but anyway, it's here if you want to take a look! My halftones are free-priced brushes I found online, and if I remember well, they can be used in procreate and photoshop, but I'm not sure. More info in the other post!

-The halftones are mostly used as a way to make the light itself pop out (in the character's hair, for example) or as a way to add details or isolate certain elements without the risk of adding too much black areas to the picture itself. Below, the fairies are grey shapes, the light source behind Alice illuminates marisa's face (it was meant both as a storytelling device and a way to locate the light source) and in the third picture, the halftones's negative space shows the direction of the doll's attack.

If the characters are supposed to be in she shadows because the light source is from behind them, but you don't want them to be looking *too* dark, the halftone is also useful. I think it really makes the different parts of the picture stand out and be distinct, even though it gives the feeling that 2d objects are pasted on top of each other. But I like it. so I don't mind. I also add white lines around certain elements to differentiate them from elements in front of them or behind them. You can see it pretty much anywhere, so I didn't add a particular picture to show it here. But if your drawings get confusing, it's super useful to separate the front and back elements.

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Uh... It looks like the post has thirty pictures already. I wanted to talk about some panels more specifically, or some successions of panels, or other stuff but I can't. I can still do it some other time, hehe.

Thank you very much if you read this random drawing rambling until this point!!

As you see, I do a regular lineart with my homemade pixelart-like brush (it's the only one I use, I love it!) and then I retrace the character's outline and some inner lines to make them bigger so that the shapes are easier to read (for example, I retraced the whole hand and arm's outline so that it didn't blend into the shape of the dress beneath it). here is a close-up of what my brush looks like:

Then, I cover the whole shape with a middle tone and try to make some of my plain colors slightly paler, and some of them slighly darker. At this point, I start modifying the colors I get with procreate's tools until I like it. Then I use a pretty dark but vibrant color to use for my shadows ( the shadow layer is set on "darken" and the opacity is around 80% ) and trace the outline of the shadow. I try to make the whole shadow in one piece as much as I can, to make the character look like a whole (I hope that this explanation is clear!). I also do some highlights in another layer, but not much.

Then I make my background. I keep the same color for its shadows to make it all blend together and look coherent, but I try to keep the overall color of the background distinct from the overall character's color, because I don't want Satori to blend into the background too much. I play with the background's colors with procreate's tools with hue, saturation and lightning to find the right balance. I also try to have pretty sharp shadows on my character to make her look easier to read/sharper than the background, and the background is some kind of mix between soft shadows (in the left border of the picture or the window's borders) and sharp ones (the big diagonal light that illuminates Satori) with minimal black lines.

Here is additional pictures of my layers (the character's layers and then the background's):

And this is it! if anyone goes that far into this post, here is the full body art of Satori that I'm really proud of:

First things first, you can get the halftones here, it's an open pricing and apparently it works for Procreate and Photoshop (Thank you very much Victoria Douglas / Halftone Hospital for all these tools!).

I know that there must be maaaany other ways to use these tools, and maybe there are much more practical ways to use it than what I'm about to explain; this post is just meant to share what I learned so far by testing stuff and trying to make my pictures look pretty (>'-'<)

Here is what the brushes look like in procreate ( I circled the ones I use myself ) :

First, I determine what part will be in which tone; the lighter one can overlay other tones, but if you make the dark and the medium ones overlay for example, it will look rather strange:

I usually do all the volume work and overall shadows with the lightest tone only, in order to keep a sense of unity in the picture. Other tones are applied much more flatly over big areas in order to make the picture more readable; for example, the dress, the desk, the frames behind and other details are darker.

So I always start with the light tone and make all the shadows, and I end with the darkest tone that I don't use much (I tend to leave most of the dark areas in full black). Please note that the halftones brushes can't be used as pencils, because the strokes overlay and become darker, and it will just look messy; also, if you change the size of the brush, it doesn't change the size of the tone patterns themselves, but only the area covered. Which is super practical.

As a result, the best way to use it is to do pretty much what you do with a real halftone, haha. You just have to select the part you want to cover with the tone, and then apply the brush un a single stroke over the selected area (I usually set the halftone brushes as big as I can so that the stroke looks homogenous for sure). Here is what it looks like:

Because I'm extremely lazy (but also because it gives a feeling of unity to the picture!) I usually try to make the whole halftone in one piece / selection. Since the drawing is big and a bit complicated here, I decided to do more parts than that, but you get the idea. As you can see here, I also do smaller parts here and there, like the nose. Because the shadows can look a bit sharp and I wanted the light that comes from the left side of the picture to be smoother, I used a tone scraper that it given with the brush pack that I use as an eraser. Here is what it looks like now:

And now, you just have to make different layers of halftones with the other ones. It's much easier now, because I just have to retrace plain areas that already exist in my lineart, in order to make details pop here and there. Here is what the other layers look like if you take them separately. I also erase some parts of it, but I try to keep it as plain as possible in order to make the picture as readable as I can:

As you can see, I always try to use these tones as a mean to distinguish different parts of the picture that could be hard to read or lack some detail.