Pansexual Robot Scientist

Step 0: Materials

The main ingredient to this recipe is the tools I use, almost all of which come from the amazing RetroSupply Co. I love their brushes and textures, but brushes and textures from any company that specializes in retro effects will work!

The most important things you'll need are Colorlab and Phantom Paper, but I also use Duplitone, Office Supplies, both Edge & Fold packs, and the Paper Boy textures. I've linked the Clip Studio Paint versions of these resources since that's the program I use, but they are also available for Procreate and Photoshop.

Step 1: Lineart

Assuming you already have your sketch, the first thing you want to do next is to lay down your lineart. I like to keep all of my black linework — including my panel borders and lettering — in one folder, since it will make an upcoming step easier to execute.

Spot blacks (areas where you have a solid black color such as the shadows) aren't necessary, but I enjoy doing them and they really help to sell the look.

Step 2: Blocking out Colors

Colorlab comes with this really handy palette in CSP that lays out an approximate look for all the color combinations you can make with the base halftone brushes they have (doesn't include extra possibilities from Duplitone).

These colors are all named with their CMYK color combos, which makes them a very helpful reference tool. I like to lay down a rough approximation of the colors I want from this chart so I have these colors and their names to reference from.

2.5: What is CMYK?

Something important you must understand when doing this is what exactly CMYK is. Because we're making something that's supposed to look like a printed image, we need to understand what goes into printing.

The CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black). These are the four ink colors used in mass printing, printing that forgoes the use of pantone inks or paints. Color is created by layering little dots of these colors to create the illusion of a certain mixed color. These dots are known as screentones.

Another important thing to keep in mind is what era of comics you are trying to replicate. The Golden and Silver ages of comics were far more limited, having a 48 color chart with four levels of screentone for CMY (0%, 25%, 50%, and 100%). The Bronze age, on the other hand, introduced a fifth level of screentone, 70%, and added black into the mix at 10% and 20%.

Most digital art screentone brushes will show these as C/Y/M 1-4 and K 1/2. If you want to recreate the Golden and Silver age looks, don't use level 3 and don't use the Key brushes. Colorlab also offers screentone "shader" brushes that provide a smoother transition between the color levels, which I use in specific circumstances where I want a smoother printed effect, and line screentones, which I don't tend to use.

Why can't you just use any old generic screentone brushes and set them to CMYK colors? Because screentone dots are all positioned at different angles to make sure they don't all blend together. This is a very important aspect of printing!

Now that you understand what CMYK is, we can move on to...

Step 3: Coloring for real this time

With the blocking colors laid out we get to the fun part: coloring in the comic one layer at a time. With the help of the reference colors I use my screentone brushes to build up the colors one at a time for each color of ink. This is where I might use the Duplitone brushes to get a darker shade of black than the base key brushes might offer.

Setting these layers to Multiply allows them to come together into a cohesive set of layered colors.

Step 4: Making it look like it's on paper

This is all well and good, but we need it to actually look like it's on paper. This is where I select one of the paper textures I have from RSC and put it over the image. RSC pre-formats their paper textures to provide texture, shadow, and light over the image, making it look like an actual photo or scan of paper. I tend to adjust the opacity of these layers to suit my taste. For this particular project I chose Vintage Flyleaf.

At this point I make a duplicate of my lineart and color layers. I merge all my lineart and key layers together to create one whole Black layer. I then mess with the opacities of my ink layers to give the impression that the color wasn't fully laid down during printing, which makes it feel more cheaply made.

Fun fact: when I lay in each color layer I make the canvas larger than it actually needs to be so that I can properly execute the next step: I Gaussian blur the ink layers (blurring more heavily on the color layers than the black layer) and move them around to create the look of registration errors: when the printing plate for a certain color is slightly misaligned during printing.

Step 5: Roughing it up

This is the last necessary step, which I take in three phases. For these I use distressor brushes and damage overlays.

First I make masks for all the ink layers and distress those individually. This gives the look of issues in the printing process.

Then make a new layer over all the ink ones and put white distressing over them. This gives the impression of damage that's occurred over time through use.

Lastly I slap down any dirt and grime I feel like adding.

My optional last step after everything is to toss the finished image into Photoshop and save it as a jpg of as low quality as I like. This gives it the impression of being an actual scan and not just a calculated drawing.