I like that I finally kinda contextualized Turpentine (& Arsenic)’s place in this one — it’s been my intention all along that it’s this odd basement apartment underneath a house, but there hadn’t yet been a page that really showed that.

Other business for today:

Jeanne Thornton, one of my favorite friends in the universe, just started up a new comics project called Bad Mother! It’s about a little girl named Betty Spector who’s being raised according to QUESTIONABLE PRINCIPLES by her mother, Mona. I’ve seen a bunch of the upcoming ones, and they are delightful.

And, on a related note, happy Mother’s Day to my mom — a very good mother who actually does read my comix, and loves me just the way I am. Aww.

This one took FOREVER for some reason! Time for a celebratory Time To Call That Page Finished glass of wine.

This is going to be specifically about my process for using masks to isolate different parts of a comic for coloring. I like to have at least two differentiated: figures and ground.

(Note: There are a few types of masking in Photoshop, and what I’m using here are single raster-based layer masks. We’re going to ignore the other ones for now: Quickmask, vector-based layer masks, and stacking more than one mask per layer.)

Ok! Here’s the panel I’m going to play with. It’s the top panel of this comic, and it’s got enough going on to demonstrate the concept: multiple figures in a scene where there’s continuous stuff behind them, like the graffiti on the wall.

And here’s the basic ink, before I start any color or masking:

So, my goal is to start blocking things out so that I can work on the background without it touching figures that are in front in the composition, and vice versa. Setting it up can be a little picky, but for me it’s an investment in things working really nicely later.

Layer Masks 101

Let’s look at the layer structure for this file.

(I made the thumbnails really big so you can see the masks. That’s in “Panel Options…” in the side menu of the Layers panel.) Masks are like a stencil you apply to your layer to block out some stuff (either entirely invisible, or any transparency percentage), and let other stuff show through. The beauty of this is that it’s non-destructive — you can have the effect of “erasing” some of your artwork without committing to murderously hacking away at the original, and forever retain the power to un-erase pieces back into existence. You can do just about anything in a mask — paint, fill, gradients, selections, whatever — except that it’s all shades from black/grey/white representing how opaque or clear the mask is. It’s really important to pay attention to whether you have the actual layer content or its mask selected in the Layers panel when you’re working — that’s what the extra little rectangle around the layer thumbnail means. In this shot, the content of “color fill” is selected.

You can see in the above screenshot that I’ve reused the same masks a couple of times in this file, and that “background fill” and “graffiti” have a mask that blocks out the figures, while “color fill” (the color on the people) has the exact inversion.

Let’s do this.

(BVB has this graphic style with an intentionally limited color palette and flat colors… but these techniques are applicable for anything, really. Also: there are tons of legit ways to do just about anything in Photoshop, so some of my methods are just my own quirks and preferences.)

First I made a new layer just filled solidly with some midtone color I know I’m going to use for part of the background elements. If the ink is 100% black, it almost doesn’t matter which is on top — just that the higher-up layer should be set to Multiply. I do actually do whole pages at once, but I thought it’d be simpler to just show one panel here.
Then I make a rough selection around my figures (either dragging all around them with Quick Selection, or picking through with the Magic Wand, depending on what makes the most sense with the lineart). It’s never perfect, and that’s ok. (It’s also frequently a judgement call how you want to treat something, like whether it’s with the figures or with the ground or whether you break the whole thing up into three or more levels.)
Then, expand that selection by 1 or 2px (I use 2px because I work huge, at 600ppi) to correct for edge overlap with the ink, and…mask! (You can mask through the menus, too, but I tend to always use the button at the bottom of the Layers panel.)

Boom. You can see that it’s not perfect — I missed some spots, and it needs some corrections. That’s easy, though — just choose the mask in the layers palette, and paint or fill the corrections in either black or white. I find it’s pretty quick & easy to do magic wand / fill corrections on a mask if you have the wand set to “Sample All Layers”, and ideally a shortcut for filling that adds that 1 or 2px expansion to the fill. So, here’s where it gets super useful….

I now have a layer where I can color effectively behind certain parts, as demonstrated by this horrible pink X! Notice that the background fill layer now has different shades of blue in it, and the graffiti layer on top has almost the same mask (except that I also blocked out the background around the wall that the graffiti shouldn’t leak onto.)

More Mask Tips: Selections & Shortcuts

• You can command-click (or ctrl, on a PC) any layer thumbnail (layers, masks, smart objects, text layers) to get a selection of its contents. In the above screenshot, I selected the mask that’s on the leopard print of these tasteful leopard leggings.
• Where this gets extra great is that you can then use that selection to make more masks on different layers. That’s how I reuse my masks (or parts of them).
• Remember how I had the inverse mask on my color fill? That starts out as a duplicate mask as the background, and then you can hit command-i to invert it. Or, if you’d rather invert a selection before it’s a mask, it’s shift-command-i for that.
• You can shift-click your mask thumbnail to hide/show the mask, and alt-click it to ONLY show the mask in its black-and-white state.
• You can also mask group folders in the same way as layers, and this becomes practical when you want to just apply one mask to multiple layers that stack next to each other in the layer order.

For now, here are a couple of things I always liked that I don’t think are posted anywhere else. These were both for group poster shows organized by my friend Gabe Wong (a phenomenal illustrator). The green one’s from Where Do You Come From (2009) and the blue ones are from Where Are We Going (2011).

Bonus today: I made wallpaper! My favorite kind, too — a repeating pattern like wall-wallpaper, instead of a single large image.

“Full” color 1920×1080 | 1280×1024 | 1024×768 | tile for tiling

All blue 1920×1080 | 1280×1024 | 1024×768 | tile for tiling

All pink 1920×1080 | 1280×1024 | 1024×768 | tile for tiling

Turpentine then immediately added “keytar” to the list of instruments forbidden from her band.

Sorry that this is so late! I swear, the last five percent of every comic takes up about half of the total production time — I always find about a hundred little details to correct.

In this world where just about everyone has a campy stage name, I think Mascara Masque is my favorite one I’ve come up with. And just for the hell of it, here she is not angled into the perspective of the wall.

NO SUCH THING AS TOO MANY STARS (OR HEARTS). This is the BVB philosophy. Honey Hart has an entire closet full of star clothing.

I was also  just thinking about how the numbering on these is pretty messed up — there are actually 66 pages in the archive, but I’ve been wildly inconsistent about which of the nonstandard pages count as part of the numbering. Fortunately, I don’t think it matters much. I mostly just number them because having a page prefaced with, like “#56!” feels like a classic retro-comix sort of thing aesthetically.

So, I’m fairly pleased with this — both of these Record Club pages were exercises in trying to really capture the style of each band, and this Sourballs one was an attempt to really get and convey this sort of aesthetic that’s had a pretty beloved place in my heart ever since it grabbed me hard as a teenager in the 90s.
(And thanks to Sarah and Amanda for coming up with a couple of the phrases and titles that I ended up using in both of these. You’ve got ways with words.)
We’ll be back to comic-style comix next time — I’ve got what I think is a pretty fun little story that I want to launch into after this.

So, this one’s not so much A Comic, but hey, that’s a thing we do pretty regularly here with the coloring pages and valentines and etceteras.
It struck me as a glaring omission this week that my bands barely had anything in the way of song titles and discographies, and that it would be fun to build that side of the world and its characters. I’m thinking that this is going to be an occasional feature, especially as we start seeing more bands in this world. Oh mannn, and I’ve already got all the song titles and half the artwork ready for a Sourballs one, but I’m not sure whether it’ll be immediately next or not.