http://www.imfdb.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

You can reference any gun from any film. Useful for ordering movies and getting good shots of the guns and the guys using them.It sure beats those static gun shots from handgun ref books where you can’t even look at it from both angles or even see how a dude holds one while lighting a cigar.

You can also look up your favorite film and check out every gun that appears in that movie.

This handgun was used in HARD BOILED…

http://www.imfdb.org/index.php?title=Image:ThompsonCenterContender.jpg

Or this Extremely Short Barreled Mini Gun from Last Action Hero

http://www.imfdb.org/index.php?title=Image:LAH_M134.jpg

Check it out!

I use the dash line tool so much it appears on almost every one of my pages, especially those with tech, or set in a sci-fi setting. Whenever I need to make interesting computer displays or GUI (Graphic User Interface) I make a bunch of random lines in the horizontal and the vertical way, and then I apply the dash line tool to some of these, randoming the settings in the Dash Line box. I make lines with small gaps and long lines, and long gaps and small lines, and all sorts of random goodness.

When I have something extremely cool looking with dashes and gaps, I go in on a Layer above that and create a few more random dashed lines in white to break up the randomness even more.

Once I have all that foolishness in hand, I ground it and then draw a box around it like a computer screen and place it on whatever open computer wall I have drawn on my page, and i use the Free Transform tool to stretch that yummy goodness into perspective to line-up with the “monitor” I have drawn.

NOW-this problem has come up before, ( I talked to Adobe about fixing this, and they finally did in CS3), the dash lines will not look right in perspective because they keep the horizontal and vertical line around the dashes that were right when I made them. AND THERE IS NO WAY AROUND THIS IN ANY VERSION PRIOR TO ILLUSTRATOR CS3! You can’t fix it by expanding or making outlines or nothin’!

But IN CS3 you select your dash line and presto, hit OBJECT>EXPAND and through the magic of little pixels Illustrator makes each dash you have created their very own individual item. You can now UNGROUP them if you wish, and delete one or two, or make some bigger, or smaller, OR THE BEST THING OF ALL, you can now use the FREE TRANSFORM tool to distort these items into perspective and it will look correct!!!

I’ll post another entry tomorrow with a bunch of examples of where I did this in Iron Man and it was wrong, and how I got around it in Illustrator 10. I’ll put up some version done in CS3 so you can see how cool this tool really is.

Try it on your own right now, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

I just started using them and I love them for a lot of different purposes.

Here’s the link…

http://verucasalt82.deviantart.com/art/Hair-Strand-Brushes-85035633

Another set that looks cool. I haven’t used them yet but they sure look neat.

http://r2010.deviantart.com/art/conetix-78945110

Download the Template here…(make sure you RIGHT CLICK and SAVE AS) then load it into your templates folder to use. Comic and Manga Template

This is a Template for creating comic and manga art in Adobe Illustrator.

It’s preloaded with standard American comic and manga sizes like…

American standard
American standard Double Page Spread
American Standard DPS on one page

TokyoPop standard
TokyoPop standard 1.5 x up
TokyoPop standard 2 x up

TokyoPop standard DPS
TokyoPop standard 1.5 x up DPS
TokyoPop standard 2 x up DPS

I’ve also loaded this document with a bunch of cool brushes that are all color-coded with a directory for what each color brush does.

The brushes are colored in the brush menu but can be assigned a new color when in use. I noticed it’s hard to keep track of dozens of black brush icons so I created the color code.

The page is set to 11″x 17″ dimensions but you can easily change the crop marks.

This document is set for use in Adobe CS3, but I’m sure you can use it in earlier versions.

If you load this document as a User Defined Brush Pallette you can use all the brushes in other documents.

This is version 1. I’m sure you may find errors in the brushes or typos, if you do please write me and let me know. I’ll fix them up as soon as possible.

Let me know what you think!

Take care,
Brian Denham

EDIT–
Some of the brushes used in this document were taken from the web. I’ve included a few of several different people’s free brush palettes but they have a lot more to offer if you visit their sites. I didn’t include whole palette’s just the best of the best for what I liked.

JOE WEBSTER–JW INK BRUSHES
First up is Joe Webster who has some awesome comic style inking brushes. Be sure to adjust your stroke to change the look. I like using a very low stroke of his detail brushes. Here’s where you can find out more about Joe, his awesome art, and cool tutorials and brushes…
[link]

Some of the things Scott really needed was an accurate brush design similar to what he had already, and the eraser function to work without distorting his clean line art. The methods we came up with to do that added a lot of time to each page. He draws his webcomic very fast and does not need an added couple of hours correcting lines that could be fixed easier in Photoshop.

When I complete a page there is a lot of extra details I put in with an added layer on top of the layers stack where I go in and add white highlights or random extra details or highlights or correct ink lines. He does not need to do any of that because he works in very clean ink lines. Photoshop delivers clean lines for him quickly and easily that is just too time-consuming in Illustrator where the remedy might be using the pen tool which takes a lot of finese.

So Kris, Scott and I learned that what each of us uses individually is the right program for each of us. Simple. Except Scott needs his line art in vector format. So he posted this video on PVPonline.com today hoping that someone may be out there in internet land with the idea or ability to help. I know enough about Illustrator to do what I do, but I don’t know enough to help him achieve the things he needs.

Maybe someone out there can help. If you have any ideas send them to Scott at his www.pvponline.com strip. Or post suggestions here in this thread.

Here’s the video…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUK2OT3cIcE

I need to see how what I am drawing affects the entire composition. Without having to zoom out and then back in to finish what I am doing I use this time-saving little tip…

I open the file I am working on and draw from afar with the whole page in my sight. When I need to zoom in I open the file again and reduce both documents on my screen so I can see them at the same time.

With one image close-up and the other image zoomed out I can draw looking at the zoomed out and checking my line quality on the close-up or vice-versa.

It works great and saves time by not zooming in and out.

They work really great and will save you a lot of time. It used to take hours lining the paper with dots to create energy patterns. But now with the Illustrator brush set you can do a whole page within seconds.

Here is the link to my devianArt page where you can download the brush set.

To use it in Illustrator go to WINDOW>OTHER BRUSH LIBRARIES and find the file on your computer.

To modify the brushes to your liking just open the file like a regular Illustrator file. They work in Illustrator 10 but may be able to be used for CS or CS2.

I hope you like it!

HERE IS THE FILE–
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/44610024/

I have been working with a better layer structure by using CLIPPING MASKS. It really helps to keep everything more organized.

SO—as I start work on my new pages I indicate where my panels will go. I block the gutters on the top layer by using black boxes all the same width. Just to be different than the average bear I put a 2pt. White Stroke in the middle of the black bars. I’m all for comics with black gutters, but when I am using a lot of black in the panels already, the panels and the gutters will run into each other and be too hard to see what’s going on. I got that tip from Jim Shooter at Comic-Con a couple of years back. That’s where I started putting the white line in to seperate the panels. Most of the ELSINORE work I did has the white line between the panels. Look at the work on www.briandenham.com to see the Elsinore stuff.

With my gutters indicated I now create my CLIPPING MASKS for each panel.

I start a new LAYER for each panel. I use the MARQUEE tool to draw a box in the shape of the panels. If the panels are odd shape I use the WHITE ARROW (direct selection tool) to grab the points and duplicate the shape of the panels. Then at the bottom of the LAYERS PALETTE I click the CREATE CLIPPING MASKS button and this makes my shape turn into a CLIPPING MASK.

—What the heck is a clipping mask? Well it’s a hole in the universe that allows us to see all of the art in the hole but nothing outside the shape of the hole. So once the clipping mask is created on a SUB-LAYER I lock that Sub-layer so we won’t mess with it again. Then I create a bunch of new Sub-Layers on this main PANEL LAYER and keep all of the art for this panel in those other Sub-Layers.

When I am ready to draw a new panel I got an do the same steps for that panel. Now I have a Layers just named P1 for PANEL 1 and keep all of the art for that layer there. P2 and so on for each panel.

I can’t believe how much of a benefit this is to keep everything in it’s place. I had to go back to do corrections on Iron Man 1 and I was amazed at how messed up I had all of my layers. It was so hard to find stuff when some of the layers were named 157. LOL

Pays to get organized.

So now all of my pages have the layers organized this way. If I have anything else I need in an exact shape I will create a new Layer and use a clipping mask for the shapes. Like I drew a jet with specific speedlines on the shadow areas of the jet. I drew all of my shadows out and created a clipping mask for them. I then drew the speed lines and placed them in the clipping mask and they only showed up where the clipping mask was. This was important for this specific effect because the area behind the jet had a different set of speedlines in the opposite direction. If I did it any other way the speedlines would overlap or I would have had to cut the ends of the speedlines off and that would take way too long.

Some people seemed pretty excited by the potential of drawing comics with this amazing program. I was just going to answer questions that popped up on a message board. But the threads turned into a discussion about the moderator and his dislike of me for being the “first” to draw comics in Illustrator and they were shut down.

Why the drama?

He went off the handle and attacked me for claiming to be first and a whole bunch of other things I never said. Then the people who wanted the info on drawing in Illustrator attacked him and pointed out where he was wrong. He shut down the message board threads before I had a chance to reply to the questions about Illustrator let alone his attacks against me. I won’t name the moderator *coff*coff*coffman*, but he was a real ass on that thread.

But without his jealous tirade I would not have had the desire to talk to the people about art without a moderator’s editorial censorship.

So that started the hamsters on the threadmill in my brain and I quickly came up with the idea of starting a website to discuss this stuff and let the conversations continue there if people wanted. and best of all the discussions would be unfiltered! Assholes need not apply.

Slowly I began putting up information on different aspects of what I was doing as I came up with them. Illcraft turned into a good size blog for the niche market of comic artists using Illustrator.

Not as huge a demand for this information as planting shrubbery or something, but at least some folks needed the info. And I love putting the info out there. I’ve spent a few years reading other peoples tutorials online about different aspects of web design, graphics, photoshop, and illustrator tuts that gave me a good working knowledge of this program. I thought I should “pay it forward” and do the same for others.

I’ve spent some time working for Antarctic Press doing the How To Draw Manga series and I love contributing to artists. I know how hard it was for me growing up trying to study art. teachers at our public schools had a religious bias agaisnt us studying anatomy. My teacher thought skulls were demonic and we were not allowed to draw them in class. That could have been because of all the Heavy Metal guys drawing Motley Crue flaming demon skulls but still! Anatomy is anatomy.

I could only afford one art book growing up and that was How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way .
I know how important it is to study art but it can be difficult at times to find good information. It was especially difficult growing up without the resources to learn what I needed. I spent time in the school library after school looking through black and white hard bound Batman comics by Neal Adams. That was a real benefit to me and it led me to study more of the masters of classic art.

So here I am in a position to give back and I feel I am limiting myself by just focusing on Illustrator. Now I want Illcraft to expand into more tutorials on drawing comics and good storytelling. There are a lot of books out there that do this just fine. hell if you go to the art section anymore there are hundreds of drawing comics books that will teach a lot of stuff. But looking through them the other day I noticed there was not near enough information about the things you really need to know about drawing comics.

I think I can help out there.

I’ve been working in comic studios for a decade and I’ve learned a lot. A lot of information and studio secrets that i think will really benefit the struggling artist.

So now I will focus the next few years working on a website that will give you a solid knowledge of comics and illustrating that you may not be able to get otherwise. By all means, if you are in a position to study at the kubert school or other graphic sequential classes then you owe it to yourself to take those courses.

But Illcraft.com will be a great chance to learn a lot of stuff without having to pay for courses or more books you don’t need.

I’m working on a new website for illcraft.com in my spare time with plans to launch it early 2007.

When I started thinking about what I want this website to be a number of ideas came to mind that I think will help out the artist. I think Illcraft does a great job of presenting ideas and tips for the artist to use Abobe Illustrator to make comics. But I want this site to be more than that.

Really, in 10 years will you still be drawing with Illustrator 10?

Will that program be as effective a few years from now?

If I am going to put a lot of time into tutorials would you get more out of tutorials for comics art or drawing in Illustrator?

I think you can benefit by both. I won’t stop doing Illustrator lessons. I can see myself still using this program in 5 years. But the drawing lessons can be used over a lifetime.

So Illcraft will be expanding and I am working towards that. It’s unfortunate at the moment that I can not share all of the new things I have learned until my new comics work ships.

But it won’t be much longer now. I hope you can stay with me until then. You won’t regret it!

I appreciate your patience.