August 2013 Video Tutorial: Digi-toons!

Digi-toons!



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What do Gary Larson, Scott Adams, and Gary Trudeau all have in common? None of them have ever heard of Gary Bouton, and they are all cartoonists. This month, Gary (Bouton) shows you how to create digital cartoons, beginning with a pen and ink doodle, scan it, auto-trace it, and use some of Xara Designer’s exciting new features to color your work ad make it ready for the web or for print. It’s serious business for the funny papers!

If you’re a “cocktail napkin doodler” or just love to sketch cartoons with physical media, stay tuned, because this month Gary covers the path from paper to Xara with your work. See how to make the best scan, how to import it to Xara and use the Bitmap Tracer feature, and finally, see how to color your work to completion. Also learn how to edit your drawing style, so tracing utilities give you exactly what you need.

Show us your best digi-toons here.

Thanks, Administrator!

Um, this month the tutorial runs about 16 minutes, which is long(ish). But I wanted to accomplish several things for people who draw physical cartoons on paper, show the proper way to scan cartoons so Xara's Bitmap Tracer can make vector copies, and how to use the Shape Painter (previously the Shape Builder) tool (previously the implement) (I'm kidding).

I think the pace is leisurely, so digest what you will, and I hope to see some of your own artwork in this thread!

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My Best,

Gary

I wish I could draw cartoons.
So, I really enjoyed watching this video.
Thanks, Gary.

Just had a chance to watch the video again and I loved it. Another excellently produced, entertaining and educative video, Gary. Thanks very much :thx

I love cartooning, I wish I had more time to devote to it. If I have time I'll doodle something and put it up for public ridicule :D

No one is going to ridicule anyone's work: cartooning is by its nature ridiculous, so there nyah, nyah-nyah! :)

And Rik doesn't have to feel left out of this month's tutorial just because he's not a pen and ink doodling kinda artist.

I want this month to be inclusive, not exclusive. The video was actually about drawing, scanning, auto-tracing, and coloring, sort of four inter-related parts, okay?

So if you'd like to work out with the new(ish) Shape Painter tool in versions 8 and 9, and come to terms with lighting, shading, highlights and all that good dimensional stuff while filling in a cartoon, I've attached four pre-traced works I've done in the past. The below are just thumbnails: go to the bottom of my post and download the Zip archive which has the native *.xar files.

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Fool Disclosure: some of these drawings appeared in CorelDRAW books I wrote in the mid-1990s, but because CorelDRAW artwork can be copied to the Clipboard and pasted into Xara, I thought I'd re-use art I own from the past, because it does me no good letting it sit around untouched on my hard drives.

Work on shading techniques, seriously! Many well-known cartoonists hire "colorists" and they only do the pencils, leaving the inking process to equally underpaid workers!

My Best,

Gary

Thanks for the vid, Gary. Well done.

I grabbed one of your images above. Unfortunately, XDP crashed a few times attempting to trace it so I used something else. I look forward to coloring it, then onto some of my own art. Going to be next week, most likely. I am leaving town for a few days to go camping.

See ya in the funny papers (someone had to say it).

Mike

@Mike—

Well,oops. Those thumbnails are far too small to use Bitmap Tracer, Mike. The attachment contains the cartoons, pre-traced, but here's an idea if you want to work through the tracing process: download the zip archive, pop it and load one of the B & W vector drawings. Export it to TIFF or PNG with no transparency at about 200 ppi or so (Xara calls it "dpi"), and then import the bitmap to a new document and use Bitmap Tracer.

Have a laugh riot, pal!

-g

Ok here is a little doodle from me, I quite enjoyed this month's video and I really like the slower more relaxed pace. Yes it took 16 mins but hey I poured myself a coffee and took a break and I learned something :)

I do have one question for you Gary, is there a reason you suggest drawing a shape then feathering it instead of using the softness setting on the Shapebuilder/painter tool info bar?

That's a lovely cartoon, Frances, thanks for joining in and submitting your Digi-toon!

After 20 months hosting the Xone and 18 video tutorials, I'm finally beginning to relax the pace, therefore lengthening the tutorial (!), and I was thinking this works for both me and our community. It helps if you do the video over the course of a few days. Many tutorials were conceived of in the morning, filmed in the afternoon, and edited and produced at night with the help of Folger's High-Test.

I had no particular reason for showing the Shape Painter (Builder)'s Softness feature; something had to give in this 16 minute coverage, so this feature lost, but thank you for pointing that out.

Actually, the Softness feature with the Shape Painter is a Feathering function. Draw a line with Softness cranked up. Deselect the stroke (hit Esc). Then select it with the Selector tool, and lo and behold, you can see the Feathering slider on the Infobar cranked up and a tremendous value in the NumBox. You can make your soft stroke hard-edged by the Feathering slider—I'm not sure there's a different way to change the edge softness other than Feathering, so I went with Feathering in the tutorial.

My Best,

Gary

Thanks Gary, I've had a bit of time off this afternoon so here is another digi-toon! This one was inspired by my little Shih Tzu The word "treat" is not uttered in our house without him appearing from nowhere lol