August 2013 Video Tutorial: Digi-toons!

[Barbara B]

Digi-toons!





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.

[Gare]

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!




My Best,

Gary

[Rik]

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

[Big Frank]

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

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

[Gare]

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.



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

[mwenz]

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

[Gare]

@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