Making Labels - Part 1
When Jess Ragan asked for help in coloring his line art for his 2600 game Solar Plexus, I thought it would be a good opportunity to make a "how-to" for other people who want to create label artwork. Whenever there's a label contest at AtariAge, people invariably ask for tips on creating labels, so hopefully this will be of some help. So here we go...
Part 1 - Line Art
If you're going to draw your own label, that means you're going to end up with line art somewhere in the process. How you go about that will impact what the final label looks like.
Being from a traditional art background, I've spent most of my life drawing with pencil and paper. Up through the Climber 5 contest, that's how I worked. Draw it on paper, scan it into the computer, and then finish it up there. This is also how I did the cartoon for my Video Mods Comparison page.
In order to get nice, clean lines, you have to ink them. That's what can make or break line art. Bad inking can kill a good drawing. There are a few key things though, that can make inking a lot easier:
Draw with your arm, not your wrist. This takes some doing to get used to, but you'll get smoother lines, the longer and broader your arm movement is.
Look where you will be drawing. When inking, don't look directly at where you're drawing. Look at the line you're tracing over, ahead of where your pen is. Let your arm follow your eyes. Again, this is something that takes getting used to, but you'll find that your lines will become smoother as your arm movements become more fluid.
Those two tips apply whether using a computer or pen and ink. But for traditional inking on paper, there are a few more points to consider:
Ink on a new sheet of paper. Don't ink directly on your pencil artwork. Tape a new sheet of paper over your pencil drawing, then use a lightbox to backlight the artwork so you can see what you're drawing.
There are several reasons for this:
- You don't have to worry about destroying your pencil drawing if you screw up. You can always just tape a new sheet of paper down and start over.
- Your finished art will look much cleaner - your ink lines won't break up over pencil lines or eraser gouges.
- You don't have to erase your pencil marks later.
- You can experiment with different techniques until you find something you like.
Using a lightbox is the way to go, and you can make a cheap one by getting a couple of those small battery-powered fluorescent lights and a piece of plexiglass at the hardware store. (Don't use incandescent lights - they get too hot). You can also use a glass coffee table, or even just a window if you don't mind drawing vertically.
Rotate your artwork to match the most comfortable and natural drawing movement of your arm. Don't tape your artwork to the lightbox, just tape the pages together so you can still move them both around.
Use good materials. I'd suggest the Pigma MICRON by Sakura. It's a great pen, very smooth and has good ink. Plus, it's disposable, cheap, and available at most art supply stores. Buy several sizes - don't limit yourself with just one pen.
Get good paper, too. Some art supply stores carry paper that's suitable for inking. It should be smooth, and the ink shouldn't bleed into the fibers. You can use good inkjet paper as a substitute.
Smudges happen. You're going to smudge the artwork with your hand sooner or later. But you can minimize this by laying a piece of paper under your drawing hand as you work. And try to keep track of where you've just drawn so you can steer clear of it until it dries. Even so, don't worry about it. You can always clean it up once you get it in the computer.
Scanning
You're going to have to scan in your drawing sooner or later. There are two key things to think about: resolution, and bit depth.
Resolution - Scans are bitmapped images. The correlation in video games would be raster graphics. The images are made of pixels. The drawback with pixels is that at some point, if you zoom in too far, you will see them. This makes the image look blocky. The key is to work at a high enough resolution (pixels per inch - ppi, or dots per inch - dpi) so you don't see them. Generally, if your file is 300 dpi, that should be fine - as long as you don't plan to print it any larger than its original size. If you're making a label, the final print size is 2.75" wide x 3.375" high*. At 300 dpi, this ends up at 825 x 1013 pixels. But if you print that same artwork out to fit on 8.5" wide paper, you end up with a resolution of only 97 dpi. At that size, you'll start seeing individual pixels, and the artwork won't look very sharp. So keep in mind how large you'll eventually want something to print. It's always better to work at a higher resolution, then scale it down later.
Generally, I just scan artwork in at 300 dpi, since I'm almost always going to print it at a smaller size than what I drew it at. That gives me extra detail to work with if I need it. I can always scale down - but I can't scale back up. If I need to scan something that's going to be larger when printed, then I'll go with 450 or 600 dpi.
* Actually, even though the visible area of the label is 2.75" x 3.375", you should add a 1/4" margin (or bleed) all the way around your artwork, because the printer can't always align the artwork with the pre-cut labels. This is something you should take into account from the very start, and make your artwork 3.25" x 3.875" instead - just don't put anything important in that outer 1/4".
Bit depth - Bit depth is how many colors the scanner uses to reproduce an image. 1 bit is black and white. This isn't really suitable for anything, since the edges end up very jagged. Besides, you have more control if you scan at a higher bit-depth, and reduce it later if you need to. 8 bits is grayscale. The scanner uses 256 values from black to white to reproduce the image. For pencil drawings, this is usually fine. But since you're going to color the artwork anyway, you might as well start out at 24 bits. This is full color, and uses 256 values each of red, green and blue to reproduce the image, for a total of 16,777,216 colors. 32 bit is color is the same as 24 bit, but adds an 8 bit channel to define transparency (something we'll get into later).
Cleaning up scans
Once the scan is into the computer, you'll need to clean it up. For this, I use Adobe Photoshop.
Here's a small part of Jess' original scan of his Solar Plexus artwork. I've zoomed into this in Photoshop by 200% so you can see the pixels clearly:
Line art by Jess Ragan
Coloring this as-is would be a problem, because the lines aren't very dark. So the first thing to do is adjust Levels for the image. This is feature of Photoshop where you can redefine what "black" and "white" is for an image. In this case, I want the medium gray in this image to become black. I also want the very light gray areas to become white.
The graph shows the distribution of values in the image. Black pixels are to the left, white to the right. There are almost none on the left, showing the lack of black in the image. But as I move the black pointer (below the graph) to the right, the pixels in the graph above it become black, and the rest of the values from black to white are remapped accordingly.
So after adjusting levels, I end up with:
Now, some of the smudges I just couldn't get rid of using Levels, because the smoothness of the lines begins to break down. So to fix this, it's time to start retouching the scan.
Whenever I retouch something in Photoshop, I always add a new layer to work on. This goes back to the concept of inking on a new sheet of paper. I can always fix or delete mistakes on the layer, without ever ruining the original scan.
After retouching, I end up with this:
This may still look a bit rough, but that's because I'm zoomed in so far on it. At some point, you have to zoom back out and decide it looks good enough. Otherwise, you'd spend forever retouching it. The key here is that the lines are dark, and the smudges are gone. And since it's grayscale, the lines are smooth.
If this was just black and white, it would look like this:
And this won't look nearly as good when printed out.
Computer inking - bitmapped
Now then, having said all of that, I'm a terrible inker. So I started doing my inking in the computer, using Corel's Painter. The reason I started inking in the computer is because of the magic known as "Undo". I can draw, re-draw, and re-re-draw a line over and over again until I get it just right. So I began scanning in my pencil art, opening it in Painter, and inking it there on a separate layer. Layers are the key to working on any artwork in the computer. It's just like using a second sheet of paper taped over your original drawing, but better. Layers don't require a lightbox - they're transparent.
The reason I inked in Painter, is because it has the best "natural media" tools out there. Far better than Photoshop. Painter has pens that work like real pens, brushes that work like real brushes, and even pencils that work like real pencils. You can create artwork that looks remarkably realistic, yet it's entirely digital. Painter also lets you rotate the canvas on-screen while you're working - just like you can rotate a sheet of paper while drawing. Very handy for inking.
Painter is what I used to ink my Climber 5 contest submissions, the Video Mods cartoon and the Krokodile Cart label. But with that last one, I also began creating the "pencil" drawings with Painter. I stopped using real pencil and paper since I got so comfortable sketching with Painter's pencil tool. It allowed me to build my sketches in multiple layers, I could select, reshape and move entire sections of the drawing around, and of course I had the magic of "Undo". In the case of Painter - multiple Undos. I could back up 20 or 30 steps if I wanted to. I could experiment by sketching on a new layer and turning it on and off to see how the changes looked. I draw almost exclusively in Painter now, and only sketch on paper when the computer isn't convenient to use.
Computer inking - vector
The drawback with Painter (and Photoshop) is they use bitmapped images. Remember that whole "resolution" thing? Vector graphics don't have that problem. Like their videogame counterparts, vector graphics are defined as lines - not pixels. Programs like Macromedia FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator create graphics this way. Starting with some of my entries in the Man Goes Down contest, I began inking my drawings in FreeHand, instead of Painter.
FreeHand allows me to create line art, and have absolute control over it. In Painter (or Photoshop) I'm limited to erasing and redrawing lines I don't like. I'm also limited by the resolution of the document I created. You can't make a bitmapped image any more detailed by increasing the resolution of it. All that happens is that the image gets scaled up in size, and is now made up of more, smaller pixels. But the image looks the same.
Vector drawings are like working with pieces of wire. They're always going to be whatever shape you bend them into, no matter how close you look at them. You can change the width and other characteristics of the lines at any time, but they always look smooth. This is called "resolution independent" artwork. The artwork can be scaled up and down with no loss of quality. The only time resolution becomes an issue is if you export it to a bitmapped program. Even then, you can control the resolution when you export it, so you can make a bitmap that's 300 dpi, 600 dpi, 1200 dpi, or anything else, and the resulting bitmap will have a very clean, smooth look to it.
Let's take another look at the Solar Plexus label.
Here's the retouched bitmap in Photoshop again.
I could clean it up a bit more, but I still have the limitation of not being able to scale it up any.
Well, if I take it into FreeHand, I can draw a vector version of it on another layer (seen as light blue lines).
Each line has points on it which allow me to move and reshape them at any time. This gives me absolute control over the lines, in ways I can't get with a bitmap.
Here's what the lines look like, just by themselves:
I can now assign new attributes to these lines. Color, thickness, patterns, and I can even have FreeHand mimic pen strokes (thick and thin lines) if I want. All the while, the lines themselves remain unchanged.
Here's the artwork with a thicker line applied to it, to match the original art:
As before, we're zoomed in on this by about 200%. But when we zoomed into the bitmap, we could see pixels. In FreeHand, we can zoom in so this could fill the entire screen, and the lines would still be smooth. I can also fill the shapes with flat color or gradients, and apply other effects to them.
However, I generally don't use FreeHand for coloring. It's very good at flat colors or perfectly smooth gradients, but not well-suited to painting or airbrush-like effects. I prefer Photoshop for that, so I need to get this art into Photoshop. This is done by exporting the vector artwork as an EPS (encapsulated PostScript) file. This is a vector format that Photoshop can convert to bitmap, at whatever resolution I choose.
Here's what the artwork looks like when imported into Photoshop (and zoomed in 200%):
This ends up much cleaner than I could possibly achieve by cleaning up a scan, and this is how I'm "inking" my own artwork now. The upcoming RPS label was done this way, as were both of my entries for the Go Fish! contest.
The trade-off is time. Manipulating the vectors in FreeHand actually goes pretty quickly, but I end up being a lot more fussy about getting things "perfect" than I do with bitmapped artwork. I can endlessly tweak the lines and shapes in FreeHand until I get exactly what I want, so that's what I do. With a bitmapped image, it's much harder to move lines around, so I clean up what I can, and leave it at that.
In the case of Solar Plexus, since it's not really my art to begin with, I didn't feel it was my place to completely re-trace it in FreeHand. So I just cleaned up the scan, and given that the artwork is pretty high resolution to begin with, it will turn out fine.
(And since it looks like I've hit my ten-images-per-post limit again, I'll have to post before-and-after pictures of what the full line art looks like in the comments below.)
Up next... coloring!
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