One option for creating comics and graphic novels is to create the artwork by hand with pencils, inks, and paint. Alex Ross, featured in my last blog, produces some mind-blowing work that way. I also love the pen and ink work of Brian Hitch, Gary Franks, George Perez, and John Byrne. Many of these artists do their pencil and ink work by hand and use Photoshop to add color or visual effects.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, you can also do graphic novel art using 3D computer-generated imagery like you’d see in a videogame or a Pixar movie. One of my early favorites in that area was an Italian artist named Marco Patrito. He produced a graphic novel on a CD that included short animation clips as well as still images. This is a sample of his work:
Producing a comic in 3D is extremely laborious if you insist on making all of your props and characters from scratch. This is a demonstration of an artist creating a human head.
This is actually a fairly simple head, but I’ve spent days trying to do what this guy is doing. If you’re interested in this, there are a number of videos of people sculpting heads and bodies using a variety of techniques.
It is possible to avoid some of the tedium by using 3D scans of real models, but you still have to add the textures, the morphs, and the rigging to give your characters color, expressions, and the ability to pose. The textures, morphs, and rigging can be harder to make than the character. Textures are decals that go on the character’s skin, clothes, and hair to make them look real. Morphs are changes in the geometry of the model that allow our character to smile, blink, and to change in other ways. Rigging involves putting bones and joints inside the model. The rigging changes your character from a sculpture to a puppet that can be posed.
One way to avoid the tedium of building an entire world from scratch is to use a combination of 3D models you build and models you buy (and, in some cases, customize). I buy most of my ready-made models from a company called DAZ 3D. The company also has a free software package that allows you to pose, light, and animate the figures and scenes you buy from them. This is a demonstration of how to build a character in DAZ:
This panel is a combination of DAZ models and models I created from scratch. The characters are DAZ figures customized to look like my characters. I sculpted and textured the tower, the robot (You just see his hand.), and some of the equipment used by the characters in Lightwave and imported the models into a program called Poser to render them. I use the free DAZ Studio software to do what much of what I used to do in Poser, though I’m still using Poser some too. I used Corel Painter to add lightning bolts and laser beams. Photoshop can be used for the same purpose.
And that’s a quick look at 3D character design. It can be used in animation, for storyboarding, for book covers, and for comic books. It might look easy, but it still takes practice to get the lighting and poses right and you still need a good story and an eye for scene composition.