Will Elder, illustrator & comic artist, Dies at 86

Will Elder one of the original Mad artists, co-creator of the popular Playboy strip, Little Annie Fanny, and Comic Book Hall of Famer passed away today. He was 86. Before Mad came along Elder provided artwork for many of the EC titles including Two-Fisted Tales and Weird Fantasy.

Articles Remembering Will Elder:

New York Observer

BoingBoing.net

Using Adobe Illustrator to Create Comics

I’d been thinking of using Illustrator or Flash as tools to “ink” online comic pages with really clean lines that can be achieved with vector image. I did a little searching around found a couple good resources that were helpful.  I thought I’d share them since my other technical lists have been so popular. If you have experiences or techniques to share please let me and the other readers know. Better yet, if you have an article on the topic let me know and I’ll feature it here.

•  Max Riffner: How I Create Comics in Illustrator
• DaniDraws.com – The Complete Digital Comic, Part 2: Inking in Illustrator
• Tutorial Using Adobe Illustrator CS2’s Live Trace 

Technorati Tags: illustration adobe illustrator drawing comic art art design digital illustration inking ink comic books

More Digital Coloring Tutorials

There was a strong response the tutorial link that I posted last night so I thought I’d include some more here on the blog, instead of keeping them to myself:

Chris Arlidge, Steel Dolphin Tutorials – Preparing Line Art for Coloring

Chris Arlidge, Steel Dolphin Tutorials – Coloring Line Art in Photoshop 

Kazu Kibuishi – Full Comic Page coloring tutorial 

Comic Coloring using Photoshop – Tutorial

I found a decent and very basic tutorial today that helped me out with a few things in my coloring. I’ll admit, my digital coloring skills are non-existent, so even though this page was a help to me it probably won’t give much insight for colorists. I still thought I’d post it for other rank amateur colorist like myself. This was put together by Nick Smith.

Comic book / graphic novel digital coloring tutorial

Comic Frame – Colored in Photoshop

Here is one of the villains for my upcoming web comic book. I’ve been using Photoshop to color in my scanned drawings. I’m not quite finished coloring and touching up this drawing yet. But I figured it was far enough long to post on here. I’m making progress with the comic book I should have some story pages online in a few more months. I do this part-time when I have some minutes after work.

Technorati Tags: “comic book” character cartoon alien monster drawing art

Rhino Man – Pencil Sketch

Technorati Tags:
cartoons, art, sketchbook, comics, monster

Fetch the Dog – Pencil to Ink Sketch – New Character Design

A character idea I have for a four panel style, daily strip. Not sure what to color to make him… or whether I should go with a Snoopyesque black & white palette for this guy.

Monster Mountain – Black Ink Pen sketch