terence n. tijuana Office Cubicles in Space

This is the first ‘tutorial’ I am creating for Terence N. Tijuana. I’m calling it a ‘tutorial’, but it’s more a ‘making-of’, because I’m going to gloss over all the technical details and just describe the overall process.

To be different, I am going to ‘reverse-engineer’ a comic for you. This panel was taken from Monday, July 27 2009’s comic:

Step 10:

The finished product, featuring almost the whole cast assembled together for the first time. They’re walking along a corridor in the Terence N. Tijuana, and you can see them through one of the ship’s large picture windows from the outside.

Step 9:

I strip back a few layers here, namely the reflections of light and the cityscape opposite the ship, which I drew on a separate layer and overlaid on the glass with lowered transparency settings. I also removed the ‘glow’ cast by the sun on the parts of the ship’s exterior surrounding the window.

Step 8:

I’ve removed the window’s glass here. The glass layer was constructed by layering a few layers (layering layers, heh…) of gradients and adjusting their transparencies.

Step 7:

Compare this with the previous picture. I’ve ‘de-coloured’ the lines which define the characters’ forms, reverting back to the original black. I coloured the inked lines above because it helps blend them in and lower their contrast, which is necessary because the characters are supposed to be positioned behind a layer of glass.

Step 6:

Here, I’ve removed the shadows in the background and foreground. Shadows are important, not only because they anchor the figures and objects to their surroundings to increase realism and believability, but they also do wonders in unifying the different arrays of colour present within a panel.

Step 5:

In this step, the characters themselves lose their own shadows. Shadows on figures help define and emphasise them.

Step 4:

There goes the interior background….

Step 3:

…and the exterior foreground.

Step 2:

The characters lose their colours. Here, you can see how Terence N. Tijuana would look like if it were a black-and-white comic.

Step 1:

It gets messier. I inked the characters on separate Flash documents before importing the results to Photoshop and assembling them together. As you can see, the inks overlap, a lot. They have to be erased before a coherent image emerges.

Step 0:

Yup, ‘Step Zero’. I’m a software engineer, that’s how we roll. Anyway, the inks started out as penciled sketches on a notepad. I scan the sketches into my PC, open up Photoshop and turn the linework blue-green for ease of inking.

Tutorial ends here. Isn’t it amazing how 5 hours of work can be compressed into 11 easy steps?

If you’ve been planning to make your very own Terence N. Tijuana, NOW YOU CAN!

Disclaimer: This step-by-step guide reveals the process behind one particular panel. Other panels/comics may have slight variations in the way they were created. For example, more complicated backgrounds are sketched on paper first, as are machines. Oh god I am taking myself too seriously. Seriously. Just scroll back up and watch the comic assemble itself.