“Clip” Art

Sorry it’s been so long since my last column.  As you know, life sometimes gets in the way of side projects such as this.  January turned out to be a very hectic month for me, as after the holidays, my wife and I decided it was time to move out of our apartment in Queens, NY, and go more suburban in Long Island.  Moving is never fun though, despite being so excited about getting a new place.  Packing up boxes and boxes of comics, statues, and toys was a lot of work, that took up most of my time away from work.  My wife and I had a lot of stuff to move, and it was quiet the undertaking to say the least.  The move went great though, and we are finally settling in the new place.  I have a whole new work area, that my wife calls my “man-cave”, in our new den.  In the corner of the room, I set up my computer, and desk, surrounded by an eight foot bookcase filled to the brim with mostly all my trade paperbacks and hardcovers, along with mostly all my statues I’ve collected over the years being in the industry.  It’s really cool to finally have the space and work area that I’ve always desired.

That’s a very important thing to have when you are an artist.  To have a work station that you are comfortable with where you can draw, work on the computer, and be surrounded by all the great things that motivate you.  People show their studio off all the time, and people (especially other artists) really enjoy seeing that kind of thing, because it really hits home to see how someone lives.  It’s why we are fascinated by things like MTV’s Cribs, I think.  We like seeing how people work, and in what environment an artist creates such wonderful things looks like.  Now that I’m finally all set up I can get back to my daily/monthly routine, and get back to doing the things I love, like drawing, and writing this column.

My New Studio at Home

My 8′ Bookcase with almost all my TPB’s & Statues

Moving in a new place only took me away from my full time job at DC for a week, so it’s another reason why I have been so busy.  It’s never slow at DC, and when you take a week off, the comics still need to be made.  It’s really just a matter of catching back up to the process that went on while you were out.  But that just means that I have a ton of things to talk about, show you and teach you, here at Print Perfect!

One of the things I wanted to discuss is something that we, as production artists do on a daily basis that many just overlook in their comics.  It it called “clipping masks”.  Clipping masks refer to the Adobe Illustrator process of masking lettering to make it look like it is behind artwork when combined in Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, or In-Design.  If you open any comic book up, you are guaranteed to find some kind of clipping mask inside.  If you look at all the lettering closely, and if you look at all the sound effects, you will find some clipping masks.  Sometimes it is used to place a balloon on a border edge, so the top or bottom of a speech bubble is cut off to fall exactly on a border.  Other times, and the thing I really want to focus on how to do, is when a sound effect needs to go BEHIND some artwork.  For example, say a character is firing a gun.  The sound effect made in Illustrator calls for a “BLAM” sound effect.  But the editor wants that “BLAM” to be big, and have some parts go behind the character that is shooting the gun.  A clipping mask will then have to be used to “cut-out” pieces of the sound effect around the character to make it look like it falls behind him.  Let me show you how a clipping mask looks, and then how it’s done, by using an example from this weeks Secret Six #18!

Secret Six #18 pg.4 Final Color file by Simone, Calafiore, Lanham & Wright © DC Comics

Pg.4 Final Lettering File

Final Quarked Page 4

Now we want to place the SFX, “KKRRAAASHHH” behind the figure, not in front of it, by using a clipping mask.

First, open Illustrator.  Then go to FILE>PLACE, and retrieve the tif file you need to work on.  This will bring the file into Illustrator.  Place it on the BOTTOM layer of the document in the layers palette.  Next, move the art to line up with the final lettering file.  Make sure the balloon borders fall where they should, exactly in each panel.  Next, lock the image on the layers palette.  Now that the art is where it should be, we can make the clipping mask.  First, lets move the SFX up so instead of it being down by her legs, it’s behind her torso.

Now that it’s in place, select the entire SFX by dragging the white/ clear selection tool.  Then go to the TRANSPARENCY WINDOW palette.  Lower the opacity of the SFX to about 25-35% so you can see through it.  That way we can see the art underneath it, so we can trace around it.  We are going to trace around the art to make what we want to “cut out” of the sound effect.  We are NOT getting rid of any part of the SFX, just hiding the selection we are going to make, so the we can see the art we want to see instead.  Now select the PEN tool in the tool bar of Illustrator.  Zoom in on the SFX and area, and make the COLOR of the PEN tool BLANK, or no color, click on the outermost part of the art you want to “cut out”.  We are going to use the pen tool to trace around the art by clicking along down the line art.  Keep tracing around the entire figure where the sound effect covers.  When you reach the other side of the art, still using the pen tool, go UP & AROUND the sound effect, swinging back to the ORIGINAL starting point of the path.  When you get to the original pen point, you will see that your clicker creates a CIRCLE, meaning you can close out that path.  Click on that and you will have created the path.  Now, as you can see above, we have created a complete area around which the sound effect is enclosed.  This is the part of the sound effect that we want to KEEP.  Anything that you went around, will be “cut out”.  Now we can make the mask.

First, move the path you created with the pen to a LAYER higher then the the layer the SFX is located on.  Then select both the SFX and the path you created by using the black selection tool, and dragging.  As you can see above you have selected both.  Now go to OBJECT>CLIPPING MASK>MAKE in the toolbar above, in Illustrator.

Click on MAKE.  This will make the clipping mask, putting the part you didn’t want to keep, and traced with the pen tool, out of sight.  The pen path is what is telling Illustrator what to clip up to that line.  This should be your final result:

Ta-DA!  I hope I explained that well enough.  Illustrator can be your best friend or your worst nightmare.  It takes a lot of practice, and a lot of playing around until you get very comfortable with the program and know what it can do.  It pretty much can do ANYTHING, trust me.  If you can think of it, Illustrator can do it, it’s that genius.  And it a KEY tool in comic book making and production.  If you have ANY desire what-so-ever in making comic books, you must have Photoshop and Illustrator.

Lets take the same idea, and apply it to a balloon, real quick.  A balloon that needs to fall on a border can be done 4 or 5 different ways, but a clipping mask is very easy to do, and gets good results.  Say you have text in a balloon that you want to fall on a bottom border, like this panel:

In the tools box, select a blank colored square tool.   Starting at the BORDER, make a box around the ENTIRE balloon, including the tail, like so:

Make sure the box is CLEAR of color, and that is was made on a layer that is ABOVE the balloon you want to clip.  Then select the box, balloon, text, and tail all together, like so:

Then go to OBJECT>CLIPPING MASK>MAKE, and wah-LA:

Your balloon now falls on the border!

I hope you learned SOMETHING from all this, and I was able to show the kind of things we do EVERY day here in lettering, AND production.  This is actually one of the more common corrections that we make, for sound effects are a HUGE aspect of our job.  Coloring them, creating them, moving them around, and placing them all around the page, in front of and behind characters and things.  It is actually quiet a lot of fun to play with all that, and Illustrator makes it all possible.  Once you master Illustrator, comic book production becomes that much easier!

Ok, that’s it for this column,

Until Next Time,

CjB

PS- Despite being back on track as far as settling in a new house, and getting back to my routines, I continue to be extremely busy with my full time job, freelance gigs (fortunately I got a lot of those coming down the pipe), drawing just for myself, my own blog, and married life!  I will continue to do my best to make this column a bi-weekly one, but knowing how hectic life can get, it looks more and more like I will only be able to do a monthly feature.  I’ll do my best to have a new column up every other week, but if you don’t see it one, please be patient and look forward to it at least every 4 weeks.  Thank you for understanding, and for continuing to read!

PPS- GREAT NEWS! Coming SOON will be the FULL colors for my Green Lantern Corps SPREAD, drawn by me, inked by Mike Sellers, and colored by Master Digital Color’s very own, Brian Miller!!!!  Brian has JUST finished the piece as of this writing and is working on any changes we may have (which will be few, trust me).  So stay tuned, and we will do a column on the EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE of the piece, and talk a little about how it was made!