Hey,
I hope you’ve been well, and gaining traction in your art! As we continue to level up in our creative endeavors, I want to take a second and mention some good digital habits to get used to.
We all start out the same in our art paths: paper, pencil, eraser. Or something along those lines. From an early age, we’ve been conditioned to draw, erase, and draw again. But digital’s different.
There’s a bit of a learning curve with digital. Some things don’t work quite the same as with good ol’ pencil and paper. Whether you’re new to digital or a seasoned vet, check this out to make sure you’re on the right track:
The term “non-destructive,” as it pertains to digital workflow, basically means making changes without causing permanent damage to the underlying drawing, asset, or file.
Say you’ve drawn something and don’t like a portion of it. To get rid of the bit you’re not keen on, you decide to literally cut it out with a pair of scissors. That’s destructive. Taking a new sheet of paper and covering it up would be non-destructive.
There are many articles, demos, and guides for working non-destructively in Photoshop and other digital-drawing apps, but I want to focus on methods that pertain to us as visual storytellers. Because, as I found on the website Pluralsight while researching for this email, “working non-destructively isn’t always intuitive.”
Photoshop is a very broad and robust program that all kinds of artists use, but I’m going to focus mainly on drawing here:
Don’t be destructive!
Don’t delete what you’ve already done. If anything, cover it up with white or your base color/tone or turn off the visibility of the layer. Try not to use the eraser tool, especially when going from shot to shot and using the previous image as an underdrawing.
We need to retrain our brains to stop erasing, especially for storyboarding.
Say you’ve drawn a beautiful arm on your character, but now you need to move that arm up, hand out, palm open. And three panels from now, you’ll need that arm right back in its original position. As an old-school, pencil-and-paper artist, you’d erase that arm and draw it again, or redraw the whole figure with the changes included. But digitally, you can copy and paste, lasso, etc.
It might only take you a few extra minutes to redraw something, but think about the tally after you’ve done that over and over and over again…
Make use of layers!
Even old-school animation used layers, decades before Photoshop.
Maintaining layers will help you move at lightning speed, but when you should create a new layer isn’t always intuitive. It takes a little forethought and a couple of extra steps that at first might seem as if they eat up more time than they save, but layers ultimately make changes much easier.
Say you’ve already drawn out a meticulous background, complete with painstakingly precise perspective, and now you’re thinking, “I’ll just keep going (no new layer) and draw the characters super quick and just blast through, erase what I need to change and keep drawing fast…”
Well, you’d better hope those characters don't plan on moving, at all, because if they do, it will ruin all that perspective work!
Being non-destructive also applies to using masks on your layers. Say you’re working on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 3 and the director wants burgers in the sky instead of balls of ground chuck. If you have a glorious sunset with portions erased to fit in those meatballs, you now have the impossible task of replacing them and trying to seamlessly match that perfect gradient.
If you’d used a layer mask, you’d have merely hidden portions of the gradient, and the original layer would be left intact.
If you’d taken the few seconds to set up properly, you’d have options.
Use proper naming conventions!
Look, you know what you’re doing. Of course you do. But, maybe you need to work with someone else, or a whole bunch of someone elses. How will they know which file is which? Using proper naming conventions gets everything in order and ready to tear into.
There are two types of people: JPEG 2937copy.jpeg or Disvacation20170624_3. You all know who you are…
That also goes for naming layers. I’ve seen articles say you should be as descriptive as possible, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea, especially if you’re going to be using actions in Photoshop. I’ve found if you’re too specific, actions won’t always work if you remove or change layers later in the workflow. I’ve found there’s a middle ground.
Say you’ve been hired to work on the upcoming smash hit, Shotgun Jimmie. Instead of naming a layer “mountains,” name it “background.” Or “hero,” instead of “ Jimmie.” This will help actions recognize layers, even if the content changes later on. Once you change “mountains” to “submarine,” actions won’t recognize the submarine as your background. But if you just stick with “background,” you can easily add a red glow to all the backgrounds by running an action to do so, rather than doing it shot by shot.
(For those asking, “What’s an action?” It’s a feature in Photoshop that takes some of the repetition out of tedious tasks. I personally like to use actions to flatten final files and save them as copies. Instead of choosing layer>flatten, file>save-as each time, you can just record the steps once, then replay them for all the files you want to flatten and save.)
This was a long email! Hopefully, having taken the time to read all this now will save you some in the future!
Board on!
Wahab
PS. We’d love to hear from you about any workflow tips you use. Please, send an email or share in our Discord community. Also, if it’s been a while, check out our website at StoryboardArt– where we’ve added a bunch of new content to help you make the most of your storytelling journey.