These two pieces come from the comic book Squee by Jhonen Vasquez. He also made the comic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and the TV series Invader Zim. If you haven't seen any of these I highly recommend you pick them up, they kick ass. Now about the two pieces. Unfortunately Squee and Johnny the Homicidal Manic are in black and white, but one day I decided to change that. For these pieces I used a Wacom tablet and photoshop. After applying the base color I removed all of the line shading and replaced it with solid color shading. There are also a few touches here and there I threw in there. Anyway, enjoy: PS - Sorry, the third image won't show for some reason... Oh well.
wow man that's damn good! What did you do, did you use a magic wand tool or cut out each 'block' by hand?
I created two layers, the top layer was the original comic and the bottom layer is a transparent layer. After crisping up the top layer so the black was actually black and the white was actually white (the scanner faded everything), I switched the layer properties so the white was transparent. After that I would just use my pen to color in a base coat (staying within the black lines). Then I colored in the shading on the color layer and removed the line shading on the comic layer. I have all the intermediate steps stored somewhere on a CD along with a short tutorial. Perhaps I'll post it some time. You can easily do these pieces with a mouse and photoshop. The comic detail is pretty minimal so solid colors generally look best. With more complex pieces you need a graphics tablet so you can easily pen in gradients.
Jhonen Vasquez? who's that?? oooh, nice job tho, the colors remind me of the pallete's they used in zim. you got just the right mix of grey and tan for the skin edit: oh, and I once tried drawing an nny picture with a bic so I know how much of a hassle those thick lines can be, do you happen to know what J used to draw them originally?
No, not for these two pieces. I don't know what Jhonen uses, try your local hobby store for some good drawing utensils. http://www.dickblick.com/categories/pencils/ Those are much better than drawing with a bic .