I’ve Finally Mastered the Pen Tool in Photoshop and it’s the Best Feeling on Earth
A couple of days ago at 6am, I finally overcame the one thing I’ve been putting off learning for nearly three years.
For the longest my non-digital paintings required me using Photoshop and Illustrator together. I would do my sketching in Photoshop, and then took them to Illustrator for the inking. Photoshop is an all-inclusive tool, but Illustrator works great for vector illustration, which gives you solid, clean lines. This process worked for my last book, since it was just a matter of exporting black and white pages with no additional coloring.
I’m working on a new comic series with a writer and this is the first time where I’ll be putting an entire comic together: sketching, inking, coloring, and lettering. Quality and detail are important to me, but Illustrator is not made for coloring in detail, and the latter doesn’t really work with vector inking right out of the box. My original plan was to do what I did for my last book, and then export the Illustrator png’s to Photoshop for coloring. The problem with that is the quality. Once I rasterize my clean vector images in photoshop it looks like something done in MSPaint, regardless of the resolution. I tried doing a panel this way and it looked laughable.
I tried to find a way around this but nearly every comics how-to tutorial incorporated the using the pen tool, something I’ve been putting off to the bitter end of my artistic journey. The pen tool in Photoshop is a necessary evil; it is the main way to incorporate vector graphics in your work. If mastered one can do anything minus solving world hunger, but until that point people typically avoid it like the plague due to the fairly steep learning curve.
The pen tool is broken down into two fundamentally different approaches: there is the regular pen tool and the freeform pen tool. The regular version is the most popular, and is pretty powerful. The early misconception is that it should work like a regular pen, but that is not the case. It feels completely unnatural; setting anchor points and adjusting directions feel nothing like using an actual pen. Freeform however allows you to work naturally like a regular pen, but it has its own quirks as well.
I couldn’t avoid using the pen tool anymore, so I looked for freeform pen tool tutorials. I watched this video, that video, and bought this brush set. I basically had to record an action (similar to recording macros in Excel) for a freeform stroke and applying a brush to it. This is the closest I can get to the ease of Illustrator with the power of photoshop. I’d say the results came out good.
Now knowing how to use the pen tool I finally feel like a comic artist now! Now to get off this and finish the actual comic…
