Comedic crowd scenes are fun to draw, but their apparent pandemonium requires careful advance preparation. My first step is to draw sketchy versions of all the individual elements in the scene. I scan these and place the various figures on different layers of an Adobe Photoshop file.

Photoshop allows me to move them around separately on their respective layers. I can rotate them. I can change their relative sizes. Eventually, through experimentation, I will arrived at an overall composition that pleases me.

I then print out my composite sketch in an enlarged form and, placing the sketch on a backlit light box with a sheet of high-quality bristol board on top, trace my drawing in pencil onto the bristol. (That's the "grayed-out" phase in the middle of the sequence shown above.) Lots of small refinements are introduced during this penciling process.

I then ink my finished drawing over my pencil lines. Once the inking is done, the pencil marks get erased.

Next I scan my inked drawing so that I can color it digitally in Photoshop. For details about how this coloring happens, see the Cartoonists Corner in my web site. (Note: a few coloring procedures have changed slightly since I created these tutorials because of changes in subsequent Photoshop updates, but the process I describe remains essentially the one I usually use.)

Coloring, like the fine-tuning of a composition, happens in stages. Taking time to lay groundwork up front invariably makes the later stages of applying color far easier. I have to keep my long-term goals in mind, of course, since in the beginning my drawing's color can ve counted upon to look quite dopey.

My temporary goal, you see, is not to aproximate the cartoon's future color scheme but to divide it into very distinct zones of color — sometimes similar to but not infrequently miles away from the hues I will ultimately use. It's a clear-cut contrast from section to section that I need at this point. Such contrasts will let me use Photoshop's "wand tool" to isolate particular areas I want to paint at given moments while preventing me from accidentally letting my digital "paint brush" stray into neighboring sections of the drawing that I don't want disturbed.

I do my final, "real" coloring on a separate layer. The new layer hides my garish earlier colors from view, but I can continue to apply Adobe's wand tool to that first layer, unseen but available as needed, in order to maintain invisible boundaries around particulart areas of the drawing's "real" color that demand my attention as I build a color scheme suitable for the scene.

Bit by bit, the color of the entire page will come together, dressed up with the shading and modeling that I have been envisioning in my mind all along.

Demo over. Now back to my blog with you!