Salon Quickie Tip #3: Matt Groening on Character Design

Matt Groening: The secret of designing cartoon characters — and I’m giving away this secret now to all of you out there — is: you make a character that you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away…those two big ears. Same thing with Popeye, same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence hair, Marge with the beehive, and Homer with the two little hairs, and all the rest. So…I think about hair quite a lot.

Good advice, I think the principle of silhouettes in character design can be expanded a bit more though. But that's for the next article...

Salon Quickie Tip #2: Cleaning Up Line Work in Photoshop

I'm a little proud of this little technique as I came up with it myself.

When cleaning up scanned black and white line work in Photoshop sometimes you miss small spots and gradients that you wouldn't see on the screen but show up when printed. Here's what you can do so you don't miss any spots.

First, you need to separate the black lines from the white background. Do this by going into Channels. It doesn't matter if it's CMYK, RGB or Grayscale (I prefer Grayscale) Just hold Ctrl and click the very first channel. You have now selected everything that is white so the next step is Select-Inverse (Shift-Ctrl-I). Now you've selected everything that is black.

Now create a new layer and fill the selection with black. You now have a layer with only black lines. At this point if you were in Grayscale please convert to CMYK or RGB color.

This is where the neat trick comes in. Add Layer Properties-Stroke. (The little fx symbol on the Layers palette)


Any little flecks or scratches you missed now have a red blob around them which makes them much easier to spot. Just erase them and now you have much cleaner art.

Salon Quickie Tip #1: Photoshop New Window

I'm planning to make Quickie Tips a regular series. Whether it's Photoshop, Illustrator, or traditional art techniques feel free to contribute any neat or helpful tricks you've learned over the years.

Here's something I use frequently in Photoshop, New Window.
Tired of zooming in and out while you're painting in Photoshop? Just open another duplicate window resized to show the entire image.

Go to: Window-Arrange-New Window for yourfilename.psd























Tuck this new second window in the corner. You now have two simultaneous views of your work. While you paint in the main window the second window will show the changes too!