Faux-vintage comic tutorial! I get a lot of people asking about my technique for making comics with that old look, like Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space.

To start off, we’re going to make a new document in CMYK.

It’s really important that you work in CMYK from the beginning, or else everything will get messed up. Work in at least 300 DPI (I work at 450).

So, once I’ve sketched everything and inked it on a new layer, I have this to start out with:

Then we fill it in using flat colors that are made up of 25% increments of cyan, magenta, yellow, and/or black. I try not to mix more than two of those per swatch. Some examples:

I do the foreground colors on one layer, and background colors on another layer.

It’s halftone time! In Photoshop, you go to Filter —> Pixelate —> Color Halftone, and you’ll get something like this:

For the foreground, I set the max radius to 8, and for the background I set it to 12. I’ve found having large dots in the foreground can make things hard to see. When that’s done, we have this:

Then I’ll go in and clean a few things up that got blurry, like her lips. Sometimes I want a few hard edges, especially on areas of color that are 100% CMY or K (her lips being 100% M and 100% Y).

Now I’m going to separate all the layers by color, so that I have a layer with just the cyan, just the magenta, and just the yellow (there is no black in this particular image, otherwise I would repeat the steps for a black layer, too.) For this, we need alpha channels. First, turn off your line art so you only have the color layers showing. Then make three new blank layers (if you have any black, make a 4th layer for the black). To get the channels menu, we go to window —> channels. You’ll see this:

With a Mac, command + click on the tiny picture next to where it says “cyan”. For a PC, it’s ctrl + click. It’ll select everything that isn’t cyan so you’ll have to invert the selection (command/ctrl + I). Fill the selection, and you’ll have a layer that contains just the cyan dots. Hide that layer, and repeat the actions for magenta and yellow. You’ll end up with layers that look like this:

Turn off everything but the line art, the cyan/magenta/yellow/and black layers. Set each dot layer to “multiply” (but not the line art).

Then bump them over a few pixels up/down/left/right to get that off-kilter registration where the colors don’t quite line up. And we have this:

We could stop there and have something cool, but I like to make things look more raggedy, like I found them in an attic after 40 years. First, I make it look like some of the ink has worn off by grunging it up. I get a lot of my patterns from CGTextures, and for this step, I like to use “plaster” pictures.

I set it to grayscale, and in this case, invert it so it’s mainly black with lighter splotches. I adjust the levels (command/ctrl + L) so that it’s more black with a few light splotches and there’s more contrast. I place this layer on top of my project, and set it to “screen” (in the same dropdown menu where we set the other layers to “multiply”). Now, anywhere that is black is see-through and anywhere that’s white is white. The lighter it is, the less see-through it is. You might have to monkey with the levels a bit more to make it perfect.

Then we age the “paper” by putting an actual old paper scan on top of it and setting it to multiply. (CGTextures also has good old-looking paper.)

And voila!

There are a few more subtle tips and tricks I use, but 1. they’re a bit nitpicky, and 2. I have to keep something secret, right?

As far as I know, this can only be done in Photoshop, unless there is another program out there that can do CMYK and alpha channels. (If there is, tell me about it!)