If you’re not familiar with the term, ‘speedlines’ are lines added over a comic panel or illustration to give a sense of movement. They emphasise things by directing the readers eye towards them and can also give a sense of the motion blur of a camera movement; standing in for the zooms and pans you find in film and animation.
Speedlines are one of the most simple ways to add energy and drama to a comic panel, but unfortunately they’re also one of the most tedious things to actually draw. However, Photoshop’s powerful and versatile brush settings can be used to create them much more quickly.
This section of the tutorial will talk you through the process of creating a set of speedline brushes. In the second part, I’ll show you how to combine the brushes you’ve created with the path tool to quickly create linear and radial speedlines. It’s worth bearing in mind that this method does not give the exact control and results of painstakingly creating them by hand with a pen and ruler. Also, while there’s nothing hugely advanced in this tutorial, I’m going to assume the reader has at least some familiarity with Photoshop before trying this.
I don’t suppose you know how to do this using Photoshop Elements 5.0? I can’t work out how to creat guidelines since it’s not under the “view” menu and if you search that into Adobe help then you just get loads of unrelated ‘guide lines’ for how to do things, rather then ‘guidelines’ if you could help that would be great thanks.
I’m not sure where in the menus they would be on 5. The only thing you need the guide for here is to make the triangle symmetrical, so you might be able to find another way to do that. (Do one side, extend the canvas, copy and flip for the other side?)
Check photoshop’s help. You also might be able to get some by dragging them off the rulers if you turn those on.
Thank you, I’ll try to find out how to do it without using the guidelines :)