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If you’ve done much colouring in Photoshop, the chances are you will have come across selections and masking at some point—using the lassos and magic wand tools to cut out areas to work on to save you having to worry about colouring outside the lines and so on. In this set of tutorials I’m going to be teaching you the basics of using the next level up from that: quick mask, layer masks and clipping masks. These features are especially useful in photo-editing, but we can use them in illustration for some really handy shortcuts and effects. Rather than running a step by step on a specific final image, I’m going to be showing you around the basic techniques, so that you can use them in your own art however you like.

This lesson is going to introduce you to a tool called the quick mask. It’s kind of the middle ground selections and layer masks, and we can also use it to very quickly create a black-to-transparent lineart, something that can be incredibly useful to have.

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Now that you’ve created some brushes, it’s time to put them to use. Depending on what kind of image you want, there are two methods we can use. We’re going to start with the linear kind, where the speedlines all run parallel to each other.

Linear Speedlines

1) The first thing we need is an image. Something inked, black and white or screentoned will work best. For this one I’ve drawn a quick shot of a guy reacting to something off panel. If you’ve not flattened it, put all the layers you’ve used to make the image so far into a group, to make it easier to see what you’re doing.

Note: These techniques work best on images smaller than 2000×2000, though that’s not a hard and fast rule.

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.