Creating Characters and Backgrounds
This section is primarily for users who want to create new character or background art for use with Comic Strip Factory. It could also be useful for advanced comic creators who want to create new parts, one-off, for use in their comics, or just edit existing parts. Various chapters in this section are referred to from chapters in the Creating Comics section for this reason.
Parts files
Parts files are a second kind of document, after comic files, that can be created and edited in Comic Strip Factory. Parts files are intended for use as libraries of art, structured to make the art easy to use to create comics. The primary element of that structure is the part. A part is a drawing of a conceptual object, like a head, torso, arm, or hand, in the case of characters, or ground, sky, foliage, structure, or vehicle in the case of background art. If it is something a comic creator would want individual control over, it should probably be a part. There are some things that more advanced users might want to change, like eyes, and we don’t make these parts, but we do have a chapter on how to edit them that anyone who creates Comic Strip Factory art for other users might want to read.
Parts files can only contain parts and groups of parts. (Groups of parts can also contain parts or groups of parts.) Parts can only contain paths and groups of paths. (Groups of paths can also contain groups of paths.) Parts are very much like groups, except that they have a part type (head, hand, ground, prop, etc.) and they cannot contain other parts. A part is allowed to contain just one object, though, while a group has to contain at least two objects. And Comic Strip Factory treats parts and groups differently when you edit them.
So if you are going to draw a posed character for use in the program, it is the general practice to break it up into parts. Artists sometimes find this a counterintuitive way to work, and one way to work around that is to draw a whole pose as a single part at first and then break it up into parts. (The part editor has a command, Split to Separate Part… , to make this easier.) But if you work this way, make sure you keep the ultimate structure in mind and don’t, for example, continue a single path up the top of an arm, across the shoulder, and up the neck, or it will be impossible to break the drawing up afterward.
How to proceed
If you are just getting started, you should go to Starting a parts file . This explains how to start a parts file and has more general information about parts files. When you are ready to create parts, there is a chapter on Creating parts that has several subchapters on all the various ways to draw paths, how to edit paths, how to apply line and fill color, line weight, and other graphical attributes to paths, and how to use paths to clip other paths.
The two most important techniques in drawing great looking comic parts are probably clipping and blurring. While we’ve left out a lot of features you’d find in a general purpose vector graphics program, we’ve made those two techniques as easy to do as we can. In particular, clipping is easier in Comic Strip Factory than in almost any other program we know of, so you might want to take a look at that chapter in particular
Finally, this section ends with chapters on Manipulating parts and Managing your catalog of parts files.