Tutorial Tutorial

Oh boy. One of the difficulties I'm facing in my career as an artist is terribly embarrassing: I'm not a master of Photoshop. I can do many things with it, and have in fact been given some basic training and great tips on using it to color comics, which is what I need it for. But, like I said, I'm no master, and there are some basic functions and tools in that program about which I have just not got a single clue yet.

Unfortunately, Photoshop isn't one of those intuitive programs (for me at least) where you can just dicker around with a tool or setting for a few seconds and go, "Ohhh, that's what that's for. Neat," and then immediately apply it to maximum effect. Nope. That mofo is technical and complicated, and while the help menu manual is a good place to start, sometimes you just need someone to show you how to do something specific.

Enter the helpful masses of friends and colleagues with a single piece of advice: "You can just Google Photoshop tutorials." I don't know which Google they're using, but so far I have not stumbled upon a rich cache of applicable knowledge. No, in my often fruitless searches, I've learned pretty much one thing: there's not hardly a soul on the planet who understands what the word "tutorial" means, much less how to make a good one. So here it is:

Mama's Tutorial Tutorial.

The point of a tutorial is to teach someone something. Someone who knows nothing about what you're about to do in your video. With me so far? Okay. Let's start with some common mistakes:

• A speed video of you blasting through a color job, start to finish, is not a tutorial. It's a demonstration of your skills, and more entertainment than education. If you're going to do a time-elapse video of you coloring a piece, you are hereby not allowed to call it a tutorial.
• Consider the fact that your audience is going to need to follow along with you. If you're not going to be featured talking, put whatever music you like over your video and position your damn camera so that people can get a good, clear view of your workspace. They will need to see what tools and settings you're using to achieve the effect. Maybe throw in some pop-up labels and info.
• If you are going to be talking, for blog's sake, be specific as hell! If your video features long pauses in between you giving lame, "I'm not comfortable talking to people" statements like, "Well, we're gonna use some green for this...there, that's pretty much done...I guess you can kinda get the basic idea here," UR DOIN IT WRONG.

Questions to answer at every flapjackin' step of the process:

• What tool did you use to do that?
• Why is it the best tool for the job?
• Where can I find this tool?
• What settings, if any, need to be applied beyond default?
• Where can I adjust those settings?
• How does one apply the tool? Do we need to double-click? Hold down Shift?

I know this sounds tedious, maybe even frustrating, but remember: you decided to make a tutorial. You need to teach this to a bunch of people who may not know jack shit about what you just did. If you're just sitting there saying, "Now we grab our Pen tool" and using your hotkeys, some poor kid in the audience may be eight steps behind now, going, "Wait, what? Hold on, I still haven't adjusted my Tolerance!"

One last piece of advice, for the more advanced tutorial makers: it's cool to discuss theory; please remember to pause a bit when you do, and keep discussing those basics--which tool, where, and why.

Now, armed with this pearl of wisdom...get out there and...somebody help me with my Photoshop. (Or, if you do know of a particularly good video/text tutorial that hits all the high notes, feel free to send me a link.)