Page One, Part 1: Technical Difficulties

First color panel...ever!

So lets get the technical goobledygook out of the way first.

 

Remember when I found a method of refining the edges on the magic wand that I said cured pixelization? Well the cure had a curse to it too. It leaves this area around my lines that I can't select. Why is that bad? Because it means any color I lay down with a paint bucket won't reach the lines and leaves sometimes noticeable white areas around every line. So I can't use the paint bucket or magic wand to select and fill areas with color, which is the quickest, easiest way to color something.



So how in the name of Lynn Varley do I color the thing? Well I have to do what real comic colorists do. You see, when coloring for the web, anything goes. What you see is what you get on screen (though the colors will vary slightly from screen to screen, but that's a frustration for another day).

Print is a bit more...complicated. You've got different color plates for CMYK you have to color on and you have to do it a certain way because the plates can slip. I don't really understand all of it, but since I'm doing this for the web, I don't have to deal with it.

But basically all this forces those coloring comics for print to color using multiple layers that you lay the inks over, and that's the idea that came in handy. If you've ever seen comics colored by hand, you've got some idea what I'm talking about, with the inks on one transparency that's laid over other transparencies with the different colors on them.



Here's the work in progress.

So that's what I had to do: delete to a transparent background on the inks and put color layers underneath it. Now there's definitely advantages to that. Instead of having to worry about coloring around a person to do the background color, you just color over him and color his face, clothes, ect on the layer (or layers) on top of that.



The downside to this is that I had to select larger areas manually by drawing around it with the lasso tool and I had  to color the finer details freehand with the paintbrush tool. I'm doing this with a mouse. It...takes...forever.



However, I will say I actually really enjoyed doing it, and wouldn't mind being a colorist based on my experience so far. But it does take up a lot of time, so hopefully I can find a way to refine how I'm refining the magic wand so I can use some of the quicker methods too.

I'm also finding the method of digitally cutting the word balloons and text boxes out of the old printed comic and laying them in the new version is also taking forever. It's just taking too long to erase the art around the balloons, and the zillion layers in Photoshop I'm having to deal with as I drag them in isn't helping either. So I'm probably going to have a friend transcribe the script and I'll have to re-learn Illustrator so I can re-letter it. It may slow me down at first, but it'll be a lot faster in the long run, I think.

Next: Page One, Part 2:  Now that's a damn fine peacock!