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!

 



The Cover, Part 1: Gah! Color!

The colored cover art.

So the cover I posted yesterday was my first step towards turning my old college class project into the first story in my online comic series.

The first story is about my protagonists, Stickboy and Psychoboy, feeling like the whole country has turned on them. So, of course, I had to have Uncle Sam going on a rampage for the cover. The drawing of crazy Uncle Sam is a homage to the amazing cover to Batman #451 by the incredible Norm Breyfogle that has Joker shooting bats with a Gatling gun. I kept the Gatling gun cause it seemed more appropriate than when I drew Uncle Sam with an Uzi (well, "appropriate" being a relative term here...).

The cover, like the rest of the comic, was originally intended to be black and white. I never thought about color at the time, nor did I miss it. I was used to doing black and white comics. All my high school comics and character sketches had just been No. 2 pencils on white paper.

Black and white was chosen for the comic because it was intended for print, and color costs a helluva lot more than grayscale, especially if you're dealing with little print shops. But on the internet, obviously color is free, so I've decided to go full color on it.

Color completely shifts how you think about the art and becomes part of the storytelling. You have to figure out what type of blue does a crazy Uncle Sam wear. What time of day is he shooting at our heroes? And what color are those damn bricks?

Mind you. there are a few color images here and there of Stickboy and his pals, but those were just character shots for promotional images. Doing it in the context of a whole image that tells a story is completely different. This is the first time I've colored part of an actual comic. Doing a real comic image of Stick and Psycho in color made me alternate between orgasmic joy and my brain wanting to snap in two.

I'm pretty happy with the results, though since it's online it'll look different on every monitor you look at it on, which will no doubt drive me nuts. I may tweak some of the colors before the end, these things are always subject to inspiration up until they're published.

So I welcome the brave new world of color for the series. After all, how else would I have found out Psychoboy had such dreamy blue eyes?