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  Color is hardDec 22, 2012 8:29 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:After all the various color experiments of the past weeks, I think I've learned that I'll be better off sticking with black and white--at least, for the most part. That's the short version--read on for the blah-dee-blah thinking out loud long version!
 
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Let's see, I scribbled out a checklist as thoughts on this began to occur to me last night... Ah okay first of all, I like black and white. It's got that old pulp feel, but more importantly, it forces me to concentrate on strong composition; I found that with color it's easy to think "oh well I'll just do some different color over here, that will help it stand out..." I like how black and white almost always verges on the abstract, with forms blending into each other in fun and unexpected ways. Plus, with black and white you don't have to worry about gamma levels and all that. :P
 
Before the color burst, with pages 14-16 of this episode, I'd felt like I'd really hit what I'd wanted to hit with black and white--in fact, I guess I felt like I also hit a plateau, and wasn't sure what to do with black and white next; I started thinking about how those compositions could be improved, and the main thought was a certain lack of depth distinction in the last two, and how returning to grayscale washes could solve that--but then I thought, I've been thinking about color, so if I'm going to start doing washes again, why not make them color washes?
 
Since then though, I've been reading the black and white Rip Kirby collection that a reader very generously got for me, and Alex Raymond's artwork in that has been giving me some good ideas on definite directions to go with black and white, and ways to solve some of the limitations I'd felt myself running into before. So now I really want to push on with the black and white and try some of that stuff out.
 
On the technical side of things, black and white has certain definite advantages from my point of view. Black and white image files are much more compact than color, so they download faster for readers. And when preparing a page for upload, with black and white I know exactly how much contrast its lines will have, and it has enough that it isn't necessary to run an artificial "Sharpen" filter on it after shrinking down the art to its web size; "Sharpen" can leave unsightly halo artifacts on the edges of things, so if you don't have to use it, that's a plus--also, I'm enough of a control freak that it was driving me nuts trying to find the right sharpen level to use for each new color page, because the contrast levels were constantly changing. :P All of which figures into perhaps the main technical advantage, which is that black and white takes much less time to produce than color; I've been consistently falling behind in my daily schedule since I jumped into color, and me being tired and stressed from time pinching all the time doesn't really help the comic.
 
Coming to the color itself, I didn't want to do regular comic flat color, because well that's kind of boring; so I'd decided to do limited, semi-abstract color, but I think I found that I lack the discipline to do that really consistently. Maybe I could get to that eventually, but at the moment the results of trying to force myself into that are not very satisfying--or not a clear victory over just black and white, at least. I learned a lot doing it, and I now have the equipment to produce color images should I need to, so I'm glad about that, but I think I probably shouldn't be trying to shoehorn it into every page. And I'm not really convinced of the effectiveness of throwing colors over my inks; on the other hand, I know from my old oil painting experience that I can do okay with fully painted color, so maybe I'll keep an eye out for an opportunity to try an all-out watercolor page at some point--could work well for a soft focus close-up portrait shot, for instance (here's an example of someone much more skilled than I using watercolor that way, although I think they also used something non-watercolor to add definition to the facial features). I can also see myself using it for a special jump-out-at-you highlight; looking back, for instance, I think one of the more effective things I did was painting the guard in yellow on page 28--I suppose I cribbed that straight from Frank Miller's That Yellow Bastard story in his Sin City comic series. Seems to work pretty well, but that's something that works well only when used very sparingly.
 
(Oh, and I happened to notice that the pink and blue color scheme I seemed fixated on looked remarkably similar to the super-saturated color in early color (or colorized?) photos, such as this one of Rita Hayworth in 1946. :)
 
Probably my favorite thing about this color adventure was all the discussion it sparked with readers--I didn't expect it to generate as much talk as it did, so that was exciting. It's a funny thing; I think overall the number of people out there on the internet who will sit and read a color comic is much larger than the number who will sit and read a black and white comic; I not too infrequently see comments from readers on other sites that make it clear that anything without color is more or less invisible to them. So I'll admit I did have in the back of my mind the thought that adding color could help A* reach more readers--and the fact that my TWC vote ranking jumped from the low 300s, where it's been for months, to the high 200s with the advent of the color pages did seem to support that notion, although I suppose that could just have been coincidence. But it's also clear that the readers who've stuck with A* have done so because they like--or at least can tolerate--black and white comics, so in that regard adding color isn't necessarily an automatic bonus.
 
And finally, I just feel more comfortable with A* in black and white. So I'll see what I can do with it while staying--for the most part--within that constraint for the time being.
 
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If you've read all this way for some reason, here are some videos to enjoy! Or not, since this first one is an Air Force public relations video from about 1960 advertising their use of animals--bears and chimpanzees--as test subjects in the development of ejection seats for the first sustained supersonic jet bomber, the B-58 Hustler; the narrator's chipper description of crash injuries to the poor bears--who certainly didn't sign up for being rocketed out of a jet at high altitude while moving at Mach 1.3+--is really pretty chilling. :| The earlier video in that series may also be of interest, though--no bear torturing in that one, but rather a surprisingly lengthy animation of the jet's fairly unique ejection system, which encased the crew member in a completely enveloping, armored and pressurized survival pod.
 
And if you really need a serious cheering up after all that, this next video can't fail, because it's Leonard Nimoy singing the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins in full Spock hairdo, since it happened in 1967 while he was filming the second season of the original Star Trek series. I haven't seen the new live-action Hobbit movie, but I really can't imagine it being able to top this.
 
 
 
 
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