Added 1 new A* page:Man this color stuff is getting way too detailed. : P
I did some color practice over the weekend, using a quick little fantasy sketch in my notebook:
^ That was before I was doing quite as much color filter processing as I am now, so the colors aren't as intense. Even so, it was tricky to work that many multicolored objects into a single 32-color scene and have it hold together; one thing that helped was turning the distant jungle brown rather than green--I was stuck on that until I took a break to drive and pick up some dinner, and noticed that the sun setting behind some trees was turning them more of a brown shade than green anyway. Another discovery that helped was that I didn't have to color the objects, like the woman's skin, separately under the shadow of the awning--I could just leave them as one shadow color, for the most part, and it still read okay; I'd been thinking I might have to use a semi-transparent layer to pull off the shadow, but that didn't go so well; in fact, every time I've tried to use semi-transparent layers rather than 100% opaque layers to get color, it just hasn't come out right at all in this wacky method.
Speaking of which, here's how the colors in today's A* page looked before the color processing (Hard Light x2 and then 0.75 Levels gamma adjustment)--these are the colors I selected and laid down manually in Photoshop, I mean:
Weird how the colors shift, huh? And here's a quicky alternate palette I tried after I was done, when I was worrying that today's palette didn't match the one in yesterday's view of the same location sufficiently:
But that didn't look so hot, and anyway I kinda knew palettes were going to shift from day to day, that's actually part of the fun for me, if I don't worry about them.
Also over the weekend, I was looking up comic coloring wisdom on the internet. I found the web site of Matt Hollingsworth, who is currently doing some pretty neat flat color work on Marvel's "Hawkeye" series (and I realized he's also coloring a comic called "The Wake," drawn by Sean Murphy, who does some pretty great stuff with ink); on his site, right here, Hollingsworth has a detailed article on how comic coloring used to work, when you did it with chemicals and color chart codes--he mentions something I didn't know, which was that DC comics only allowed the artists to work from a 64-color chart, whereas Marvel used a 125-color set, so their color could be a lot more subtle and detailed. Maybe that was subconsciously why I was way more into Marvel stuff back then?
If you scroll down to the bottom of that page and hit the link to the previous page, he's got a detailed breakdown of how he does his digital colors, and reading that made me realize that I really am not into the usual comic method of coloring, with its "flatting" (a set-up for coloring neatly inside the lines, basically : P), "trapping," shading, blurring, intensely detailed "rendering," and texturing. It all just looks too...sterile and artificial for my tastes, like it's done by a robot--the flat coloring method Hollingsworth has since developed for "Hawkeye" is much more creative. I'm really not into the digital style spelled out on his older page there, though; its so careful and methodical--can't we encourage professional colorists to go outside the lines sometimes? Man. Anyway if you *are* into that sort of highly precise and technical inside-the-line coloring, the another print comic pro, Dave McCaig, started a forum for colorists some time back, gutterzombie.com, and they go all into that stuff in microscopic Photoshop detail; the forum doesn't seem to be quite as busy as it was in its heyday, and it looks like the circle of pro (or soon to be pro) colorists like McCaig who started it don't pop in much these days, but there are still people posting and also really elaborate tutorials, and handy tips and so forth.
Anyhoosle that's the professional coloring stuff I found, and it more or less satisfied me that I am not gonna worry about how the pros do it because it looks boring. Oh yeah I also listened to a podcast um where was it...ah yes: in episode 19 of his "Decompressed" podcast, print comic author Kieron Gillen interviews professional comic colorists Bettie Breitweiser and Matt Wilson--these are more folks who do work for the big comic publishers, and they talk in detail about why they colored specific panels or pages of comics they've worked on in their various ways, which is interesting to hear, although again, looking at the results told me that I'm not so into that style.
By the weekend I'd had three people, separately, liken my coloring to the old, pre-Photoshop coloring of the '80s--the chemicals and chart days, I mean. That surprised me, and then worried me, because a lot of the coloring back then was not so great--like, they used a lot of bright pink and orange in inappropriate places...eh whereas when I do it, it's totally tasteful and pizzazzy. Ehm. Well, the fact is that the '80s was when I started reading comics, so I'm not gonna pretend like I can escape its influence when it comes to comic coloring--I mean, I had no idea that the coloring I was doing was '80s-esque until it was pointed out to me, but now that I look at it, I can definitely see what the 80s comics have done to me, and...hey, what can ya do. : P Not that I'm consciously going to embrace retro coloring or anything either, I just think it's interesting how some of those old colors have dyed my propensities.
And if you don't know what I mean by '80s comic coloring, the gotham city by way of riverdale tumbl blog is absolutely packed with examples (not safe for color or dot-pattern-sensitive eyeballs, perhaps!).
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