My plan is to colour the comic digitally. I will shade everything in the style of comics, with high contrast in the light and shade. I will experiment with how half-tone shading and cross-hatching work within my drawings. I will de-saturate background objects to create the illusion of depth, as in the Batman comics I referenced earlier. The colour scheme will be mostly cool colours, as it takes place outdoors and at night, and he is in a bleak situation- with accents of warm colours. This works really well in pieces by
Sam Bosma; his comics have a mixture of cool-coloured panels with warm accents and warm-coloured panels with cool accents. The man's skin colour will be one of the warm coloured accents, in the colouring style of Norman Rockwell. I will also look closely at Rockwell's pieces for his portrayals of emotion, and for a better idea of the man's facial shape in the next set of character designs. Panels with high emotion, such as the fear of the creature or the creature's anger will be warm-coloured with cool accents.
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| Sam Bosma |
A lot of comics use flat colours rather than fully "painting" the whole range of colour and tone, I expect in order to save time, since there are a lot of panels and scenes, so it would be too time consuming to meticulously colour each drawing. This will also be a good strategy for me, since this comic will have quite a few pages, and a lot of panels within those pages. I plan to create as many final pieces as possible for this project, so time is an issue. I have also only recently tried colouring digitally, so any attempts I make to improve my digital painting skills should be left out of the final pieces. Mostly flat colours will be more than enough.
I found this tutorial on colouring a comic digitally with a technique I may try, as it sounds a little more simplified than my attempts at teaching myself in the past:
Copper: Step-by-Step Process, by Kazu Kibuishi
Kibuishi pencils his comic in a coloured pencil, which he can then easily remove from the scan with Hue+Saturation. He inks using a mixture of fineliner and dip pen - I will be using a mixture of fineliner and brush pen. On the computer, he sets the linework itself to multiply; In my prevous attempts at colouring, I would set the colours to multiply, which would cause problems with multiple layers. He uses Image>Adjustments>Threshold to turn the lineart purely black and white with no anti-aliasing, so then he can use the magic wand tool to select areas and colour them individually.
I will definitely try this technique, as it sounds a lot faster and more effective then my previous attempts at digital colouring, and it is well suited to using flat colours. The final results of the Copper Comic look very well done - I would have been nervous about getting rid of the anti-aliasing, effectively reducing the lineart to pixel art, but it obvious works well for Copper. I will try it out.
