Behind the Lines

Page one of episode three of The Word Smith has now gone on-line.  As an added bonus, I, for reasons I cannot fathom, decided to colour this page which was very time consuming!  Thus, do not expect to see many coloured pages in the future (unless I get much faster at it) and do make sure to go look at the final coloured page because it was kind of a pain to do.

I also figured I'd take a few moments to talk about how I went about colouring the page.  For those familiar with Photoshop or colouring comics in general, this is probably all old hat.  For those who aren't terribly familiar with either of those things it might still be a bit dull, but go and read it anyway.

So, naturally, I started with the scanned in inked pages.  One could, of course, do everything digitally, but I'm still doing thing drawing/inking the old fashion way, at least for now.  Here's the black and white page:

Yay!  The first step is to put the line art on a new layer (leaving the background blank) and set the layer to multiply.  This makes the white parts transparent, allowing you to draw underneath.

The first step is a technique called "flatting".  I'm not going to go over this in excrutiating details (tutorials exist on the weeb for the terminally curious), but the basic idea, is that you outline each area (in my case using the polygonal lasso tool) and fill each area with a solid colour.  Generally, the outlines should be created under the inked lines so that, when filled, there are no gaps betwixt the lines and the coloured areas.  This is all done on the background layer (or, I suppose, any layer underneath the line layer) with all forms of anti-aliasing, feathering and so on turned off.  The idea is to create areas of solid colour that a colourist can easily select when doing their colouring.  With the line layer turned off, the flats will look something like the following:

See?  Kind of a neat looking effect, in and of itself.  You  can actually use any colours you want at the flatting stage, but since I'm doing my own colouring, I just flatted with the final colours.  As you might imagine, doing all of this by hand is a bit tedious.  I understand there are plug-ins that can help with this so I will probably look into that the next time I decide I'm crazy enough to do some colouring.

Now, one can leave things as flat colours, but I decided to go a little further and add some shadows.  I actually did this fairly similarly to flatting.  I created a shadow layer between the flat and line layers set to multiply with about 80% opacity.  Then I just created my shadow areas in a similar manner to flatting, except there were a lot fewer areas so it didn't take quite as long.  With the line art turned off, it looks like the following:

Similar to above, except now with shadows.

Well, that was basically it.  One can add hilights and other effects, but I decided to stop with shadows.  And don't forget that you can see the final, full colour version here.

Freak Out,
-TFitC