webcomics tutorial

20
Webcomics Tutorial – 10 Lessons For Better Colouring Posted on November 1, 2010 by admin This how-to-colour-comics tutorial is geared towards webcomics but applies to regular comics as well. I’m not going to teach you the ins-and-outs of a particular art program. Instead, you will learn 10 important things to consider whether you colour with Photoshop or a paintbrush. These lessons will keep your comic storytelling clear and dynamic. If you do a goofy strip like my own Princess Planet , or an all out action fest like the X-Men the lessons still apply. 1. Read vs Real Comics is sequential story telling and therefore its primary goal is not making the nicest picture – its about making the clearest picture to illustrate your story. Just like you don’t draw every hair on a persons head, every pore on their skin and every leaf on a tree, you need to make decisions about what colours you will and won’t include. How much shading is enough and how much is too much? With the advent of computer colouring there are a lot of mainstream comics coloured in a way that makes them more “realistic”. This is often at odds with what is most clear. So I recommend that choosing colours for your characters and their surroundings becomes a question of what “reads” best, not what’s most “real”. For a simple gag strip I think the first head is over drawn and the last head is over-coloured. Depending on how real you want to make your strip you may find your level of detail varies.

Upload: henricuseramawanto

Post on 15-Dec-2015

11 views

Category:

Documents


1 download

DESCRIPTION

COREL

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Webcomics Tutorial

Webcomics Tutorial – 10 Lessons For Better ColouringPosted on November 1, 2010 by admin

This how-to-colour-comics tutorial is geared towards webcomics but applies

to regular comics as well. I’m not going to teach you the ins-and-outs of a

particular art program. Instead, you will learn 10 important things to

consider whether you colour with Photoshop or a paintbrush. These lessons

will keep your comic storytelling clear and dynamic. If you do a goofy strip

like my own Princess Planet, or an all out action fest like the X-Men the

lessons still apply.

1. Read vs Real

Comics is sequential story telling and therefore its primary goal is not

making the nicest picture – its about making the clearest picture to

illustrate your story. Just like you don’t draw every hair on a persons head,

every pore on their skin and every leaf on a tree, you need to make

decisions about what colours you will and won’t include. How much shading

is enough and how much is too much? With the advent of computer

colouring there are a lot of mainstream comics coloured in a way that

makes them more “realistic”. This is often at odds with what is most clear.

So I recommend that choosing colours for your characters and their

surroundings becomes a question of what “reads” best, not what’s most

“real”.

For a simple gag strip I think the first head is over drawn and the last head

is over-coloured. Depending on how real you want to make your strip you

may find your level of detail varies.

Page 2: Webcomics Tutorial

2. Basics of Colour Theory

The colour wheel is made of 6 major colours. Colours opposite each other

are called complimentary. They make the biggest impact when you put

them beside each other. You don’t lose a green snot monster on a red wall,

but they might seem a little more subdued on a yellow or blue background.

Page 3: Webcomics Tutorial

Analogous colours are ones that are 3 in a row on the colour wheel. We

start to include the non-major 6 colours like orange-yellow, blue-green etc.

They make a very pleasing combination. This is good for home decorating.

If you just use two colours beside each other some people think these

colours clash. I’ve heard a lot of people say you don’t wear red and purple

(bad news Dracula!) and blue and green should never be seen except round

and round in the washing machine. This isn’t as bad if you use stretch the

colours to be almost analogous, so that you have blue and yellowish green.

Another reason colours clash is that they are at the same value. Picture

value being “If this colour was on a black and white tv, what grey would it

Page 4: Webcomics Tutorial

be?”. You can test this out by converting your computer file to greyscale. If

you have colours too close to each other on the scale of grey, they become

hard to read, especially if you don’t have an outline between the colours. If

you colour your outlines or don’t use outlines at all, be very aware of this.

If you add black to a colour it’s called a shade. If you add white it’s called a

tint. But adding black to a colour is bad news. It makes colours muddy and

flat. If you want a darker colour try adding other colours to it, like painters

do. A purplish shadow is deeper than a blacker one. Here’s a link to a

Photoshop palette that has all the basic colours without black that recreates

the traditional mainstream comic colours.

A monochrome colour scheme is when you colour with only one colour,

white and black.TXcomics strips The Abominable Charles

Christopher and Sin Titulo both use this simple version to add a quiet tone

to their comics. It’s harder to make a clashing or unappealing picture with

only one colour besides black and white. It’s also harder to make a bold,

grab your attention from the other side of the room one. If you want bold in

a monochrome scheme, you usually rely on stark white and black to grab

attention (click to enlarge).

Page 5: Webcomics Tutorial

Neutral colours are ones not on the wheel, like greys and browns. These

colours won’t dominate the other colours. You can create “dusty” or “sandy”

tones of regular colours by making the values of cyan, magenta and yellow

close to each other on your computer program’s colour sliders

3. RGB vs CMYK

Speaking of CMYK, if you are making a webcomic you may be tempted to

use all the colours of the computers spectrum and colour in RGB.

Unfortunately if you ever want to make a print edition, your comic will need

to be converted to CMYK and you may lose a lot in translation. If you plan

ahead you can save yourself a lot of headache. And obviously you want to

make files at AT LEAST 300dpi (but preferably 600), then save a 72dpi

version for the web. Using CMYK sliders also more closely mirrors natural

paint mixing, so if you learn how to colour on a computer this method will

be easier to make the switch to paints. You can work in RGB in CMYK

preview mode which will let you know how it will print, and that’s just as

good.

If you’re colouring in Photoshop, make yourself a swatch palette of your

most used colours. This can be your character’s clothes and skin tones,

their home base, or whatever.

Page 6: Webcomics Tutorial

This CMYK lesson also applies if you are drawing or painting your work by

hand and scanning it in. If you draw in black and white, scan it in as line art

for crisp linework, before you convert it to CMYK. If you are scanning in

paintings you will have to adjust the colour balance of the images to get the

truest colours to your painting. Taking a hi-resolution photograph may yield

a better result. Either way, the file should be CMYK in the end if you want

to see how it will print in a book.

“Print is dead!” you say? Well webcomic creators still make a good chunk of

their money from prints and books. At comic conventions we almost never

have fans ask us creators “when will you have this as an iPhone ap?”. The

question we are most frequently asked is “When will you be collecting it in a

book” or “When does the next collection come out?” People still want books.

4. Character Design

Comic characters usually have very different colour schemes to identify

themselves. For instance Spider-Man is primarily red. His main villains are

his complimentary colour, green. This gives the greatest punch and easy

separation when Spidey gets tangled up with Doc Oc, The Scorpion, The

Vulture, Sandman, Electro and of course Green Goblin.

Page 7: Webcomics Tutorial

I remember watching the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace where Bond

(in a black tuxedo) fought against similarly proportioned white guy (also in

a black tuxedo) in a scaffolding-filled room. They zipped up and down ropes,

kicked, shot, climbed and all the good things you’d expect in an action

sequence. But with the quick cuts and shaky camera I couldn’t tell the two

apart. This would be great storytelling if there was someone off to the side

trying to shoot one of them but unsure which one to shoot at. Alas, that

wasn’t the case. So if for some reason you are drawing all of your

characters in the same outfit and they have to be the same build and race,

at least change their hair colour. I mean, it worked for separating blonde

Betty from raven-haired Veronica.

Page 8: Webcomics Tutorial

Think not only about what will set your characters apart from each other

but apart from their backgrounds. So, if your character spends his time in

the jungle, and you make him green, your character becomes a ghost that

even the reader can’t see half of the time. As cool as that might be,

remember that it can become frustrating. People may not bother trying to

figure out where that word balloon is coming from. They may just click onto

another easier to read webcomic. While red might make the hero look

foolishly confident, a blue, yellow or black might work well.

If you really want a green person in a green location, like Swamp Thing in

the swamps, you need to be brazen enough to colour the background in

colours that are not real. A quick look through a classic Swamp Thing comic

and I see old Swampy against lilac tree trunks, bright blue swamp water,

red skies, and pale, pale green empty backgrounds.

Page 9: Webcomics Tutorial

This seems less unusual if your comic takes place in a made-up world. In

The Princess Planet I have pink skies and purple grass sometimes so I can

do whatever I think suits the story. In a realistic setting it takes real guts to

colour things the “wrong” colour. Andy B’s comic, Raising Hell, colours with

red and blue. He only introduces new colours when he’s drawing attention

to something new, like a yellow school bus appearing out of nowhere.

Page 10: Webcomics Tutorial

5. Start Simple

The next lesson is really simple: Colour the things you know have to be a

certain colour. Once you’ve established your character’s colour scheme,

stick to it. For instance I know Princess Christi has spray-tan orange skin,

white blonde hair and a reddish-orange jumpsuit. That’s not going to

change unless there’s something dramatically different in the scene. The

Gorgon character in my strip is always the same colour too.

Then you colour the things that are usually the same colour, like tree trunks

are brown, grass is green, sidewalks are grey. Sure, untended grass can go

yellow but it’s that’s atypical.

Page 11: Webcomics Tutorial

Then you turn on your thinking cap and colour the things that are a bit

more variable in their colour. Like leaves on the trees are usually green but

it’s not illogical to see red, brown and orange in the fall. Could your comic

take place in the fall? Would it help the colour scheme of the page? What

about the sky? During the day it’s blue but at sunset it can be a rainbow of

colours. Does that help or hinder your storytelling? Is your character hiding

or are they the centre of attention? Here I can make rock grey, brown,

sandy yellow, biege… there are a lot of applicable colours to choose from. I

selected a cool pinkish grey.

Then you should have a pretty good framework to start in with colours that

never have to be any particular colour, like cars, pants, walls, ice cream etc.

You can start referring back to your generic colour theory like

complimentary, analogous, etc. For this gag I want the “rock” to sit apart

from the “stone”, so I made the stone a warmer, darker grey than than the

rock figures.

Page 12: Webcomics Tutorial

6. Avoiding Busy

When you have a lot of things to colour in it can get busy-looking very

quickly. A trick that help me is to leave out one of the main 6 colours (red,

orange, yellow, green, blue or purple). The image below doesn’t have any

orange (and barely any yellow).

Page 13: Webcomics Tutorial

When you have drawn a crowd scene you might look at all the characters

you’ve drawn and worry about labouring over the colouring of each

individual. Luckily, it’s not usually in your best interest to spend your time

doing that. Most of the time you want to set your characters apart from the

crowd. You want people to know “there is a crowd here, but the people

talking are the important ones”. So you can colour the crowd different hues

of the same colour. I usually use purple. I saw it done a lot in comics when I

Page 14: Webcomics Tutorial

was a kid and it makes a lot of sense. Almost nothing in real life is purple so

people won’t confuse the crowd of people for a crowd of green trees, grey

rocks or skin coloured nudists. They also won’t blend into the background

elements you’ve set up Unless your comic is about Grimace fighting the

Purple People Eater inside the Hulk’s pants, purple is your friend.

The time when you do want to colour the whole crowd is if you want the

reader to labour over the crowd looking for someone, like a Where’s Waldo

puzzle. This is good to slow down the reader on an establishing panel of life

in a new location. It’s also good if your character has just given someone

the slip into a big crowd and that person is feeling overwhelmed with where

to look. However, if your escapist has been spotted by their pursuer, you

may want to fall back on a purple crowd with the suddenly spotted

character in their regular colour.

In this comic I coloured all of the confectionery different colours to suggest

the huge variety of deliciousness. I’ve used purple in the last panel here to

make the complimentary gold pieces pop off of the background.

Page 15: Webcomics Tutorial

Neutral tones also accomplish the same thing as the purple. Blending your

base colour with white, black or it’s complimentary colour can give you a

duller version to work with. In this comic I have a panel where I wanted an

intense rainbow of colours behind the Unicorn Queen. This works at

differentiating the Queen because she is mainly neutral colours: white and a

blue-ish grey. In the lower panels the bright purple hydra is highlighted by

the dull, grey rock.

Page 16: Webcomics Tutorial

7. Let There Be (Some) Light

Light sources are great at two things: mood and overdoing things.

Sometimes people go over board colouring comics based exactly on the

light sources drawn in the panel. For instance with this comic I have a

couple of light sources, the fire under the cauldron and the open doorway.

Instead of calculating exactly where these competing light sources are

going to light my characters I just throw a little hint at both. This comic

isn’t about the heat from the cauldron or the light from out of doors. So a

drop shadow underneath the walking characters in the last panel suggests

light from the door and an orange glow around the fireplaces suggests a

light there too. Any more than that would be like drawing the characters

with enough hand wrinkles that a fortuneteller could read their palms. This

is a comic, not a historical documentation. If you worry too much about

casting the right shadow and picking up the right highlight in someone’s

hair you’re probably not seeing the forest for the trees.

Page 17: Webcomics Tutorial

But a few lighting cues can go a long way to building a mood. Simply

lighting someone from below gives them an eerie appearance. If you add a

bit of blue to your basic palette you’re ready to colour your characters at

night. Or you could wash everyone out with red if their at a roller disco.

8. Special Effects

Page 18: Webcomics Tutorial

You might be tempted to add a solar flare from the sun in the distance or a

radiant glow from a campfire. This occurs more in comics now that

colourists are almost like painters, filling in blank backgrounds that

pencillers and inkers have left empty. When you add special effects, it

draws attention to the special effects and away from what the writer

(hopefully you) is trying to say in the scene. Is it more important the sun

seems bright or that we look at the character’s reaction to the sun. Who is

the story about? The desert nomad or the sun?

9. Changing Locations

Once you have a colour palette established for your scene, you can use a

shift in palettes to indicate a changing of scenes or mood. If a person

suddenly gets really angry you can put them on a red background. If you’ve

suddenly gone from Sally’s apartment to Brenda’s apartment, you can tell

people by changing the wall colour. Below you can see a transition from one

stone home to another.

10. Sketch From Life

A great way to build up your palettes is to sketch with your computer facing

a window (or if you have a laptop, just go outside somewhere). These are

Page 19: Webcomics Tutorial

sketches I’ve done in different weather at different times of the day. All of

these have been used colouring one of my comics set in a city.

If you are looking to use a different palette, try scanning in (or finding

online) a picture that you like, and eyedrop the colours from it. Just like you

wouldn’t trace another person’s artwork, you wouldn’t swipe a complete

colour scheme. You’re bound to tinker with some of the values, especially

from a radiant coloured photo. But it can force you out of your regular

routine if you’re looking to introduce a new mood. This works great if you’re

thinking things like “What colour can snow appear at night?”. You might

use the eyedropper and disover the blue snow is actually grey but looked

blue next to the other colours. You can try to recreate the environment

Page 20: Webcomics Tutorial

where grey looks blue or you can make the snow the blue you see it to be in

your mind and work from there. You have options.

The last thing to say is “Keep working at it!” If you’re colouring on the

computer it’s really not very time consuming to try switching a few colours

around to see if the wooden furniture should be a reddish brown or a bluish

brown, or if the sky works better as sunset or broad baylight. Do a couple

versions of your comic and see which one you like better, maybe combining

the best of both. Just like learning anything, there’s a lot of trial and error.

Hopefully these tips have helped you to find some paths in the wilderness

that should lead you to your goal. Good luck and have fun!

If you enjoyed this tutorial, you may want to check out my book