Colouring Joseph

Having pencilled and inked my 23 page Joseph story for Bible Society (I referred to it as a 23 page graphic novel on Facebook, at which Gordon Rennie pointed out that that's what we call a comic) now I have the task of colouring it all.

It's a strange thing that, after thirty years working as a professional comic artist - and we must have passed that anniversary at some point recently as I had my first work in Oink in 1987 then had my first work accepted by Gas magazine in 1988 and went full time freelance in the summer of 1989 - I still lack confidence in certain areas. The writing I feel most confident about, but even then I don't do enough of it regularly to feel that I'm as good as I could be. I feel awkward about my artwork. I like my humorous style, and I know I'll never be the draughtsmen that I grew up admiring. But it's the colouring about which I am most concerned.

Back in the day, when I was doing colour pages every month for The Damage and others, I used to use water colour and magic markers and started to feel I knew what I was doing. I even painted pages in goache, god help me. Took ages. Since I've had access to Photoshop, which I think came with the Mac I acquired in 1998 (so, another anniversary) I've been entirely self taught, and never sure that I'm doing things as well as I could. So I put a shout out on Facebook to see if anyone had top tips. A few came in.

One thing I was obsessing about was Flatting, which all the colourists of US comics seem to do. So I did it for the example you see on this page. Does it make things quicker? I'm not sure. I've ended up working with a mixture of my previous method, and a couple of techniques like flatting, consistent use of a purple shadow layer, and this time I've decided against selecting and colouring outlines, which I spent a lot of time on in previous strips. Let's see how we get on shall we? Meantime, here are some of the tips that came in on Facebook.

Nigel Auchterlounie First have b&w line art on top layer set to multiply locked. A copy of that under to colour. Fill an empty layer with a base colour inbetween. Set that to multiply and merge with the bottom line art copy. This should give you 2 layers. Line art and a copy under that's coloured with one colour. This means anything you miss will still have a colour. Fill gutters and eyes and teeth white. Then all skin tones. Colour things that have to be a particular colour first. Then you're not colouring a jumper green then realising you have to change it because they're standing in front of a green bush. That's all I got. Good luck.

Andrew Dodd The line work I right click the magic wand and select the black in the line art first, creating a black layer that uses the line art as a mask, this can help later when changing the colour of the lines. I block all the colours in and on a separate layer add a hue and saturation layer as a mask for the shadows. This means that if I change any of the colours, the shadow changes with it. Background on it's own colour, characters on their's.

Gordon Rennie “...a 23 page graphic novel...”
Don’t we just call them ‘comics’?

Jamie Smart I don’t do all that flatting stuff I’ve never understood it. I do similar to Nigel’s method, I’ll put 4 b+w pages all on one page and go through dropping one colour in, then repeat with a different colour, etc etc. My Wacom’s super helpful to with its shortcut buttons, so my left hand is clicking between wand and painter while my right hand is picking the colours. Good luck with it all!

Chris Okse Oxenbury I discovered this Kev , https://www.ayalpinkus.nl/Flatton.html It creates flats and that .

Kev Sutherland Thanks to Okse for directing me to Flatton. Not sure how useful it'll be, until I can give it a colour guide. Here's my first use of it...

Kev Sutherland But you know, at a push I could live with this for a random panel where colour matching didn't matter(same panel after two minutes tweaking)

UPDATE: Sunday 21st Oct, page 10 coloured
Mon Oct 22 - pages 2 - 4 coloured
Tues Oct 23 - pages 1, 5 - 6 coloured
Weds Oct 24 - pages 7 - 9 coloured
Thurs Oct 25 - Page 11 coloured, then off to Socks gig in Canterbury
Sat Oct 27 - page 21 coloured
Sun Oct 28 - page 22 coloured
Mon Oct 29 - 11.45am p 23 coloured. 1.57pm p 20 coloured. 4.58pm p 12 coloured.
Tues Oct 30 - 7.50am p13. 10.27am p14. 12.15 p15. 3.15pm p16. 5.15pm p17. 9pm p18. Six pages in a day, only one to go!
Weds Oct 31 - page 19, final page, coloured and whole comic delivered & invoiced 11am. Hoorah!



Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.