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Description
I thought I'd put some of my WIP colouring online since, well, I find it interesting anyway! These two panels are from the Slagacon 2011 convention comic, I believe there are still issues available here: [link]

This is how I'm doing my colouring at the moment anyway. I'd appreciate any heads up on improvements! This was both an attempt at quality AND speed; to meet the publishing deadlines I had to do a page every 4-6 hours which is pretty painful!

1 - First of all, the lines. These are by the excellent whose deviantart is well worth checking out! With lines it is worth spending the extra time to make sure they are properly adjusted for contrast and are very crisp black and white. Some artists will do this for you, some will just scan the page and leave it to the colourist to adjust.

I used to put the lines on top as a multiply layer. What I do now is to put them on top, add a layer mask, paste the lines into the layer mask and invert them. This has exactly the same effect as multiply, but means it is simple to colour the lines different shades.

2 - Backgrounds! I used to do backgrounds last because I hate them, but they are a necessary evil, and should actually be done first in order to ensure that the lighting on the characters is correct. There's nothing worse than spending ages on the foreground only to realise that the background actually dictated a completely different lighting scheme.

In this case the background was three layers - flats, some shading and a light texture. I probably did the texture too strongly here, though it was destined for the printed page and such subtleties are less obvious there. Honest.

3 - Foreground flats! Some people do a layer per colour, I just do two - first I do a layer shading each character completely in a base coat (for example, the chap on the far left is completely red in one layer). This means that I can later easily select each character if I need to add any lighting effects easily to the entire body. On the next layer, I add the other flat colours. This is a step that I find takes a surprising amount of time because I like to trace all the areas to fill by hand (I have tried doing the old 'select and fill' but find you need to manually fix the bits it missed).

4 - Shading! I give the shading its own layers. I like to smudge in the light-to-dark and then go over really light or really dark areas with a paintbrush. I used to use the airbrush tool but barely do anymore. I know I'm sometimes still too scared to go too dark or too light, but it's something I'm working on.

5 - Maybe you think this is finished there, but no! Next, I colour in any lines that need to be coloured. Usually I'd try to colour as many as possible, but working on a strict deadline means you need to be choosy. Here because the box is supposed to be bright, I've turned some of the background lines white in order to turn them into highlights on the wall and give the effect of brightness. The light lines leaping off the characters have also been turned white.

I decided early on that the characters in this panel would be blue due to the light reflecting off the box. Rather than just colour them blue, I coloured them normally and then shifted their hues to blue at the last moment, since I didn't trust my eyes to be able to tonally pick out the different shades of blue I'd need.

6 - Glow! Glow glow glow! The glow layers (there's 3 here) are hard light, and place on top of the lines. It looks much better than underneath (I used to do this, it was a real headbanger when I worked out I should be putting them on top) because otherwise the black lines are on top of the glow, whereas a glow SHOULD drown out lines. Doing this also has the bonus of adding more shade to the lines.

Eyes are the obvious glow points with robots, but I also added a glow to the orange punch effect in the first panel. I then went to town with the second one - I used a circular gradient focussed on the box and cut off at the panel borders. To be honest, the background should probably have been a bit bluer too, I'm not sure.

Any comments and crits welcome! Again, this was both an attempt at quality and speed, in a perfect world I'd like to spend hours on each panel, but with the threat of deadlines, that isn't always possible, especially if you need to get 22 pages done pronto! If people are interested, I might upload some more WIP examples.

Description
I thought I'd put some of my WIP colouring online since, well, I find it interesting anyway! These two panels are from the Slagacon 2011 convention comic, I believe there are still issues available here: [link]

This is how I'm doing my colouring at the moment anyway. I'd appreciate any heads up on improvements! This was both an attempt at quality AND speed; to meet the publishing deadlines I had to do a page every 4-6 hours which is pretty painful!

1 - First of all, the lines. These are by the excellent whose deviantart is well worth checking out! With lines it is worth spending the extra time to make sure they are properly adjusted for contrast and are very crisp black and white. Some artists will do this for you, some will just scan the page and leave it to the colourist to adjust.

I used to put the lines on top as a multiply layer. What I do now is to put them on top, add a layer mask, paste the lines into the layer mask and invert them. This has exactly the same effect as multiply, but means it is simple to colour the lines different shades.

2 - Backgrounds! I used to do backgrounds last because I hate them, but they are a necessary evil, and should actually be done first in order to ensure that the lighting on the characters is correct. There's nothing worse than spending ages on the foreground only to realise that the background actually dictated a completely different lighting scheme.

In this case the background was three layers - flats, some shading and a light texture. I probably did the texture too strongly here, though it was destined for the printed page and such subtleties are less obvious there. Honest.

3 - Foreground flats! Some people do a layer per colour, I just do two - first I do a layer shading each character completely in a base coat (for example, the chap on the far left is completely red in one layer). This means that I can later easily select each character if I need to add any lighting effects easily to the entire body. On the next layer, I add the other flat colours. This is a step that I find takes a surprising amount of time because I like to trace all the areas to fill by hand (I have tried doing the old 'select and fill' but find you need to manually fix the bits it missed).

4 - Shading! I give the shading its own layers. I like to smudge in the light-to-dark and then go over really light or really dark areas with a paintbrush. I used to use the airbrush tool but barely do anymore. I know I'm sometimes still too scared to go too dark or too light, but it's something I'm working on.

5 - Maybe you think this is finished there, but no! Next, I colour in any lines that need to be coloured. Usually I'd try to colour as many as possible, but working on a strict deadline means you need to be choosy. Here because the box is supposed to be bright, I've turned some of the background lines white in order to turn them into highlights on the wall and give the effect of brightness. The light lines leaping off the characters have also been turned white.

I decided early on that the characters in this panel would be blue due to the light reflecting off the box. Rather than just colour them blue, I coloured them normally and then shifted their hues to blue at the last moment, since I didn't trust my eyes to be able to tonally pick out the different shades of blue I'd need.

6 - Glow! Glow glow glow! The glow layers (there's 3 here) are hard light, and place on top of the lines. It looks much better than underneath (I used to do this, it was a real headbanger when I worked out I should be putting them on top) because otherwise the black lines are on top of the glow, whereas a glow SHOULD drown out lines. Doing this also has the bonus of adding more shade to the lines.

Eyes are the obvious glow points with robots, but I also added a glow to the orange punch effect in the first panel. I then went to town with the second one - I used a circular gradient focussed on the box and cut off at the panel borders. To be honest, the background should probably have been a bit bluer too, I'm not sure.

Any comments and crits welcome! Again, this was both an attempt at quality and speed, in a perfect world I'd like to spend hours on each panel, but with the threat of deadlines, that isn't always possible, especially if you need to get 22 pages done pronto! If people are interested, I might upload some more WIP examples.