For Part 1 of this series of blogs, The Foundations of Writing, click here!
For Part 2: Script, Lettering & Layout, click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
For Part 5: Erasing, Scanning & Cleaning Up click here!
So we’re on to the final leg of the mission to create this Lucy the Octopus comic strip. The physical drawing has been completed, scanned into my mac and cleaned up ready for a dusting of colour…
This is probably my favourite stage of the work. It’s the home stretch and my brain doesn’t have to work as hard as when I do other parts of the process. It’s also cool to see how easily a splash of colour can bring an image to life.
That being said, I’m not suggesting that colouring in general is an easy task. There are many comic colourists who not only put much more detail and time into their work but are infinitely more skilled. A great colourist can control the mood of a scene, suggest complex lighting and texture and help depict the physical structure of the characters and objects in a comic panel.
My own colouring rules however (for a typical episode of Lucy the Octopus at least) were developed to make things as quick and easy for myself as possible…
LUCY THE OCTOPUS COLOURING RULES
1) No lighting
Generally, I colour characters and objects as though they are unaffected by light sources falling on them.
So Lucy and Puffy are the same colour and tone regardless of being out of doors or in, as below…
This saves a heap of time, and I’m happy with the flat look it gives the comic.
For a few special strips, such as in the panel below, I added one lighter tone and one darker shade to each character or object. This limited range of colour variation is far from naturalistic but adds a small touch of dimension and lighting.
2) Repeated colours are consistent, strip to strip
The way any given colour looks to the human eye, varies according to what colour it is placed next to. An artist can chose to consider this carefully or ignore it completely.
Guess what? I go for the easy option and ignore it.
By this I mean that virtually everytime you see a character in the strip, such as Lucy’s sister Patricia below, the tone of their skin, hair and any clothes they may wear are identical. This is regardless of whether it’s night or day, whether they are inside a room or outside in the street.
I’m never considering what tone of yellow should Patricia be today?
The above panels are from strips done over three years. I always just copy the exact tone from the first time I ever coloured her (below). On Photoshop this is done using the eyedropper tool.
The technique of repeating the exact shades of colours for characters is similar to how animated cartoons are often made, especially ones on a tight budget. The colours, design and backgrounds of Cartoon Network’s Samurai Jack were especially an inspiration in making Lucy.
3) Limit coloured lines
Changing the outline of part of a drawing from black to anything else can look great and be an effective tool. Lucy’s patches are coloured with a blue outline, so it’s hard to avoid using this technique altogether, though I try to limit myself as much as possible.
As well as the patches you can see coloured outlines below on the air bubbles around Puffy and the KLIK sound effect.
4) Fill or Colour underneath the lines?
There are plenty of online tutorials on the subject so I won’t go into too much detail, but for those who don’t know, there’s essentially two main ways of colouring work on Photoshop.
Arguably the most straightforward is to click inside the outlines of the shape you want to fill with colour, using the PaintBucket tool, and voila! The shape is the colour you selected. I use this for 95% of my colouring on Lucy.
The second technique, which some folk use for their entire colouring process (as do I on some other projects) is to create each block of colour stroke by stroke using the Pencil tool. You do this by creating a duplicate layer of your linework, (keeping the initial layer safely unadjusted if you need it) setting it to Multiply so that it’s essentially transparent except for the linework, then doing the colouring-in on another new layer below.
Now a couple of things worth quickly mentioning that I do in the majority of Lucy strips, though happen not to in Episode 93…
5) Shadows
As I said earlier, I don’t generally add lighting to my Lucy panels, but I do add simple ground shadows to characters and objects. This is usually done in Photoshop by forming an ellipse shape with the Marquee tool, then filling it with a solid colour…
I think I picked up this shadow style from Peppa Pig.
6) Photographic Textures
One design aspect that I could have saved a lot of time by not including in the Lucy strip is the use of photographic textures added in Photoshop.
I like the feel they give the strip though and the contrast between rocky and sandy backgrounds with the flat blacks of colour of the characters and other subjects such as the spaceship and sea creature in this example…
I also add a wooden look to Lucy’s guitar, Ramani’s bass and a few other bits and bobs. Since doing the panel below I’ve generally stopped adding wood to Geary’s drumsticks as it’s not really noticeable once the strips are reduced to print or online publication size.
Okey dokey – let’s look at Episode 93 specifically…
STEP BY STEP COLOURING EPISODE 93
I start filling in spaces with blocks of colour, beginning with the characters that take up the most space…
There’s not too many decisions to make here. Colours are dictated by the characters’ previous appearances in the strip…
Same goes for the school bus…
Next up I colour the sea monster in Panel 2.
I leave its other appearance in the final panel for now as I have something else in mind for that…
I use the Magic Wand tool to select Miss Faridani’s hair and draw in the blonde streak…
Using the PaintBucket tool, I click on the outline of Lucy’s patches in Panel 4 to change their colour.
I want to do the same to the outline of the sticker on the glass behind her. However, as that shape is connected to the speech bubble above it, if I just clicked on the outline of the sticker I’d change the colour of the outlines for all connecting linework – practically the whole strip.
To avoid this I select the linework with the Magic Wand tool and just colour the bit I want to change using the Pencil Tool…
Earlier when I was laying out the position of each character in pencil, I was very much aware of how the colours of each of them would impact where they ended up.
For example I might avoid two bright pink characters being placed next to each other, so as to maintain contrast and definition within the image.
In this way, you could say the colour process actually began back at the penciling stage.
I carry on filling in the colours of the characters whose colours are determined by the previous appearances in the strip.
I also start to make choices as to the colours which are not predetermined, such as the background of Panel 1.
I base my colour choices for backgrounds on what will make the main subjects of the panel (usually characters in the foreground) stand out. This can mean using a less intense colour as in Panel 1, or a contrasting colour as in Panel 2 and 3.
For the final panel I decide to colour all the subjects in one colour – a rare bit of mood colouring for the Lucy strip). To do this, I remove the purple I’d already put there, then colour on the layer beneath the linework.
I add a background colour to Panel 4.
Now I want to add some highlights to the windows of the school bus to give it a reflective glassy feel.
If I started adding highlights (professional technical term up ahead warning) willy-nilly, then it would be tricky to remove them from the areas which aren’t supposed to be glass.
So on a new layer above the linework, I map out the glass areas.
Here’s those masked areas without any of the rest of the drawing just to show you…
Now I can select all these areas using the Magic Wand tool, hide the layer with these masks, then add my highlights on a new layer. For this I use the Paintbrush tool with a soft brush.
Below again are the masked areas without the drawing, this time with the white glassy highlights. They’re not naturalistic in where they might fall on the curved glass of the bus. Instead I add them according to what works best over the character positions and existing layout.
Now to try something else for that last panel, as it doesn’t sell the peril of the scenario as it is…
Red is good to express danger and emotion, but not sure it works as a background here, so I change the actual subjects within the panel to red rather than blue and drop the background tone altogether.
Right… just a few details to go. I change the colour of the sound effects, adding a white outline around the AAAAAAARRGGHH to make it pop a bit more…
Incidentally, if you’re curious as how much of the colour was done by pointing/clicking within the linework and how much was done with the Pencil tool on a layer below, here’s that lower layer by itself…
Anyhoo, just putting the finishing touches to the colour work. I add white lines to give a metalic finish to the bus and change the colour of the caption in Panel 1, the copyright text and my signature.
For those sort of details, I like to repeat colours that have been used elsewhere in the episode. It helps tie the colour composition together.
So we’re done!
Almost.
I find it’s virtually always worthwhile looking at a seemingly finished strip with fresh eyes the following day (deadlines allowing). You pick up on a few points that can be improved and sometimes even discover why you had a niggling doubt as to whether a strip is working or not.
So in this case I decide the movement lines in the last panel would look better in red, matching the other elements of the panel.
Then one final thing is bothering me.
Anyone who’s been reading all of these process blogs (Bless you!) may have picked up on a recurring theme. Even though you can divide the process of work into different key stages…
Writing
Lettering
Layout
Pencils
Ink
Colours
…at any point you might be considering future stages or adjusting details from earlier stages. Case in point, is my final tweak on this strip. Not a colour adjustment but something directly relating to the dialogue from the writing stage…
In Panel 4 Lucy and Kate debate holding on to the window handle.
Kate says “SHUT IT LUCY! WHY SHOULD I LISTEN TO…”
I realise there’s a possibility that readers may take the words “SHUT IT!” as a reference to shutting the window rather than just Lucy stopping talking.
Not the biggest disaster, but I do want the strip to read as smoothly as possible without there being any confusion even for a fraction of a second, so I change Kate’s dialogue, making sure that the new words still fit comfortably in the given speech bubble…
Pheweee!
Now I’ve filled 6 blogs with not only my general techniques for making Lucy, but also explanations of tiny details. Hopefully it gives a decent overview of the thought process involved.
It’s important to remember that most of the creative choices I’ve discussed are split second decisions and not as drawn out as they may seem when spelled out in writing. Solving the problems along the way makes for fun moments that take a creator step by tiny step, closer to the comic looking in reality like it does in their head.
Down the line, I will use the full size Photshop file when creating the layout for the printed comic using Adobe InDesign.
Now though, I use the Save for Web function on Photoshop to create a low-res JPEG of the episode (980 x 335 pixels). I then schedule it on my WordPress site to be published online on the desired date.
Then we’re on to the next strip! Bear in mind, by the time I’ve finished one strip I’ll most likely have written, lettered and layed out panels for several upcoming strips so I can dive straight into the penciling again.
Thanks for reading – hope it was vaguely informative and remotely interesting!
Stay tuned for the final special entry in this blog which should tie everything together!
For Part 1 of this series of blogs, The Foundations of Writing, click here!
For Part 2: Script, Lettering & Layout, click here!
For Part 3: Pencils, click here!
For Part 4: Inks, click here!
For Part 5: Erasing, Scanning & Cleaning Up click here!
For a video overview click here!
