COMIC BOOK COLORISTS: THE UNSUNG HEROES OF COMIC BOOK ART
This month I dedicated the challenge to trying my hand at coloring panels of comic books. I mainly focused on doing the flats, which for the non-comic book crowd, is adding a solid color to every object within a given page/panel. I wanted to do this challenge so I could gain a better appreciation for this particular skill set. And after doing this for less than a month my respect for people who do this for a living sky rocketed. The flats are a tedious undertaking and made especially more difficult if the line work is very intricate. Doing one panel of one page could take upwards of an hour and a half. To give that context, an average comic book is around 20 pages and let's just say has an average of 5 panels a page. Based on those numbers you're looking at 100 panels and 150 hours worth of work. And that's just one issue of a series.
So to anyone that ever undervalues the work that a comic book artist does, try doing a page yourself and you'll be singing a different tune. It's amazing to me because I feel like comic book colorists aren't very well known either. I could list 20 writers and 20 artists in under 5 minutes, but I would struggle to name more than 3 colorists. I consider myself a dedicated comic book fan, but also I recognize that this lack of awareness could just be a failing on my part. The colors are so fluidly worked into a book that it's often easy to overlook how good they actually are. I'd be curious to know what the rest of the comic book community thinks. Whether or not comic book colorists get their due credit?
Anyway onto the work for this month. The majority of the coloring work that I did, I pulled black and white scans from Akira and Blade of the Immortal as well as a Batman piece from Mike Mignola. Then there are a few pieces that I did myself (the portrait shots of super heroes) and then I began coloring pencils from Earl Womack, which he is creating for our upcoming series, Tunnel Rat.
RULES
DAY 224 TO 250
Below are the rules/themes I tried to stick to for this months challenge.
- Spend roughly one hour per session
- Start with black and white pencils (original or from existing sources)
- Start with flats
- Add extra lighting effects or textures if desired
DESIGNS
DAY 224 TO 250
So that's another challenge down. Comment, share, critique. Again, if you have a challenge that you created yourself, I'd love to hear about it and follow your progress as well.