Coloring Presentation at 12-Hour Comic Book Day

On July 27th, 2013, the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington, Indiana (where I live and breath) held it’s 6th annual 12-Hour Comic Book Day. Each year, young women and men between the ages of 10 and 20 write and illustrate comics of their own creation within a time limit of twelve consecutive hours.  MCPL’s Children’s and Teen Services teamed with our local comic book store,  Vintage Phoenix Comics, and provided art supplies, food, and surprises – like me! Prizes were awarded for every three hours of comics-making. Participants can work individually or collaboratively. Many of the resultant comics can be seen at the event’s Flickr site, here.  My kids and I are in photos 2-6!  My son created “Evil Limbs” and “Punch Me“, and my daughter whipped up “Aliens Attack!” and “Party Pooper”.

Those two pictures of me are from the presentation I did for the kids about comic book coloring.  I don’t know why I never contacted anyone about the event in previous years, but this year I did – albeit with little time to spare.  I figured most kids would know about the Justice League or at least some of that teams members, so I opened up the full, working file for Justice League #20 (written by Geoff Johns and published by DC Comics) pages 4&5 and got to work.  Those 2 pages are a 2-page spread of the JL battling some toothy, ravenous, mindless minions, but it had a lot of special effects and I thought it would be a good, big, simple way to show the layers of work involved in coloring a modern, mainstream super-hero comic book. I talked through each layer of art, from the initial black-and-white line art to the last streaks of rain. The kids were adorably and goofy and awkward and smart. They had good questions, and a couple of them hung around after my presentation to ask even more smart questions.

There are articles about the event here and here and here. Thanks to Chris Hosler of MCPL’s Adult and Teen Services for being friendly, helpful, and in charge!

Here are the images I used in the presentation. Click on the first one and then just click through the slideshow!

the original line art, by Gene Ha

Close-up of the line art. Generally this stays in it’s own layer and never gets messed with. Everything else gets done in separate layers either on top of the line art or below/behind it.

Basic “flats”. The whole background is filled with a color you won’t use anywhere else in the flats.

Creating a flat color area…

…using the Pencil tool to draw an outline under the line art…

…and then filling it in with the Paintbucket tool. You could use the Marquee tools instead, but I find those to be best for larger, less noodly outlines.

The finished flats. They don’t need to be the characters’ actual, final colors, and when parts that will be the same color overlap, it helps to have those parts be different colors in the flats so that you can select and render them separately.

A new layer! I copy the flats layer, then fill everything with their actual colors. I put a lot of care into picking character colors I’ll be using repeatedly. everyone’s skin-tone should be different, everyone’s metallic gray should be different, everyone’s blue-black should be different. Sez I.

You use the Magic Wand tool to select areas of a given color from the flats layer.

Some initial shadows…

…and some more shadows.

Some highlights…

…and some more…

…aaaaand some moooore….

…yuh-huh…

“Color holds” are when you make the black line art a color other than black, usually to help achieve special effects like energy, blurring, etc.

Special effects are kicking in to gear, using various means: airbrushing, texture brushes, copying and ghosting, blurring…