I saw this piece by Guile Sharpe, you can find more of his work here: @spiderguile
He sent over the high resolution image and decided I'd make it a big deal. Over the years I've become a bit jaded over the process of coloring. A lot of people don't realize the amount of work that goes into coloring these pages.
I instantly knew how I wanted to approach it and how much depth I wanted to give it.
I love doing effects and this had quite a few different effects I could play around with.
Guile did an excellent job with this piece and there is a lot going on. It's a complicated piece with multiple characters, some are harder to see than others and it's my job to bring out all the details and make the artist shine.
First, like any page I color, I start out with the flats. This is usually where I separate the planes. This particular image has quite a few to go through and later on, the effects will help to push the depth a bit more.
This is the process of also setting up the file for the fun parts, the rendering.
When you flat the image, this allows the colorist to select those certain base tones easily and isolating it.
Sometimes I will go ahead and start out doing the line-holds. I've done it enough times that I will sometimes bounce around from effects, to rendering, to line-holds.
Second step, the rendering. This is where I start setting up the light sources. In this case, our heroes are outside, so the light is all around them in this case.
However, there can be more than one light source and in this particular image, we have multiple sources from the effects.
I will most of the time start out coloring the background, then work my way from front the back.
At this point, the image is already taking on a new life of it's own. As you can see, I started with Wolverine in the foreground and the background is finished. Remember, you can always adjust your colors later, could even change it all to a night scene fairly easily too.
One thing that stood out that I wanted to handle early on, was the Invisible Woman. As you can see, she's transparent and I love to color transparent characters because it's different than you'd color other characters, using layer masks.
Third, is where I start giving it more depth. Using line-holds and an effects layer, I can really push it.
As you can see, I haven't finished all of the rendering yet, some characters have remained rendered at this point and that's okay, I was experimenting a bit with this and wanted to see how far I could push it before it was TOO far.
Once I get the image looking the way I want it to, I give it my own special treatment that I've been doing to my images in 2019. It's something I tried using in books in 2018 but some creators didn't too much care for it but ever since the Spider-Man: Into the Spider verse came out, I've been getting requests to use this little technique that gives it that lil extra punch.
As we can see, there are tiny dots and a little lens correction effect. What lens correction does adjust the RGB colors. In this case, it gives it that pink and green 1 pixel of color around the line-art.
The dots, or halftone pattern is something I do to give it a bit of texture and that old school comic feel without actually taking away from the artist.
Finally, I give you the finished product!
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