reMIND

Outsourcing to professional flatters

In my last post I brought up Elance or Guru for outsourcing.  This has been useful to know but I almost hate the process of finding the right person, spending money to test them, possibly train them and the whole time wondering if I could just find a more direct route to a professional flatter in the comics industry for a good price.

Enter GutterZombie.

This is an awesome forum started by Dave McCaig, pretty much dedicated to the comic coloring world. These guys really know their stuff and when I asked about flatting they laughed and directed me to a "work for hire section" that is full of Flatters just waiting to get work.  It looks like the going rate is about $10 a page. That's not bad in my opinion.  I can see paying ten dollars instead of using 3 hours of my free time and I don't have to teach them about Flatting.

Here is a link to the work for hire section: Flatters!

There are several people offering their service as flatters but it looks like posting a thread about your project is the best approach.  It seems like everyone finds someone when they post a thread.

I dug through some of the posts and found a few professional looking websites of flatters.  Here are the first five I found but there's plenty more:

Aaron Daly

Alex Petretich

David Burns

Fred Fries

Ruth Lim

I talked to Aaron Daly by email and he offered to flat a page for free to show me how it might work if I hire him for more.  He finished the page I sent him in a flash and it looked amazing!  We talked about a page rate and I must say that it is much better then I expected (sorry I don't want to say his price because he's doing me a favor since I'm paying for this out of my own pocket.) I'll share what he is doing for me in a future post but feel free to check out his samples here.

In conclusion, I'm pretty convinced that finding a flatter through GutterZombie.com is the best approach when looking to outsource. I know I've found my guy and it was pretty easy.

Here is spread 6 along with the pencil lines.  Sorry I'm starting to impose my name and the date of conception on my work.  I've noticed some sites are posting my images which is very exciting but also makes me kinda worried if I don't watermark it from now on. I hope it's not to intrusive into the art.

Here are the final pencil lines of spread 6.

And here is the final colors (I think).  Notice almost a year passed between the pencils and colors.  I'm sure you're also noticing that I'm milking the splash page spreads here.  Don't worry, the whole book isn't going to be like this, although it will have splash spreads throughout. I just wanted the first chapter to be a slower pace to force the mood and feel of the world onto the reader before I jumped into heavy story.

(All this information about outsourcing is my unprofessional opinion only. Please contact your CPA for any tax related questions about outsourcing.)

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