Coloring a Graphic Novel – Part 1
By Jason Brubaker on June 16th, 2010Posted In: Blog,Making Graphic Novels
Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting
First of all, I highly recommend using Adobe Photoshop in which all the steps below are achieved. It’s an industry standard and will also come in handy for everything else creative you choose to do. I know it’s expensive but it’s worth every penny.
If you are new to coloring comics in Photoshop, here are the very first things you will want to learn. Later posts will get more advanced, so bare with me all you experts.
Adjusting the Levels
Pencil art is usually really washed out when you scan it so I suggest adjusting the levels before you try to flat or color. If you want to keep your line art looking like pencil then it’s totally fine but for flatting purposes you will need to save an adjusted version. If you have inked lines, you can still use the levels to adjust it just as you would with pencils. Everything that follows will still work. Here is a simple tutorial on adjusting your line art to look like ink HERE.
Now that your lines are nice and dark we need to set the layer with your lines to multiply.
Using Multiply
Multiply is one of the first things I ever learned in Photoshop. It’s also one of the most common layer modes I’ve seen used, and for good reason.
Multiply makes your line art act like a transparency on a white background. Any layers you put under your line art will be visible through your line art layer (unless your line art is solid black, in which no light can pass through) just like an overhead projector.
Here is a video showing how to use multiply and what it does.
Now that we understand multiply we can start making our flats or bring in flats if we had them outsourced.
I’ve talked about flatting before and I’ve found this to be one of the most important parts of the whole comic coloring process so I need to address it more before we can really get to the rest.
My definition of Flatting:
Flatting a comic page is the process of coloring different sections of your panels a unique color so they can easily be selected later. It’s not important what color each section is, only that they are unique colors and properly fitting to your artwork. For those of you who are old school, it’s like cutting out all the stencils for a drawing you’re going to airbrush.
To prepare the line art for my flatter to flat, I converted it to grayscale and played with the levels to make sure the lines are nice and black then I flattened (reduced it down to just one layer in PS) the file so it’s only one layer and removed any hidden alpha channels. This allows the file to be a decent size for emailing. I save the image as a grayscale .PSD file at 300 dpi.
A few days later after the file has been flatted, I get it back looking something like this. Notice the lines are gone and it’s just colors. Perfect!
Here you can see how the flat sections are divided right in the middle of the lines.
In this way it’s not just a matter of using your selection tool to make flats. You must split the lines right down the middle to ensure your color edge is hidden by the lines. For more specifics on flatting your own pages, check out Kazu’s flatting tutorial over at BoltCity.com.
Sloppy flats lead to wasted time. If you hire a flatter or do them yourself, you need to make sure they are perfect so you don’t have to keep repainting selections over and over.
Remember, if your making your own flats, don’t focus on the colors yet. Just focus on making them as accurate as possible, dividing up everything into as many seperate colors as you need. This will never be what people see when your page is finished. It’s just a bunch of colors that can easily be selected when we start coloring later. I’ll show you how I use flats in the next tutorial.
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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)
Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting (You are here)
Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel
Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library
Part 5 – Adding Textures to your Flatted Page
Part 6 – Masking and Applying Gradients
Part 7 – Light Source and Shadows
Part 8 – Dialing it all Together
It’s really awesome of you to share your experience this way. If I may interject, multiplying a layer is useful but in a very limited way. If you want to move things around the layer, the white gets in the way, and if you need to color some of the linework, it’s an issue because the color interacts with the background. I would recommend knocking out the white background altogether so you don’t have to use Multiply – I have a simple PS action for this that can be downloaded here: http://fav.me/d19736w
It should work for pencil linework as well. If the pencil is not heavy enough for that, one can simply duplicate the layer and multiply the top one, then merge – instant pencil thickening. Then apply the action and the excess will be shaved off again.
Thanks Joumana! I’ll have to look into that more. I don’t color my lines much so this hasn’t been a huge issue but I can see how helpful this would be. I’ll have to test it out a bit. Thanks for sharing this.
Happy to share, honestly :)
You probably know of this, and I think it’s very good to know the underlying principle before you automate, but for color flatting I use two delightful (and free) plugins for Photoshop called Multifill and Flatten that make the whole process enormously easy – they basically do in a single step what you just described. Basically, you create a straight (non-dithered) black-and-white line drawing (either a flat bitmap, or you can run “black and white” on that layer), and then run the two filters in succession. Multifill fills all the white areas bounded by black with colors chosen at random from the Pantone catalogue. Then, Flatten takes the lines away and runs the color areas up to each other along the midpoint of the (now removed) black line. Then it’s just a matter of flood-filling the areas in the proper colors (I recommend turning anti-aliasing off for that part). Slap the line drawing on a multiplied layer above, and the whole thing falls into place remarkably quickly. And saves a lot of clicking to make all those fill areas. The whole process isn’t perfect but it goes a long way towards speeding it all up.
–M
And by the way, a secondary question for you – do you use a large-format scanner for your pencil work or do you scan in pieces and then knit them together in Photoshop? I’ve been making photoreductions and scanning those, but you basically have to have a heavy black ink line to make that work, and as I shift to pencil for my next experiment, I think I’ll have to scan the originals directly. I’m wondering how best to go about that. I know you mentioned at one point that you draw panels individually and compose them in Photoshop, but what do you do with splashes and spreads?
–M
I just have a 8.5 x 11 scanner so I have to scan things in sections. Sometimes I use a scanner from a friends studio if I have lots of big format stuff to scan. I’ve also seen that the newer Photoshop has some auto stitch features that seem to be really good but I’ve never tried them.
I mainly just scan individual panels though then organize them over top of my sketch. So I don’t have to scan really big stuff all the time. Plus I don’t really work as big as most comics.
Thanks for the tips on Multiply and Flatten plugins. I can see that I’ll be learning as much as anyone else in this series. haha
jason,
do you do your flatting on one layer, or is each color on its own layer? It seems like this process is trying to make things easily colorable like livepaint in illustrator.
so basically you are making blocks of color so that you can select those later instead of trying to select inside/outside of specific pieces of line art (where you might get those frizzy edges)?
Yes exactly. This is all to avoid the bad fuzzy edges and make things super easy to select later.
The flats are all on 1 layer. I used to try to separate every color on it’s own layer but after learning flatting techniques it’s just a whole lot easier to manage when you are coloring because you don’t have a million little layers to dig around through. Although I still break off parts, like if I wanted all the flat colors for the lighthouse on 1 layer so I can adjust them as a whole. But this is on a case by case basis and not very often. i’ll get into that more in later posts too.
the reason why i was asking about layering was looking at your example and wondering how you got into some of the small areas (like the faces, eyes etc) without overlapping?…your linework isn’t that thick. Do you paint using a lot of selections? or do you just have super advanced kindergartener coloring inside the lines skills? =)
do you have any special color management tricks or do you just create new swatches and palettes for your pages/chapters? On the video the guy was going slider happy…kinda curious if you do the same, or have a more limited palette?
Well, before I would hire a flatter I used to use both selections and a paintbrush zoomed way in to paint in the details. Now I just give it to my flatter and let him color between the lines. Then when I get it back I just adjust the colors the way I want.
That video was of me, by the way. Sometimes I use sliders and sometimes swatches but I rarely need to do this step anymore. I think it will make more sense once you see the next tutorials though. The flatting tutorial that I link to is pretty good with examples of how to paint between the lines though.
But like I said before, I don’t like doing flats because it’s just boring and anyone can flat your page but only you can color it exactly the colors and style you want.
oops. didn’t realize it was you. looks relatively simple though. =)
i tend to jump ahead asking questions before the teacher gets there.
actually this seems waaaaay more simple than i’m making it out to be. The video does make it look easy. My book will most probably have a limited palette so thats why i was asking.
Yeah, the video is more or less to show what Multiply does.
The idea behind flatting is what will really speed up the process later on. As you will see in the future tutorials, after you get your flats done, it’s really easy to just dial around the colors of sections until it’s finished. If you are going for a simple color pallet then it should be a pretty fast process too.
One problem I have when coloring my sketches is that I can’t seem to be able to separate my sketch lines from the original scans. I’ve heard of a way to separate the line passes using the masking tool in photoshop, but I never got to getting it work. Do you know anything about this? Because I can’t float my sketch line layer above the color layer with transparency, I end up having to make the sketch layer multiply as well… which makes it impossible to draw over the sketches when I need to…
Sorry Dudu, I’m having trouble understanding what you are asking. Are you scanning an inked drawing with pencil sketches under it? Or is your scan just one big pencil sketch that you’re trying to clean up?
One thing I do to make clean lines is use a lighttable to make my final lines before I scan it. I generally don’t scan work that is cluttered with sketchiness. I try to keep it as clean as possible so I don’t have to spend all kinds of time fixing every line in Photoshop.
Well…you know my style…lol I just can’t keep it clean enough :(
Would this help? http://fav.me/d19736w
This’ll only clean up ‘inked lines’ right? so for this to work I’ll prolly have to scan it in black and white, but it seems like it might help.
You can try to follow the procedure suggested in the description to strengthen pencil lines before applying it. The result depends on your lines but it’s worth a try I guess :)
dubu,
are you trying to knock out the background to make the white page empty (aka the checkerboard in photoshop) so all you have left is linework? thats how i used to do things and always came out messy.
If your linework is really dirty/messy, you might have to get into something called channel masking (pulling). its a tricky process, but once you get the hang you can fly at it. If you google it, there are ton of tutorials.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. channel masking…i’ll look into it. thanks!
cool, glad it helped!
P.S. Everyone. I just removed a link to a software site in a comment. I was informed by a trusted source that it’s a scam site.
You just rocked my world!! I was trying to figure out how to do something like multiply for ages. Thanks for the tutorial!
No problem. I remember when I learned about it and how it changed my world.
Have you ever tried using PS flatting plugins?
Yes, I’ve tried it but the human factor is never easy to duplicate. If I had no other options then I’d definitely be using it more often.
For my own online comic, Lovecraft is Missing, I follow a similar procedure but I use a free plug in filter from BPelt that converts the line art to the flat. You have to be sure all your sections are closed, but otherwise the filters are much faster.
Hey Larry, I love your comic by the way. I started reading it not to long ago and it’s really great stuff.
Thanks for the suggestion on the plugin. I’m planning on having a tutorial specific to using plugin’s to flat your pages. Talk soon.