• Batman
• Superman
• Spider-Man
• X-Men
• Spawn!

JASON BRUBAKER – Hey Ian.  Thanks for taking the time for this interview. 

To start things out, How did you become a comic colorist?

IAN HANNIN - No problem, Jason. I'm a fan of your work- especially, the colors!

Let's go back to 1995. Wow. I was a comic book fan, and a Photoshop enthusiast working at Kinko's in downtown Orlando, FL. On one of my weekly scheduled trips to the comic book store, I found myself with the latest issue of Wildstorm Production's, WildC.A.T.s, drawn by my favorite, the legendary Jim Lee. And to my astonishment, there was an page in the back devoted to their talent search! They were looking for writers, pencilers, inkers and colorists. I figured I'd give it a go since I'd had some traditional painting experience, and was fresh out of Ringling School of Art and Design of Sarasota, having learned Photoshop 2.0! I crafted a resume, collected some of my photoshop work, and dropped it all in the mail to La Jolla, CA. A few days later, I received a call from Wildstorm- a truly life-changing day. I will always be indebted to Alex Sinclair- pioneer in the biz, and Jim Lee colorist to this day, for giving me the opportunity. Within a few short weeks, I had moved to La Jolla, settled into a small studio apt, and begun coloring Jim Lee's comics- with the man himself just down the hall. And by the way, he's still my hero, and a great guy.

JASON BRUBAKER – What a great story.  I remember picking up that same issue of WildC.A.T.S. and spending the next 2 weeks perfecting 4 penciled pages for a submission.  They told me I wasn't chosen but I was second on the list.  Oh well.  So since my blog is about making comics and graphic novels I'll try to get really specific now of your process.

When you color, do you use any photo reference or do you just pull it all out of your head?

IAN HANNIN - If I need photo reference, it's usually for background elements. With deadlines looming, sometimes I'll search online for photos of things I'd have a tough time starting from scratch. A cloudy sky or some ripples in the surface of a pool. Maybe a nice moon with craters and gashes across the surface. In any case, I tweak it heavily- adding contrast, blurring, smudging, adding my own details, and of course changing the hues. By the time I'm done with the reference, it's no more a photo than a Monet is.

JASON BRUBAKER – It seems like that is a pretty common practice now days.  About half the artist I work with manipulate photos for their visual development paintings.  They also make a lot of custom brushes in Photoshop.  Is this something you do as well?

IAN HANNIN - I do have some custom brushes, but I use them sparingly. I'm a big believer of less-is-more. I try to keep the colors simple and clean. Too much rendering is too much to look at. I mean, come on, the reader is READING. If I need some blood splatter, or some rust, then I'll go for the custom brushes. But I don't care for coloring with textures everywhere. Just because you can make blue jeans look real in Photoshop, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

Ninety-Nine percent of the time, I'm using the lasso tool and the airbrush to render the lighting set up by the inker. That's it.

JASON BRUBAKER – I see.  Do you have someone flat out your pages before you start?

IAN HANNIN – To paraphrase one of my heroes, there is no "try". You are DOING it. You're making your graphic novel. To those reading this who's work I haven't had the good fortune to see, I would say only this: Make it your own and do it in a way we've never seen before.

JASON BRUBAKER – Very good advice. And now for the most important question…If you were a color which one would it be?

IAN HANNIN – That would change from day to day, but sitting here right now I'd have to say C 65, M 85, Y 0, K 30.

I’ve been told my Inks look great.  Really? Because I don’t Ink anything.

The End.

Adjusting Levels in Photoshop.

No, but really. I tried to Ink my comic pages back in the mid 90′s but whenever I’d go to a convention and show an editor my work they would scratch their head and ask why I was ruining my pencils with screwed up inks.  Later I started to focus only on my pencils, my strength, since I could control the lines better then my chicken scratch, blotted, messed up Ink lines.

Years passed and I decided to make a graphic novel and I contemplated inking all over again. I chose not to. To help you understand why I chose not to ink, I need to side step a bit to explain my conclusions.

The argument of Inking for the sake of printing is also obsolete in my opinion. Printing gray tones or full color paintings is just as easy as black and white now days. Printing in solid back and white is still cheaper but you can still adjust clean pencils to be black and white by boosting the contrast.

Here’s what I suggest doing if you want to make your own sweet, coveted textures to use in Photoshop.

First, find the ideal style you are trying to achieve like we talked about in the last section. I suggest looking outside of comics, otherwise you will just rehash the same old thing. Look at your ideal style as reference while you are creating your own.

What surface should you use?

Figure out what surface your ideal style was created on. This all plays into the final look more than people think. Is it on canvas, wood, glass, watercolor paper, tracing paper, art board, or just pain old photocopy paper. It all affects the end result. If you don’t know, then experiment. It’s fun.

What medium should you use?

Figure out your medium.  There’s oils, acrylics, watercolors, Ad markers, Prismacolor markers, color pencils, pastels, Gouache, charcoal, spray paint, airbrush, ballpoint pen or something more abstract like wood textures or fabrics. It’s all there to experiment with and they all create different textures. There are countless options.

What I used for reMIND.

For reMIND, I used watercolor paper and Gouache and Acrylic paints applied pretty thick.

Edges are important to make  an organic look.

Okay, now that you know what style you want, there are a few simple things to remember when making texture swatches to use in Photoshop. Remember that these need to be versatile so you can use them over and over. I’ve found it helpful to make the edges of your textures one of two ways. Either fade out the edge or have an organic edge that matches the texture itself. The main thing to avoid is the edge of the paper or making a hard edge. This always creates lines in your art that you constantly have to remove. You don’t need your textures to be massive in size. I’ll show you how to blend them together in Photoshop really easily as long as you make the edges organic in some way like I suggest.

Here are good and bad examples of edges.

You could fill up a whole 11 x 17 sheet to the edges thinking it’s going to be big enough, but I guarantee you will move it around and want to use one of the parts near the edge of your paper and then you’ll remember this tutorial and be mad at me for not USING CAPITALS TO EMPHASIZE THE IMPORTANCE! Okay, there’s the caps. Lets move on.

What size should you make your textures?

Try to create your textures at the same size that your finished product will be. So if you have a manga sized comic in mind, make textures that don’t need to be enlarged or shrunk down to fit your page. I suggest creating them at around 12 x 12, personally. You want to avoid enlarging them more than they need to be when applying, otherwise it will look like you used a 5 inch paint brush to goop house paint on your comic. You definitely don’t want your beautiful textures to be all blurry from zooming in too much either, unless that’s what you want. Another thing I’d avoid is stretching your textures. I never stretch mine for reMIND because it becomes more and more clear that you are just hacking it up in Photoshop when you do this. Brush strokes are never stretched in traditional paintings, so why stretch them digitally? Stretching textures is another thing that immediately screams, PHOTOSHOPPED!

A good rule of thumb for if you need to enlarge a texture more than it’s scanned size is don’t enlarge it more than 110%. I’ve worked with lots of high end studios in print and media and most agree to not blow up any art more than 110%. In some cases I’ve heard people say 120%, but more than that and you start to see it get blurry. Not very professional looking.

Choose one or two colors per texture.

You want to be able to adjust them in Photoshop and if you have to many colors in one texture then you will have a harder time dialing it to the hue you want. I’d even go as far to say to only use two very similar colors or one color and black or white.

Scan and Clean your textures.

Now that you’ve made a batch of 10 or so textures in various colors it’s time to scan. Scan everything at 600 dpi to start with. You can shrink everything later but it’s a good idea to make your master files plenty big. Here is a coffee texture that I never cleaned up so I’ll use it as an example.

Adjust the Levels only if needed.

It’s time to use the levels again in Photoshop to adjust out the white of the canvas to be completely white.

Clean up specks and document edges.

Any specks or blemishes can be painted out with a solid white paint brush.

Now take a white fuzzy airbrush and go over the edges of the canvas. Try to avoid painting over your textures though. Just paint out the paper only. Make the edges as clean as possible with no junk around the corners of your documents. You don’t want to be cleaning the same file every time you use it.

Believe it or not, even though this texture is really sloppy and has crazy hard edges, it’s still organic and can easily be used. I’m not sure if it would fit into the world of reMIND though so I’ll save it for another project.

As an example of how well these organic hard edges blend together, I’ll duplicate this texture and set the top layer to Darken.

I rotated the top layer and slid it to the right and look at how nicely it blends together to look like one nice big texture. The only problem I see is the darker shapes within being easily spotted as repeating objects. Other than that, it looks pretty good.

I’ll go into the Darken mode more in the next tutorial in case you are not familiar with it.

Croping your file.

Crop your paper only; don’t crop the actual texture. Here’s another example. This is one of the textures I use all the time in reMIND. (Of course it’s much bigger than you see here)

Inverted Textures or painting on black paper.

It’s a good idea to make light textures on black paper as well. This is one thing I never did and I’m really in need of some now that I’m getting to my darker scenes. What I’ve been doing lately is hitting Apple+I (MAC) or Ctrl+I (PC) to Invert my texture so the white background turns black. It also creates some crazy new colors I never thought to paint. Too much of this and you will start getting a totally different style so I use it sparingly. That’s why I want to make a new set of light colors on black paper.

It’s important that your textures be on a completely white or black background for the method I use. This will become clear why, later in this series. Here are more examples of good texture files that I use throughout reMIND. Sorry they are so small, I want you to make your own instead of just taking these.

Next we’ll talk about how to use these in your pages with your line art.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting

Part 2 – How I use Flats

Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel

Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library (You are here)

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