On the right side is my ode to Christian Schellewald I guess. You see, I bought his book, LA/SF, at the San Diego Comic Con in 2006 after looking through the entire convention. It was one of the only books that really stood out to me, besides Joshua Middleton’s Sky Between Branches. Schellewald’s book is filled with amazing little guasch paintings and sketches of completely normal things. Mostly streets, airplanes, and palm trees, but with every sketch is an amazing composition and what amazed me most was his use of negative space. Almost an entire panel would be painted white and then the lower third would be a cool tree or something. This really opened my eyes to a few things. One, negative space is a really good thing. And two, the whole guash painting approach is a good thing too. I know what you are thinking right now. This guy can’t write to save his life. I know, I know, I may not be J.K. Rowling when it comes to sharing my thoughts but I sure know when I love an artistic style.
Schellewald’s and Middleton’s books are some of the biggest influences on this graphic novel. Middleton’s sketches on his blog just make my head spin. You might have to dig a little for them but it’s worth it.

Anyway, I loved the negative space idea and as you can see, I wholeheartedly applied it to the right side of this page.

Below are a few of the steps that I had to take to get this finished spread.

A step is missing here where I blew up this thumbnail and printed it on 8.5 x 11 paper and traced over it using tracing paper and a bald point pen.
This is the final line work after blowing it up again and printing it on two sheets of legal paper (8.5 x 14) taped together.  I used a light table, bristol board and a mechanical pencil. Scanned to Photoshop, adjusted the contrast and presto.

For about 3 years now, I’ve been slaving away at my coloring process about as slow as possible. I would spend hours and hours filling between the lines all while throwing textures over everything to see how it might look. I would work on a page for half a day and then just leave it alone for a while. Perhaps I might dream of a better color pallet that night. Or maybe I’ll be able to see something better if I open it up in a week or a month.

To start this off, I'd like to say that I'm not trying to promote outsourcing. I'm sure someone will read this and be upset with me for showing a clear cut way to outsource your comic pages causing the American economy to collapse…again.  All I'm trying to do here is get my stupid graphic novel finished before I'm to old to draw.  Plus I'd rather spend time with my wife and son then flatting a page on the weekends.  After all, this isn't my job, it's my personal project/hobby.

Surviving the effects of globalization for an online freelancer?

Now that I've captivated you with that last link, I'll plow forward.  The whole idea of outsourcing arose after reading the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book, in itself, is a controversy. I think Tim is a bit of a salesman myself but I did pick up some interesting things from his ramblings.

Outsourcing was one of them. Outsourcing boring, time consuming, or monotonous things that don't need your special attention so you can focus on things you want to do. 

The book suggests a few websites that specialize in aggregating freelancers from around the globe.  Here are a few of them:

• elance.com (what I used)
• guru.com

I suggest Elance over Guru. Guru is slow and it's hard to find anyone for a good price.  Why would I want to pay someone $75 an hour to flat out my pages.  Elance, on the other hand is a pretty fast site to look through and you can find people around the world but it does take some getting use to.

I ended up using a small company of five from India called Dream Computers.  They have a few comic coloring samples in their portfolio.  Their hourly rate said $15 but after I paid them for my test pages they emailed me back, dropping their page rate to $15 a page for finished coloring. Just so you know, I never used what they colored because it wasn't what I was looking for but I'm thinking about emailing my contact at Dream Computers to show them a flatting tutorial and negotiate a new price.  After all I don't want to pay them the same price for flatting a page as I would for finished coloring.  My only problem with this method is it seems like you have to spend time and money to get the right freelancer and maybe even teach them what you want them to do.

Even though I can see how this might work out well with the exchange rates, I'm still curious about hiring someone who already knows how to do flats.  I mean how much more could it cost to have a professional flatter?  But where do I find one?

[Edit] Click here to find out – Outsourcing Comic Flatting – part 2 

P.S. I just got reamed the other day about my lousy lettering job in these pages.  I promise I will make it all better once I learn to do it right and I'll post what I learn. 

[Edit] What I learned – Lettering and Making your own fonts

Here is Spread 5 by the way.

I'm thinking of adding part of a row boat in the bottom left panel foreground. I already redrew Sonja twice and finally asked my wife to pose for me so I could get it right. I worry it looks more realistic then the rest of her frames.  And talk about negative space!

• 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.

Click image to enlarge.

I have to say that this is almost my favorite finished spread. I just love how the lighting turned out with the warm sun blasting everything in the bedroom and kitchen. This was also around the time I started running out of large Bristol board sheets in which to put a full spread.  I wanted to finish another page that Saturday and I had a bunch of animation paper laying around so I decided to draw individual frames on it instead. What I discovered changed my whole process and I've never looked back.  

You see, back in the day it was ingrained into my mind that I needed to layout a comic page on Blue Line Pro.  When shrunk down 65% it fits exactly to a standard comic size page. Everything had to be perfected on that Blue Line Pro because there was no Photoshop at my fingertips to edit any mistakes. Until recently I always felt like I needed to draw all the panels together, after all, how would I sell the originals if it wasn't nicely arranged exactly as it is in the comic.

Well, I'm here to tell you when I tried to sell original art at the Ape Con a few years ago along other graphic novel publishers, I had more luck selling small originals then selling large ones. In fact I sold about 20 small originals that were 4" x 4" and three that were 4" x 8". Nothing larger then that sold. Hmmm. Maybe my large artwork sucks but that's not the point.

To this day I draw all the frames separately except for sometimes with a few small ones. I like the idea of arranging it all in Photoshop however I want. I still stick very closely to my original thumbnail and sketches which are all still drawn as a whole. The only things I'm still unhappy with, on this page, are the ugly blue sound effects.  I really need to draw something better to replace them.

Here is the thumbnail.

And here are the finished frames.

This spread was a fun test. A test to see if I could push your eyes back and forth between the same frames. Feel free to throw out any ideas to make this work better if you think it's broken. There are just so many rules that people create when trying to explain how to do something. Comics and graphic novels have a handful when trying to lead the eye around the page. I think I understand the rules. The fact is, as long as the average person can read the story without getting pulled out of the scene because they are confused then I feel like I've had success. And if the average person can think, "Hmmm, that was different but I liked it for some reason." then I'm a superstar in my own mind.  

Speaking of superstars. I need to hand out a bunch of "Thank you's" in this post so hold on to your seats.

Last week was a roller coaster for me.  Every night after work I was up till the wee hours of the morning testing my new WordPress blog, transferring over old posts, downloading plug-ins, deleting plug-ins, testing layouts, wondering what I'm doing, reading help forums, testing links, fixing links and emailing my friend for help while crying.  I got in seriously over my head and I promised I'd deliver two posts a week to my 11 Google followers. What was I thinking? By Wednesday night everything was up and running like planned thanks to my longtime friend and shorttime IT guru, Rand Fugate, who wrote all the CSS madness in the background to make my sweet menu bar look totally rad!  

Just in time too because literally 2 hours later, Jerry from CartoonBrew, wrote an amazing article about reMIND releasing the floodgates of traffic to scour and pour over every crevice of my newborn blog to it's embarrassingly short end.  Thursday I got the same amount of hits every 15 minutes as I'd normally get in a day.  That was a rush.  That day at work, people were giving me high-fives down the hallway and beautiful women were winking. Okay, so maybe not, but I still felt pretty cool about myself.

Later on, BlackStar9000, put a link to reMIND on Reddit.com.  I've never heard of Reddit before but, WOW, that place really generates traffic too. Thanks Blackstar9000, whoever you are!  You alone sent over 1000 unique viewers to my time-suck and are on my list of new heroes. So if anyone is reading this, can you do me a huge favor and go to Reddit to vote up reMIND or down if you really must.  I still need all the help I can get!

Then Saturday rolls around and Nate Simpson links to reMIND from ProjectWaldo! Thanks Nate!!! ProjectWaldo has greatly inspired me in so many ways and Nate's blog is the best thing on the internet in my opinion. So go there right now if you've never heard of it. Click on his pages and see the magic.

So thanks for all your comments last week and several emails. I really enjoyed responding to everyone. It was a real shot in the arm. In fact, now I REALLY need to step up my game and get more pages finished.  

Some of the emails I received brought up the following points that I promise to address in the near future.

• I need more in depth coloring tutorials and my process of creating tones.
• What do you do with flats? Why make them?
• Explain how I use paint textures in my pages.
• My writing sucks and seems cliche. Why don't I hire a professional to help me?
• How would someone approach coloring a comic with different mediums like colored pencils or watercolors.

To add to bullet point number 4. If anyone sees any grammar or spelling errors then feel free to let me know. You are my temporary editors until Jeremy Barlow rocks it!  Spelling and grammar are my mortal enemies.

I apologize for the lack of actual panels in these pages. Keep in mind, this graphic novel was intended to be printed as a hardcover book and this was just supposed to be one of those transitional pages with little information; more about mood than anything.

For some reason in the past when I’d show these pages to friends, more times than not someone would stop me here and compliment the textures. I never understood why a page with textures could out preform a page with line milage overkill but it seems to work in this case. I do admit that I’m pretty happy with them myself so I’ll leave it at that. I still don’t like the dog drawing much here. I rescaled part of him right before I uploaded it. I think it’s final now.

The last two weeks have been a bit rough. I’m not partaking in a sob story so feel free to keep reading. I learned that I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol (which are both bad, incase you are as ignorant of health related things as I am) so I decided to add a few things to my already packed schedule. At 6:30 A.M. I have to get up and go jogging every other day now. This is a ridiculous thing to demand of myself being the kind of person who hates exercise but now it’s a must, so I’m forcing myself through with it. I already had a week of sore muscles and I’m starting to feel like I can do it regularly.  The problem is, now I even less free time to commit to the late nights on this graphic novel. Glad I wrote my time management post a while back. Problem solved. Ha.

But seriously, it still amazes me how much more we can add to our full plates and still get things done. I’m not saying it’s going to be a walk in the park, maybe a run in the park, but I’m committing to this thing. Both running AND the graphic novel in case you were wondering.

I spent the whole week so worried about changing my life habits that I didn’t get any new pages colored. So yesterday (Saturday) while my son was taking a nap, I buckled down and set my timer and two hours later I finished my quota for the week. Two nicely color pages. Whew. I’m still about 3 months ahead of what I post here but I still stress out if I don’t move forward every week.

New Click to Enlarge Page Feature

My IT guru friend, Rand, added a new feature to the pages on this site. You can now click anywhere on a page when you are viewing the comic and the image will open up in a new window for full size viewing. So hopefully this will solve some of the reading problems that I’ve been hearing comments about. No more bifocals needed. Just click to enlarge.

Shirt Status

I still have about 10 shirts in Medium and Large left so order away. If you don’t get them then I’ll just have a sweet collection of reMIND shirts for every day of the week.

I sent off all the gorilla packs on Friday so anyone who ordered a shirt within the U.S. should be receiving them today! (Monday) The gorilla pack was not all that I was hoping it would be as far as marketing extras. I was hoping to get stickers and another bigger flier in there but cost was becoming a huge issue. I was already taking a hit on it so it was hard to rack up the bill further. Plus I still can’t find a good method of printing custom stickers. Anyone? Anyone?

All the packs did get a few nice postcards though, but they printed strangely dark. I think my color profile was wrong when I sent it to the printer. This just proves to me that I MUST get proofs made for the book and not just assume it will print like I think it should.

Extras

Since this week has little to show as far as drawings go, here are some extras from previous pages just for fun.

Last week I said I’d start posting page specific info under the pages but I decided to change my mind again. I’ll keep all my long winded jabbering here on the blog so I don’t have to write two posts. Just trying to keep you on your toes. Click the image below to see the new pages then swing back here for more info below.

This page was one of the last pages I colored before I took a long break from reMIND back in 2009. I made some minor adjustments to it before posting it and was tempted to dial every color around resulting in a completely new piece. I saw myself opening a massive can of worms so I quickly deleted all the new color tests to stick with the original. It’s hard because I feel like I’ve learned so much about color in the last year that some of my older pages feel flat. I used to enjoy making the colors really flat because it was the only way I knew how. Not saying I’m way better now, just more daring I think.

Well, hope your ready to move forward with the story now. I know I am, and trust me, it gets crazy. More stuff will be revealed soon, so bare with me.

This week I finally finessed 6 pages that have been giving me a run for my money. I finally cracked the color pallet and I’m very relieved. To celebrate, I whipped open my sketchbook and frantically scribbled thumbnails for book 2 of reMIND knowing that it still needed lots of figuring out. I can’t do thumbnails very long because they drain on my brain. I’m happy to say I figured out some of the stranger pages.

On the other hand, I’ve been a bit antsy this week because I should be hearing from the Xeric Foundation soon regarding their decision to give me $5000 in grant money to help print reMIND. If they decide to give me the cash, it will relieve sooooooo much financial pressure on this project. Wow.

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The Phoenix Requiem

So last week I decided to be really bold and email two of the top notch webcomics out there to introduce myself. These guys get hounded by webcomics all the time, trying to share links or get free promotion so I knew I could easily just be ignored. To my surprise, both of them responded right away with kind words about my comic. Sarah Ellerton of The Phoenix Requiem tweeted a link to reMIND the next morning sending over 100 visits alone.

Later that day she plugged my comic on the front page of her site sending a massive throng to devour and savor tender Victuals. I’m super grateful for how willing talented people are to support this project in it’s early stages. If any of you are not already coming from Phoenix Requiem, then you’ve really gotta see what an amazing graphic novel she is doing. It’s massive and very professional unlike 99% of the webcomics out there.

I’ll talk about who the other top notch webcomic is next week.

Oh yeah, since Sarah showered kindness on reMIND I’ve gotten so much traffic that I’ve moved up to number 3 on the ComicBlogElite! I took a screen capture just to prove it.

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T-shirt Update

Last week I was emailed to see if any more shirts were left. I still have about 5 medium and 5 large left. If anyone wants one just donate at least $19 and let me know the size and your address. This pays for shipping and handling too. If you are in Europe (as many of my last buyer were) then please add an additional $9 to your donation to cover the shipping charges.

Recap: $19 for US. $28 for Europe. Only Medium and Large in stock. Here is a picture incase you missed it last time. Front and back.

[EDIT]   Only 1 medium and 2 large shirts left now.

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One of reMIND’s true fans, Andy Bailey, sent me an email saying he got his t-shirt. He attached a cool picture of his placement of reMIND postcards at his restaurant in the U.K. Check it out! Thanks for the pic Andy! In case your interested, Andy has a wordpress plugin called CommentLuv. Download it at comluv.com.

If anyone is brave enough, I’d love to see some pics of you wearing your reMIND shirts. I’ll post them here so my 20 fans can appreciate it as well. Come on, you know you want to be internet famous.

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Last but not least, please vote for reMIND at TopWebComics. If you do, I’ll show you a panel of the next page. Here’s a link:

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 2 – How I use Flats

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

When I first started making comics I was clueless about the coloring process. I would paint under my line art that was set to multiply but that was the extent of my knowledge. It always seemed like such mindless work to paint between the lines, to fill in the shapes, like I was doing what any kid could do in grade school. It took up so much precious time, but it had to be done before I could start adjusting the colors to my liking.

After learning about flatting, coloring a page became a quick and fun process. I can cut right to the part I enjoy and the part that needs my special attention.

If you goto GutterZombie.com, you can find all kinds of threads on how to color comics. That’s the forum where I learned about how to use flats. There are MANY ways to approach it and most of them involve putting your flats into channels. I’m not going to say that’s the right or wrong way but it’s not the way that works best for me. Here’s what I do.

First, I bring my flats layer into my file with my line art. I have my line art set to multiply and I put my flats below the lines so it looks like this.

HINT: If you are dragging in flats with the same dimensions as your line art, hold down the shift key as you drag in your file and it should automatically snap to your canvas and line up perfectly with your line art.

To make these colors easy to select, we need to select the magic wand tool.

Now that we have selected the magic wand, we need to adjust the tolerance down to between 3 and 5. This makes it only select the colors that are extremely close in range to the color we click on. If the tolerance is higher, more colors will be selected when we click on something, so keep it really low when using flats.

The second thing we need to look at is the box that says Anti-Alias. Anti-alias blends the edges of your selection to make it look nicer to the eye and less like an old video game. In most cases this is good to have checked, but for flats we need to turn it off so it doesn’t feather our selections. Every time you select something with Anti-alias, it slowly eats away more of your selections, so make sure it’s off.

Third, we need to look at the Contiguous check box. You might be switching this one back and forth as you work because it changes your selection from just selecting the same colors that are touching each other, to the same colors that aren’t. So with contiguous unchecked, if you select a skin color in one panel, it will also select the same skin colors in other panels even though they are not touching.

Now our magic wand settings are ready for using our flats.

The first thing I do with my new flats is adjust some of the colors if I know it will work better one way or another. For instance, I know that Sonja’s skin will always be the same color on the whole page so I’m going to select all the skin colors and make sure they are all the same. Or perhaps I want to darken one of the Victuals layers becasue I know he will be a different color in one panel. This is the time I do that.

Remember, we are still not coloring, only adjusting the flats for easy selection.

Now that we have our flats the way we want, duplicate it.

I rename the duplicate, Colors, and move it below the flats layer.

Now select the flats layer again and slide the opacity to “0″ so that the layer is completely invisible.

Now lock it so you can’t accidentally start painting on it.

Now the fun begins, but it takes some getting use to.

Before I adjust individual parts, I first click on the color layer and hit Apple+U(Mac) or Ctrl+U(PC) for Hue/Saturation.

I usually pull down the saturation to start with so everything is not so colorful. Just a personal preference. It will look something like this.

Now we can start adjusting specific parts. Start with the big, obvious colors, like the sky. So lets click on our flats layer and with the magic wand, click on the sky. You will notice that even though the flats are invisible and locked, we can still select from it. (Isn’t that cool!)

All the sky should have been selected and nothing else. Now click on your color layer and hit Apple+L(Mac) or Ctrl+L(PC) to bring up Levels. Adjust the sky to white and hit OK.

Congratulations! You have officially painted your sky white with very little effort.

Now go back to the flats layer and select something else. Go back to the color layer and use Hue/Saturation or Levels again to adjust it to your desired color. Slide around the Hue sliders until you are happy with the color and hit OK. If you can’t get the color you are looking for then click the colorize check box in Hue/Saturation and try it again.

Another command that I use quite a bit is Apple+B(Mac) or Ctrl+B(PC) for color balance. This makes it easy to add just a little more red or blue or whatever to a selection.

You are well on your way to coloring your page using flats and guess what, if you were simply coloring these pages without textures in a style like “Hell Boy”, imagine how fast you could do it. Here is a little recap of the Hot Keys and what they are best for with this kind of technique.

Keep selecting colors from the flats layer and adjust the color layer. Repeat until you are satisfied with all your colors. Now you’re all done! You can also airbrush inside your selection as I did below with Sonja’s hand in the last frame.

Here’s what my page is starting to look like. I know you’re impressed.

I usually don’t go to far without adding some textures which affect how the final color looks, but I’ll get into that later, along with lighting and shadows.

So you thought coloring a comic was all about using the paint brush to fill in between the lines, eh? Well, I’m sorry to destroy your childhood dreams. Of course you could still do it that way after you select from your flats, but for me this approach is super easy, quick and fun.

Here are the upcoming topics I’ll be breaking down in future posts so make sure to bookmark or subscribe to reMINDblog so you don’t miss out on the good stuff.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting

Part 2 – How I use Flats (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