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!

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.)