Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Color Test for comic page

Here's a another test page for my upcoming coming book. I have been doing a few test pages to see what the characters in my comic book would look like in full color. I also wanted to test myself by coloring more backgrounds and special effects. Lastly, I wanted to work on my timing for coloring comic book pages. As you can see, I wanted the characters to have an animated feel, as if they were characters in a cartoon; and I am still working to get better with that style of coloring.

These two panels took about 4-5 hours to complete within 2 days. I know that sounds long, but it was because I had to do some revisions to the original artwork. As you can see in the original black and white panel below, the energy particles around the main character had to be redesigned. While it looks good in black & white, I discovered later, that I needed less special effects, and more room for dialogue with the word balloons. I also went over some of the inked lines to close gaps and strengthen my black lines. The character in panel 2 was inked perfectly, and turned out really nice once color was added. The icing on the cake for me was coloring the special effects. I definitely get excited when the colors turn out how I see then in my head. It gets me motivated to do more coloring.

I must say that I enjoyed the challenge of finding the right spacing for the word balloons too. Creating the right word balloons is a learning process within itself and I am eager to learn more about it. After it's all said and done I am about 90% pleased with the end result. As I mentioned earlier, I am still practicing with colors, so I want to improve and get faster.