Alex Heberling

I’ve had some mixed feelings towards coloring lately.  I was getting so burned out on Garanos by the time I started my hiatus that, at that point, I knew I really had to change something to keep such a beautiful comic from becoming a chore.

Thus, I’m trying out some new things.

Most of the comic coloring tutorials put out by the big guns in webcomics are wonderful, but are heavily weighted in the favor of traditionally-inked artwork.  This is unfortunate, as I’ve reiterated in blog posts past, because I dislike inking.

But I’m trying out a new technique nonetheless that I hope I will transfer over to Garanos, and hopefully let me get pages done in a more efficient manner.  The guinea pig I’m using for this is a drawing I did of Karen Filippelli from The Office, played by Rashida Jones.

So far, I’m borrowing a combination of techniques used by Hawk, who does Applegeeks, and Sarah Ellerton, of The Phoenix Requiem.  Unlike what I’ve done before, shading and highlighting is now on separate layers and set to various blending modes, rather than painted directly onto the flat color layer.  First, I made my layer of flats, which are just random colors chosen to identify areas that I want to be separately selectable with the Magic Wand.

This is the part I borrowed mostly from Hawk.  I differentiated parts of Karen’s hair that I’ll want to be colored separately, along with things like her lips, chin and neck, and her eyelids.  All the selections I made as I built this layer are aliased, meaning that there are hard pixel edges, as seen in the closeup.  This is because later, when I use the Magic Wand to select bits, I don’t want there to be gaps where the tolerance setting didn’t pick up aliased edges.

Being an output-minded individual, I’d normally be worried about how aliasing affects the print quality of the image, but at resolutions as high as those that I work in it becomes irrelevant, since the image is shrunk down quite a bit for web presentation.

I duplicated the Flats layer and named it Colors, and with my tolerance set to 0, I used the Fill Bucket to fill in Karen’s actual colors, below.

Since I still have the Flats layer, I don’t need to put things on seperate layers.  Here’s an example of the flats at work, allowing me to select individual parts of the image:

This brought me to the shading and highlights.  These are both on seperate layers set to blending modes Multiply and Screen, respectively.  This is what I have shaded on Karen so far, using my Wacom Bamboo.  Since they’re separate layers, I can also do fun, trippy things with the Flat layer as well.

This is what the Shading and Highlights layers look like by themselves and together, without the Colors or Flats layers.

The shading color is a dark, muted brown from Photoshop’s default swatches, a color I use quite often.  The highlight colors are white by default, but to highlight the lips, for example, I selected Karen’s actual lip color from the Colors layer, which looks nice since the layer is set to screen, and it lightens her lips very softly.

I’m rather intrigued about where this new technique will take me, and how it will influence the evolution of my style.  I will post again when I get her finished!