There's some great digital illustrations on the internet. How do you like the terrific example above by Jorge Gutierrez, riffing off a character by Gabe Swarr? Web comics are a different matter. There's some first rate artists and storytellers doing web comics, but at least half of them are still struggling with finding color schemes that work on the computer screen.
The horrible fact is, that the same saturated, digital color that makes illustration look good on screens can be lethal to long-format, comic book-style storytelling.
I envy the old print media cartoonists. Newspapers and comics couldn't reproduce saturated color, so everybody was forced to use something more subdued. It was lucky for them, because faded color didn't compete with the drawings the way saturated color does.
The early days of digital coloring (before Cochran and Gladstone figured out how to do it right) produced some hideous efforts. Here (above) the color dominates the page, not the story, and the graded background give Scrooge's silhouette an eerie glow. Yuck! Some newspaper strips are still colored this way.
A number of digital cartoonists have experimented with updated versions of the old pulp color, including Gene Hole, who did this picture. What do you think? I prefer the older way, though it looks a little old fashioned now.
Some cartoonists darken the lines so the brighter colors won't dominate the characters, and that seems to help.
In my opinion textured backgrounds seem to work for digital storytelling, but not everyone agrees.
John K's color style looks like it would work great for web comics. If ever John ever does a comic just for the internet, and can figure out a way to monetize it, he'll clean up.
In addition to those already credited, thanks to Katie Rice, Luke Cormican, Michael Sporn and Bill Peckmann.
14 comments:
I've tinkered a little with coloring in Flash, examples
http://bit.ly/guTm2z
http://bit.ly/fu1E1m
A theory I'm going to test next time is something Kurtzman did in some of those early Mad covers; have the background and tertiary characters conform to a simple color scheme and then have the object or character of focus be a contrasting deviation from the color scheme
More examples
http://bit.ly/eandyh
http://bit.ly/fJX4AR
Dumm Comics! Woo! I do enjoy those comics, especially from Spumco artists like Gabe, Katie, and Luke. John K certainly knows color also - it would be great to see him do a web comic!
I agree with ya and one of the biggest problems I have is that in order to avoid overly bright colors I end up mixing a lot of greys in. When I come back to it a day later I wonder why I'm coloring everything to look depressing or like it's densely cloudy outside.
Also I love textured backgrounds, but I don't think I'm very good at making them.
The worst offense from digital manipulating would be when newspapers squashed the image to fit in a smaller space. I can't find an example but its like "The Family Circus" would look more like an oval.
Reminds me of the reverse situation when people stretch out a 4:3 image to fill up a widescreen TV.
i thought the colors for the donald duck looked good russ cochran and company found good people but it does take over the page
Kazu Kibuishi once blogged that coloring digitally is essentially coloring directly with light. I think that's a good attitude to embrace. Color on screens will always be bright and high-contrast, because it's like light shining through a window. Good digital colorists seem to embrace that attitude well, without letting brightness go overboard.
Personally, I reign in brightness by always coloring in CMYK from the start, but then I will pick one, two colors at most that I will saturate as highlights. The rest of the colors I will try to keep as closely related to each other as I can. This method works for me.
Also, I adore Katie's coloring. I am glad you picked her as an example.
Color can be a cruel mistress sometimes.
yow! didn't expect to see that milt gross color again... that was me, just a little experiment i was doin...
you're dead right about the struggles of web comic artists with color on a screen versus print color. it's a whole different mess in many ways.
here's the post the milt gross art came from http://justforspite.blogspot.com/2007/12/gross-layout-stretching-my-long-dormant.html
Eddie, thank you for reminding me of how damn talented geniuses like Gabe Swarr and Katie Rice are keeping appealing color schemes in comics alive and how I haven't gone to the awesome Dumm Comics site in a while. Have you ever tried to do your own comic with the aid of programs like Flash and photoshop by the way? You should try to submit a guest comic or something on that site to be honest. Anyways, i'm gonna go draw....
I think the biggest difference is what you said, Eddie, about line weight. Thin lines don't organize shapes on screen as well as they do on paper.
On a monitor our eyes tend to be scanning for shapes rather than lines anyway. We've been trained to. We are living in the age of 50 x 50 pixel avatars and image thumbnails.
So the game has changed...color has to play a larger role in organizing the image. That means simpler palettes and knowing how to use value and not just lines to describe shapes.
I don't claim to be a great colourist at all, but I'm still taken by surprise by the difference between monitors. Those new glass-screened Apples have insanely vibrant colour that will turn something that looked nice and subdued on my Cintiq into Lego-brick shades! Some great examples of good web comic colouring in this post and the replies.
Is $100 a good price for volume 1 or 2 (each) of Cochrane's Carl Barks Library, guys?
Scrawney: Nice examples of character color! You seem to have a knack for it. To complete the comics look you need to put colored backgrounds in, though. I mean backgrounds that aren't just shaded color cards.
You have a nice, cartoony feel in your drawings, but IMHO you need to work on pleasing shapes and negative spaces. Get hold of the classic Felix color Sunday pages and copy some of them to see how that artist did it.
I always have trouble with pleasing shapes myself. Thinking of a character as an abstract shape always gets in the way of the emotion I'm trying to convey, but audiences and employers insist on it, so we really don't have much coice in the matter.
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