Ollie & Quentin Book

Ollie & Quentin Book
125 pages in full colour!

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Dark Secrets





Today's comic gives me an excuse to show you how I do that dark effect in my comics.

Firstly I color the comic normally as if it's all in broad daylight. I then fill a new layer (in Photoshop) with my dark color, set the layer blending mode to 'multiply' and simply erase the areas that I want the light to shine through on. This is fantastically satisfying to do.

This method also gives me the advantage of already having the dark part completed for when I do the gray/bw version.

Simple.


3 comments:

arcticcircle said...

How do you convert that to grey? Do you just fill it with 25% K or something?

Piers Baker said...

I do everything on different layers in Photoshop. The colour is done on the bottom layer, below the linework, text, balloons, 'dark effect', frames etc layers. As the colour is too complicated for the black and white version I delete it. Keeping all the other layers as they are I convert the whole image to greyscale then do a very simple grey 'colouring' on that bottom layer again. So my original colour file easily becomes the greyscale version too. It only takes me 5 minutes.

NB: As it's you Alex I've used all the proper English spellings here!

arcticcircle said...

Good oh - hope that didn't hurt your grey matter...

I draw my strips for the black and white version for dailies. Colour is an afterthought and a bit slapdash...