Webcomics Tutorial 10 Lessons For Better Colouring

Posted on November 1, 2010 by admin

This how-to-colour-comics tutorial is geared towards webcomics but applies to regular

comics as well. Im not going to teach you the ins-and-outs of a particular art program.
Instead, you will learn 10 important things to consider whether you colour with
Photoshop or a paintbrush. These lessons will keep your comic storytelling clear and
dynamic. If you do a goofy strip like my own Princess Planet, or an all out action fest like
the X-Men the lessons still apply.
1. Read vs Real
Comics is sequential story telling and therefore its primary goal is not making the nicest
picture its about making the clearest picture to illustrate your story. Just like you dont
draw every hair on a persons head, every pore on their skin and every leaf on a tree, you
need to make decisions about what colours you will and wont include. How much
shading is enough and how much is too much? With the advent of computer colouring
there are a lot of mainstream comics coloured in a way that makes them more
realistic. This is often at odds with what is most clear. So I recommend that choosing
colours for your characters and their surroundings becomes a question of what reads
best, not whats most real.
For a simple gag strip I think the first head is over drawn and the last head is overcoloured. Depending on how real you want to make your strip you may find your level of
detail varies.

2. Basics of Colour Theory

The colour wheel is made of 6 major colours. Colours opposite each other are called
complimentary. They make the biggest impact when you put them beside each other.
You dont lose a green snot monster on a red wall, but they might seem a little more
subdued on a yellow or blue background.

Analogous colours are ones that are 3 in a row on the colour wheel. We start to include
the non-major 6 colours like orange-yellow, blue-green etc. They make a very pleasing
combination. This is good for home decorating.
If you just use two colours beside each other some people think these colours clash. Ive
heard a lot of people say you dont wear red and purple (bad news Dracula!) and blue
and green should never be seen except round and round in the washing machine. This
isnt as bad if you use stretch the colours to be almost analogous, so that you have blue
and yellowish green.

Another reason colours clash is that they are at the same value. Picture value being If
this colour was on a black and white tv, what grey would it be?. You can test this out by

converting your computer file to greyscale. If you have colours too close to each other on
the scale of grey, they become hard to read, especially if you dont have an outline
between the colours. If you colour your outlines or dont use outlines at all, be very
aware of this.

If you add black to a colour its called a shade. If you add white its called a tint. But
adding black to a colour is bad news. It makes colours muddy and flat. If you want a
darker colour try adding other colours to it, like painters do. A purplish shadow is
deeper than a blacker one. Heres a link to a Photoshop palette that has all the basic
colours without black that recreates the traditional mainstream comic colours.
A monochrome colour scheme is when you colour with only one colour, white and
black.TXcomics strips The Abominable Charles Christopher and Sin Titulo both use this
simple version to add a quiet tone to their comics. Its harder to make a clashing or
unappealing picture with only one colour besides black and white. Its also harder to
make a bold, grab your attention from the other side of the room one. If you want bold
in a monochrome scheme, you usually rely on stark white and black to grab attention
(click to enlarge).

Neutral colours are ones not on the wheel, like greys and browns. These colours wont
dominate the other colours. You can create dusty or sandy tones of regular colours
by making the values of cyan, magenta and yellow close to each other on your computer
programs colour sliders

3. RGB vs CMYK
Speaking of CMYK, if you are making a webcomic you may be tempted to use all the
colours of the computers spectrum and colour in RGB. Unfortunately if you ever want to
make a print edition, your comic will need to be converted to CMYK and you may lose a
lot in translation. If you plan ahead you can save yourself a lot of headache. And
obviously you want to make files at AT LEAST 300dpi (but preferably 600), then save a
72dpi version for the web. Using CMYK sliders also more closely mirrors natural paint
mixing, so if you learn how to colour on a computer this method will be easier to make
the switch to paints. You can work in RGB in CMYK preview mode which will let you
know how it will print, and thats just as good.
If youre colouring in Photoshop, make yourself a swatch palette of your most used
colours. This can be your characters clothes and skin tones, their home base, or
whatever.
This CMYK lesson also applies if you are drawing or painting your work by hand and
scanning it in. If you draw in black and white, scan it in as line art for crisp linework,
before you convert it to CMYK. If you are scanning in paintings you will have to adjust

the colour balance of the images to get the truest colours to your painting. Taking a hiresolution photograph may yield a better result. Either way, the file should be CMYK in
the end if you want to see how it will print in a book.
Print is dead! you say? Well webcomic creators still make a good chunk of their money
from prints and books. At comic conventions we almost never have fans ask us creators
when will you have this as an iPhone ap?. The question we are most frequently asked
is When will you be collecting it in a book or When does the next collection come
out? People still want books.
4. Character Design
Comic characters usually have very different colour schemes to identify themselves. For
instance Spider-Man is primarily red. His main villains are his complimentary colour,
green. This gives the greatest punch and easy separation when Spidey gets tangled up
with Doc Oc, The Scorpion, The Vulture, Sandman, Electro and of course Green Goblin.

I remember watching the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace where Bond (in a black
tuxedo) fought against similarly proportioned white guy (also in a black tuxedo) in a
scaffolding-filled room. They zipped up and down ropes, kicked, shot, climbed and all
the good things youd expect in an action sequence. But with the quick cuts and shaky
camera I couldnt tell the two apart. This would be great storytelling if there was
someone off to the side trying to shoot one of them but unsure which one to shoot at.
Alas, that wasnt the case. So if for some reason you are drawing all of your characters in
the same outfit and they have to be the same build and race, at least change their hair
colour. I mean, it worked for separating blonde Betty from raven-haired Veronica.

Think not only about what will set your characters apart from each other but apart from
their backgrounds. So, if your character spends his time in the jungle, and you make him
green, your character becomes a ghost that even the reader cant see half of the time. As
cool as that might be, remember that it can become frustrating. People may not bother
trying to figure out where that word balloon is coming from. They may just click onto
another easier to read webcomic. While red might make the hero look foolishly
confident, a blue, yellow or black might work well.

If you really want a green person in a green location, like Swamp Thing in the swamps,
you need to be brazen enough to colour the background in colours that are not real. A
quick look through a classic Swamp Thing comic and I see old Swampy against lilac tree
trunks, bright blue swamp water, red skies, and pale, pale green empty backgrounds.

This seems less unusual if your comic takes place in a made-up world. In The Princess
Planet I have pink skies and purple grass sometimes so I can do whatever I think suits
the story. In a realistic setting it takes real guts to colour things the wrong colour.
Andy Bs comic, Raising Hell, colours with red and blue. He only introduces new colours
when hes drawing attention to something new, like a yellow school bus appearing out of
nowhere.

5. Start Simple
The next lesson is really simple: Colour the things you know have to be a certain colour.
Once youve established your characters colour scheme, stick to it. For instance I know
Princess Christi has spray-tan orange skin, white blonde hair and a reddish-orange
jumpsuit. Thats not going to change unless theres something dramatically different in
the scene. The Gorgon character in my strip is always the same colour too.

Then you colour the things that are usually the same colour, like tree trunks are brown,
grass is green, sidewalks are grey. Sure, untended grass can go yellow but its thats
atypical.

Then you turn on your thinking cap and colour the things that are a bit more variable in
their colour. Like leaves on the trees are usually green but its not illogical to see red,
brown and orange in the fall. Could your comic take place in the fall? Would it help the
colour scheme of the page? What about the sky? During the day its blue but at sunset it
can be a rainbow of colours. Does that help or hinder your storytelling? Is your character
hiding or are they the centre of attention? Here I can make rock grey, brown, sandy
yellow, biege there are a lot of applicable colours to choose from. I selected a cool
pinkish grey.

Then you should have a pretty good framework to start in with colours that never have
to be any particular colour, like cars, pants, walls, ice cream etc. You can start referring
back to your generic colour theory like complimentary, analogous, etc. For this gag I
want the rock to sit apart from the stone, so I made the stone a warmer, darker grey
than than the rock figures.

6. Avoiding Busy
When you have a lot of things to colour in it can get busy-looking very quickly. A trick
that help me is to leave out one of the main 6 colours (red, orange, yellow, green, blue or
purple). The image below doesnt have any orange (and barely any yellow).

When you have drawn a crowd scene you might look at all the characters youve drawn
and worry about labouring over the colouring of each individual. Luckily, its not usually
in your best interest to spend your time doing that. Most of the time you want to set
your characters apart from the crowd. You want people to know there is a crowd here,
but the people talking are the important ones. So you can colour the crowd different
hues of the same colour. I usually use purple. I saw it done a lot in comics when I was a
kid and it makes a lot of sense. Almost nothing in real life is purple so people wont

confuse the crowd of people for a crowd of green trees, grey rocks or skin coloured
nudists. They also wont blend into the background elements youve set up Unless your
comic is about Grimace fighting the Purple People Eater inside the Hulks pants, purple
is your friend.

The time when you do want to colour the whole crowd is if you want the reader to labour
over the crowd looking for someone, like a Wheres Waldo puzzle. This is good to slow
down the reader on an establishing panel of life in a new location. Its also good if your
character has just given someone the slip into a big crowd and that person is feeling
overwhelmed with where to look. However, if your escapist has been spotted by their
pursuer, you may want to fall back on a purple crowd with the suddenly spotted
character in their regular colour.
In this comic I coloured all of the confectionery different colours to suggest the huge
variety of deliciousness. Ive used purple in the last panel here to make the
complimentary gold pieces pop off of the background.

Neutral tones also accomplish the same thing as the purple. Blending your base colour
with white, black or its complimentary colour can give you a duller version to work
with. In this comic I have a panel where I wanted an intense rainbow of colours behind
the Unicorn Queen. This works at differentiating the Queen because she is mainly
neutral colours: white and a blue-ish grey. In the lower panels the bright purple hydra is
highlighted by the dull, grey rock.

7. Let There Be (Some) Light

Light sources are great at two things: mood and overdoing things. Sometimes people go
over board colouring comics based exactly on the light sources drawn in the panel. For
instance with this comic I have a couple of light sources, the fire under the cauldron and
the open doorway. Instead of calculating exactly where these competing light sources
are going to light my characters I just throw a little hint at both. This comic isnt about
the heat from the cauldron or the light from out of doors. So a drop shadow underneath
the walking characters in the last panel suggests light from the door and an orange glow
around the fireplaces suggests a light there too. Any more than that would be like
drawing the characters with enough hand wrinkles that a fortuneteller could read their
palms. This is a comic, not a historical documentation. If you worry too much about
casting the right shadow and picking up the right highlight in someones hair youre
probably not seeing the forest for the trees.

But a few lighting cues can go a long way to building a mood. Simply lighting someone
from below gives them an eerie appearance. If you add a bit of blue to your basic palette
youre ready to colour your characters at night. Or you could wash everyone out with red
if their at a roller disco.

8. Special Effects

You might be tempted to add a solar flare from the sun in the distance or a radiant glow
from a campfire. This occurs more in comics now that colourists are almost like
painters, filling in blank backgrounds that pencillers and inkers have left empty. When
you add special effects, it draws attention to the special effects and away from what the
writer (hopefully you) is trying to say in the scene. Is it more important the sun seems
bright or that we look at the characters reaction to the sun. Who is the story about? The
desert nomad or the sun?
9. Changing Locations
Once you have a colour palette established for your scene, you can use a shift in palettes
to indicate a changing of scenes or mood. If a person suddenly gets really angry you can
put them on a red background. If youve suddenly gone from Sallys apartment to
Brendas apartment, you can tell people by changing the wall colour. Below you can see
a transition from one stone home to another.

10. Sketch From Life

A great way to build up your palettes is to sketch with your computer facing a window
(or if you have a laptop, just go outside somewhere). These are sketches Ive done in
different weather at different times of the day. All of these have been used colouring one
of my comics set in a city.

If you are looking to use a different palette, try scanning in (or finding online) a picture
that you like, and eyedrop the colours from it. Just like you wouldnt trace another
persons artwork, you wouldnt swipe a complete colour scheme. Youre bound to tinker
with some of the values, especially from a radiant coloured photo. But it can force you
out of your regular routine if youre looking to introduce a new mood. This works great if
youre thinking things like What colour can snow appear at night?. You might use the
eyedropper and disover the blue snow is actually grey but looked blue next to the other
colours. You can try to recreate the environment where grey looks blue or you can make
the snow the blue you see it to be in your mind and work from there. You have options.
The last thing to say is Keep working at it! If youre colouring on the computer its
really not very time consuming to try switching a few colours around to see if the
wooden furniture should be a reddish brown or a bluish brown, or if the sky works

better as sunset or broad baylight. Do a couple versions of your comic and see which one
you like better, maybe combining the best of both. Just like learning anything, theres a
lot of trial and error. Hopefully these tips have helped you to find some paths in the
wilderness that should lead you to your goal. Good luck and have fun!
If you enjoyed this tutorial, you may want to check out my book