Tuesday, September 2, 2008

RAPUNZEL Coloring Tutorial

I know I promised a post on the giant Rapunzel wig last week. But it's been a hectic week at the space station. Coloring has begun on CALAMITY JACK, the sequel to RAPUNZEL'S REVENGE.

Coloring is the final step in my graphic novel work schedule. My order is: pencil sketches>lettering>ink>coloring. Unfortunately, the coloring tends to take the most time. For Rapunzel, I ended up coloring for four months straight. This year, I'm bringing in some help.

I've got a team of five Color Mappers! They range from Photoshop experts to Photoshop beginners. To clarify the process, and to help the beginners, I created a RAPUNZEL Coloring Tutorial. I made it for the color mappers, but I thought you might like to see it too. It features a sneak peek of CALAMITY JACK (possibly the most boring page in the book) and might be helpful to anyone who wanted a simple way to digitally color an ink drawing. 

Now there are a million ways to lay out flat colors, this is just my method. It's based on my experience coloring Rapunzel, as well as a few different books. There was a mountain of valuable information in Mark Chiarello and Todd Klein's DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics, I also found some handy tricks in a book called Japanese Comickers 2.

When I started inking Rapunzel, I had planned to color the book by hand, with watercolor. Didn't happen. For all of its slowness, Photoshop is still faster (and more forgiving) than watercolor. One day...

Okay, here's the tutorial--you'll have to click on each page to read the small print. I hope it comes in handy. Next post will be about the wig I promise.







7 comments:

ueberhund said...

That was really cool...I always wondered how you colored those pages.

Nathan said...

Thanks ueberhund. Saaaay don't I know you from Xbox live?

Laura Z M said...

Hey, Nate. This is awesome. I tried it out on a few of the Rapunzel paper dolls, and it was really fun and looks great. I don't know how to do the shading part, though. Any chance a tutorial on that is forthcoming?

Nathan said...

Cool! I didn't even think of coloring the paper dolls this way. I'd love to see how they turned out!

In fact, if anybody has colored versions of the paper dolls, send them to me, I'll post them on the site.

A tutorial on shading is definitely something I'd like to do down the road.

Enna Isilee said...

I'm having a blast coloring. Except for this one building that has an awful lot of windows...

;)

Julie Olson said...

You are the man, NATE! Good luck with the sequel!Sorry I don't have time to help out.

Nathan said...

Thanks Julie--I wish you could help too, but I you know I can't afford an agented pro illustrator. What am I, made of gold?