Like most kids, I liked crayons. I drew my own superheroes, and I colored em in with my Crayolas, and it was fun. Eventually, I got older, and coloring stuff just seemed like a waste. I just drew with pencil. And I drew and I drew. Occasionally, I would get a ball point pen and "ink" my drawings, but it was pretty rare I would use color. If I did, by this point, I had "graduated" to the more refined colored pencil. I took art classes when I could, and I would learn to work with pastels and watercolors and acrylics. I learned enough to get by with this stuff, but I never concentrated on color. Because I drew and I drew and I drew.
I started making comics. The first TORC Press comic, "Pulp Horrorshow" vol. 1 #1, is pure black and white. Not even a color cover. It was made on a Xerox machine (oh, how I have strangely come full circle...). I did start making feeble attempts at creating color covers for some of the later issues, but they looked like crap, so I eventually abandoned color, yet again.
When I started getting my comics professionally printed, the print shop I worked with told me I could get my comics printed a lot cheaper if I just kept the cover black and white. At first I balked at the idea, after all, if I was gonna get my comics printed for realsies, then I needed a for realsie color cover, right? Then I realized the money differential, and I decided I could live without color (interesting side note, the original, hand painted in acrylic, cover for SDF: Crumpled Planet is still in my studio...it looks like crap).
When I switched over to a digital, Print on Demand, printer, color covers were part of the package, and didn't jack up the price. Full color interiors were also an option, and were actually affordable (not cheap, but affordable). So, now I could experiment again. The cover to Pulp Horrorshow vol. 2 #1 (again, full circle) utilized watercolor, acrylic, and I think some markers. Other covers from the time used similar experiments. I quickly discovered that colored pencils didn't translate over to print very well (I recently relearned that lesson when I tried to use colored pencils to color the Chupacabra in "Truth or Consequences Zer0").
Eventually, I started using Photoshop for my colors. I didn't really know what I was doing (still don't...), I just picked out loud, crazy colors, and paint bucketed em onto the image (which, again, you're not supposed to do). I occasionally experimented with using Photoshop properly, but I found that boring and slow. I decided to do a comic in color, so I started "Monster King". It was neat, and the color interiors stood out quite a bit. I still love Issue 3. I really think I killed it with that one.
Then I bought my own printer. I could control my output, and I was free to experiment with... well, everything. At one time, all of my comics were pure black and white. Now, I've practically abandoned black and white for color. With every book I've produced in the last couple of years I've tried all sorts of new stuff. SDF was my "safe" book, produced the same way as my previous color books. With Clown and Penguin, I used a mixture of acrylic, colored inks, and Photoshop colors to create what I feel like were some interesting effects. With Death Moth I kept my pencils in with the inks, creating an oddball shade of grey that gave the images a strange look that I kinda liked. When I did TORC Zer0, I used colored inks to color in the foreground characters, and Photoshop for the backgrounds. It was just an experiment, but I really liked it. The colored inks gave the characters a unique look, and a unique texture. I felt like I was on to something.
I took what I had learned into TORC 100, and the results were pretty cool. I used pencils for shading (from Death Moth), Acrylics for "Special Effects" (from Clown and Penguin), colored inks for the characters (from TORC Zer0), and Photoshopped backgrounds. I like how it turned out, and I felt like I had created something interesting.
So, now I'm making a couple of new webcomics, and I wanted to go full tilt with both books. So I'm doing full hand colors on both new books. It's crazy, and it takes a lot of work, but now that I've been working with it for awhile (I'm past page 9 on both books), I'm starting to really get the hang of the process. And it's surprisingly fun (albeit, a bit nerve wracking).
I'm trying to give each book it's own look, to hopefully make it easy to visually differentiate between the two. The new Hot Fudge Sundae Adventure Club will use brighter colors (the grey backgrounds on the first few pages were an early mistake...), while the other strip (which we'll reveal on Tuesday) will be darker, so I'm using Ink Washes for the backgrounds, and using colors sparingly. I've decided I don't really like the look of the pencil shading anymore (it was a neat experiment), so I didn't do that with the new stuff.
Um... anyway, I'm having fun with color. Who knew?
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