Little Red: Flat Color

Posted on January 4, 2012 by skook

Laying down flat colors is the least interesting part of creating an illustration. Sometimes it’s fun but mostly it’s a matter of making sure that you’ve filled in all the little spots where you want a certain color or made sure that all the large areas are outlined properly so that you can use the paint bucket tool to fill the middle. I put all the colors on a separate layer than the black and white art. You could do your coloring on the original art layer but making any changes if you make a mistake would be next to impossible.

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3 Responses to Little Red: Flat Color

  1. Glenn Ingersoll says:
    January 8, 2012 at 6:36 pm

    I bought a paperback reissue of old X-Men comics (the original). I know they’ve issued big fat black & white compendia that are cheaper, but I wanted to read the comics in color. Occasionally you notice coloring mistakes, which, I suppose, are faithful reproductions of the original coloring mistakes. The villain gets thrown against the Beast and Beast’s legs change color to match. The colorist clearly couldn’t tell the difference between gams.

    • skook says:
      January 8, 2012 at 6:55 pm

      I find it hard to read those black and white collections. I’m so used to seeing the comics in color that without it the art doesn’t seem to flow as well.

      You’ve probably read the story of why the Hulk is green? He was originally supposed to be gray but difficulties in the printing of the first issues made him come out a different color on different pages. Stan Lee chose to make him green in the second issue.

  2. Glenn Ingersoll says:
    January 10, 2012 at 6:56 pm

    Hadn’t read the green story. When I stopped buying superhero comics I would still pick them up occasionally and flip through them, so I saw the whole “gray Hulk” business but I never was quite curious enough to explore the justification.