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FactsAreUseless posted:How worth it is color? I don't see any black and white comics, so I'm assuming it's basically a necessity. kate beaton junji ito lackadaisy rubyetc that bee thing on tumblr manga in general do black and white if you like it/are good at it
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Sep 13, 2015 19:30
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Lackadaisy isn't exactly a black and white comic. It's sepia toned with splashes of color as needed.
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Sep 13, 2015 19:40
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I guess i tend to think of monochromatic and black and white as the same thing even thought they're not, especially in this case where having it colored doesn't actually add that much work. And tbh i think that the slightly orange/slightly blue tints she's been doing more recently don't look as nice as when they were purely one shade.
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Sep 13, 2015 19:44
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Wowporn posted:I guess i tend to think of monochromatic and black and white as the same thing even thought they're not, especially in this case where having it colored doesn't actually add that much work. And tbh i think that the slightly orange/slightly blue tints she's been doing more recently don't look as nice as when they were purely one shade. Yeah I'm mostly just being rules lawery I guess. Just sepia VS black and white is as different as grayscale work on a comic. All three are different styles of coloring that give different feelings for a book. Or could be combined because that's the great thing about comics-they're pretty dynamic in terms of how they can be realized.
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Sep 13, 2015 19:46
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I really like the treatment people give to ink and inkwash comics but am sad that most visible examples of that currently are soulless new yorker cartoons
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Sep 13, 2015 19:49
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Think of yourself as both Wilbur and Orville Wright, wondering why there's no flying contraptions whizzing about the mostly vacant roads of the sky.
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Sep 13, 2015 19:53
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A shitload of mangos and mango-style comics are black and white or minimal color. That Toronto Comics anthology a while back is also black and white. Love Me Nice, Templar AZ, Family Man... there's plenty of great black and white comics. Do color if you like it and/or feel it'll enhance your comic in some way. Don't if it's not important to you. It won't make a big difference.
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Sep 13, 2015 20:11
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Puppy Time posted:A shitload of mangos and mango-style comics are black and white or minimal color. That Toronto Comics anthology a while back is also black and white. Love Me Nice, Templar AZ, Family Man... there's plenty of great black and white comics. Yeah, we looked into doing colour, but it ends up costing +33% in print costs. I do love the hell out of colour, but it's expensive and time-consuming. Today, I will become a bad guy. Of the 55 writers who applied to this year's anthology, we only have space for 26. I've turned away one or two people before for the previous books, but never on this scale. We've had 45 artists apply as well, and I'll have to turn away a significant chunk of very talented folks. The frustrating thing is that so many of the story pitches are really good. I'd love to see them made, and I'd love to read them, but it's not practical to publish a 500-page phonebook. I've lost a good few evenings arguing with my editors as we try and pick which of the great stories we all love will get left out.
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Sep 13, 2015 20:49
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I never developed much of an eye for color so I stick to monochrome and I think it works for me. There's still a lot for me to learn about doing a black and white comic, though.
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Sep 14, 2015 01:53
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The thing with black and white comics online is that the artists tend not to push the contrast far enough and so the page can come out boring looking.
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Sep 14, 2015 03:20
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Image > Auto-tone 
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Sep 14, 2015 03:31
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thousandcranes posted:The thing with black and white comics online is that the artists tend not to push the contrast far enough and so the page can come out boring looking. That's a good point. I've seen a lot of grayscale comics where I kind of lose the action of what's goign on because the artist just made everything darker in order to make it more atmospheric and accidentally wound up shrouding everything in mystery in the not-fun way. Doing a comic in grays or black and white means thinking more critically about the meaning and emploiyment of light and shadow, and especially negative space, in a way that's not necessarily intuitive the way it is when doing something photorealistic or even just in color.
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Sep 14, 2015 03:48
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Color when done well really does have a way of grabbing attention and the only way you are gonna get better at something is to practice at it and learn it. For instance, I don't think Jeremy Mann's work would be nearly as impressive without his great use of color.  But yeah as others have said it's not essential, cause there are plenty of artists who do amazing stuff with black and white.  Bernie Wrightson <3  Harry Clark You could also go mostly monotone but have splashes of color ala Lackadaisy as someone mentioned or something like Sin City or whatever. Just a little color can really pop if it's the only color in the piece and that can be a cool effect if that's what you want. You certainly don't need to use color to direct someone's attention if you are good at value anyways. Imo, choose what you think will suit your story best and what is most aesthetically pleasing to you. If you make something good you'll get an audience color or not.
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Sep 14, 2015 04:44
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Working in greyscale is fun because you get a lot more depth in value compared to color (pure white to pure black has much more visible contrast variation than mid-light color to mid-dark color). You lose the power to use hue and saturation to create contrast but pure value gives you a lot more data to work with, albeit on a single linear spectrum. I actually find black and white more time-consuming than color because you have to simulate hue and saturation contrast within the value spectrum, especially when it comes to reflected or atmospheric lighting. My dad used to comment how much more "expressive" old black-and-white shows were, since he grew up with the Munsters and the like, and I always took that to heart. Anyways that's my post on the topic.
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Sep 14, 2015 07:00
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Deciding on color vs monochrome vs grayscale should be a decision left to the tone of the content being presented and the skill of the artist, imo. Color work is definitely more popular, but colors also work to hide imperfections with the more high contrast elements, e.g. black linework. I would wager most of the stuff you see online in color is because it looks better due to that corrective effect, rather than for stylistic choice. (I am guilty of this.)
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Sep 14, 2015 07:21
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It feels like really really different things are being talked about here. We've got: Fully rendered full colour Fully rendered greyscale / monotone (Dead Winter / Lackadaisy) Line art + monotone cell shading or greyscale cell shading Black and white line art only. While any of these can look absolutely spectacular, you often get a perception issue from punters / readers / not artists. While anything fully rendered is naturally going to take longer, in my experience it is also more eye catching. This is particularly important if you're selling at conventions. I doubled sales when I swapped from black and white to colour, and it was not a question of skill.
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Sep 14, 2015 13:03
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I have never heard a complaint about my comic being in grayscale, and my comics are occasionally somewhat popular on Tumblr. I hear more complaints about the subject matter than the style. I don't think color would add anything to my comic. Part of my style inspiration is cheap paleontology textbooks from the 1950's, and then I save a few bucks when I get it printed on Ka-blam, so no I don't think color plays into a comic's success at all.
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Sep 15, 2015 05:14
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GreatJob posted:I don't think color plays into a comic's success at all. I don't think it's easy to make that claim. If you talk to a graphic designer, it's not uncommon for them to say that color is the most powerful tool to catch someone's attention, above anything else. I don't necessarily go that far but I'd definitely agree that color can be a powerful tool. If color made no difference, why would a great comic artist like Meredith Gran hire a colorist? Or why would marvel or dark horse or what have you hire colorists? Why would anyone? I'm not gonna say you have to use color cause I think there are plenty of examples that show that you certainly don't have to. I agree with you, your comics are great as they are but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the value of color for all cases especially with people like Robin Pierce saying that color lead to a direct increase in sales for him. I think the question of whether to use color (and to what extent you render or use value/line/or whatever else) is a question people should consider carefully to see what works for them. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 06:57
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People who buy your book at conventions will sneer at the price if it's greyscale, like "if I'm gonna pay $20 I want my money's worth, I want ALL the colors". It sounds ludicrous but I've seen it happen to multiple people more than once.
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Sep 15, 2015 07:02
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I've also found that non-artists seem to have a strange bias toward color over monochrome, I really have no idea why. I guess it's some sort of "value proposition" like "more is better"? Those people are wrong though and shouldn't be catered to.  I think the easiest way to decide something like this is to just ask yourself what method you find more appealing, personally, and go from there.
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Sep 15, 2015 09:54
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It probably breaks down on the creator vs reader line. A reader is probably more likely to think black and white or monochrome stuff is only half the work of color since hey you have to draw it in black and white first right? That's where the devaluation comes in, ignoring that really good b&w stuff isn't just drawing the lineart and forgetting to add color. Likewise, when I was starting out, lo these 12 years ago, it was common advice to tell newbies to use color for these reasons. Color can definitely make up for mediocre work (which is most new artists) and readers did usually prefer color. If I had to guess, I'd say that since newspaper comics are mostly b&w, it was a way to distinguish your stuff and be more like the big publisher comics. Plus, at the time, no one was thinking about publishing books so since you're on the web, why not use a bunch of color? I think it's probably changed since then, especially since most manga-style stuff isn't in color, there's probably less push for color if you can make monochrome look good. But if you like black and white / monochrome, and want to get better at it, just do it.
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Sep 15, 2015 12:54
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Mercury Hat posted:It probably breaks down on the creator vs reader line. A reader is probably more likely to think black and white or monochrome stuff is only half the work of color since hey you have to draw it in black and white first right? That's where the devaluation comes in, ignoring that really good b&w stuff isn't just drawing the lineart and forgetting to add color. Can definitely echo that. When I started out I wanted to do full colour to "hide" art mistakes and to have everything look more appealing to any new readers. I still use colour now but it's more out of habit then anything else. I am tempted one day to actually try to do a black and white comic, but I keep scaring myself from doing it.
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Sep 16, 2015 03:43
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JuniperCake posted:I don't think it's easy to make that claim. If you talk to a graphic designer, it's not uncommon for them to say that color is the most powerful tool to catch someone's attention, above anything else. I don't necessarily go that far but I'd definitely agree that color can be a powerful tool. If color made no difference, why would a great comic artist like Meredith Gran hire a colorist? Or why would marvel or dark horse or what have you hire colorists? Why would anyone? Sure, people get excited about color and it is an important part of design. I guess I'm more in favor of using color if the visual language of the comic demands it and if it can be applied in a skilled manner. My experience with clients is that they always want colors right the gently caress now before I can do any of the preliminary and necessary structural work that will make the colors work. My kneejerk response to color discussions that I don't always censor in time is 'CALM THE HELL DOWN, THE COLORS WILL HAPPEN, GOD, LEAVE ME ALONE, I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS LIFE'
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Sep 17, 2015 06:40
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It's funny, I nearly always work in full color, but for the sake of efficiency, I'm doing my anthology piece in Sin City monochrome. I forgot how hard this was, and I also forgot how effective it could be. It's also fast, at only about 1/3rd the time it usually takes me to finish a normal full-color page.  I like how it's going so far, anyway.
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Sep 17, 2015 08:07
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I've been wondering about putting my strips on line. I publish a fairly popular series of strips and short comic stories in the Belgian magazine "Spirou". But I was never able to find a publisher in English. (is that even possible in print? It seems it's all about syndicated 7 day a week strips with only a handful of artists getting a spot) I tried to put some strips on line through imgur, reddit and what not. Resulting in 100000+ views sometimes, but the traffic coming back to your own site is about 20 people. And so, I guess there's no way of making money of banners etc...? Maybe some of you have more experience with these things, and I'm hoping for some help 
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Sep 17, 2015 16:12
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More dumb comics made in paint for my 6th graders. The original lines are drawn in Gimp with my wacom, and I draw example panels using mouse + paint in class. 
McKilligan fucked around with this message at 12:49 on Sep 18, 2015 |
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Sep 18, 2015 12:46
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I finished my western, I'm so happy  . It's an adaptation of an episode of Gunsmoke (you can actually listen to the whole thing here, if you're interested).I had so much fun doing something new and somehow I managed to slide this in under the wire to get some minis printed up for SPX this year. I'd really like to do another one, but I think I'd also like to get back to my poor neglected main comic. I've had two months of nothing but westerns rolling around in my head. Here's some panels I liked:    
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Sep 19, 2015 00:44
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Mercury Hat posted:I finished my western, I'm so happy I'm so happy I got these at SPX today, they are baller! They are good in digital format but I enjoy having them in print more! I think between this, the Candy Fairy zine, and the little kid who gave me 24 pages of hand-drawn Super Penguin comics, this is the best convention I've had in terms of people randomly giving me things.
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Sep 20, 2015 03:57
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Hey Merc would it be possible to buy one of the hard copies? My dad loves Gunsmoke and I'd like to get him one.
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Sep 20, 2015 05:04
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Here is how I make a comic. I sit down. Drink the ink. Take it all into my throat andn into the acidic gourd of my stomach, mty bulging fleshes. I feel it sliiiiiide like Iraqui oil through my intestinsers, it oozes down through geological layers of meat and it churns all through black and bubbly into my bowels/ There it becomes poo poo. poo poo! I squat 0n the keyboard and I paaaarp out a gentle shart. I sit down. I do a pose/ I think ofmyself winning an Oscar, of the speech I will give. When my comic becomes a movie. Thanking the actresses and the director, criticising themovie soundtrack, I think of the dressI will wear, the spring green dress woith boobs on the back, bristling boobs all down my back like a mature stegosaurus. I grind my hot taut rear end and then I presss "save as". Comic 001.png. That's an insight
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Sep 20, 2015 12:16
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I prefer to use a tablet.
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Sep 20, 2015 15:56
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Maybe he draws everything in ASCII.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:50
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Oh yeah, speaking of making GBS threads out comics, I launched one a couple of days ago: The last time I started publicly posting a serial comic I was 12-years-old and holy crap are you a lot less self conscious about this kind of thing as an oblivious tween. (Drop Dead was super good A+) Rethy fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Sep 21, 2015 |
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Sep 21, 2015 03:35
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Puppy Time posted:Hey Merc would it be possible to buy one of the hard copies? My dad loves Gunsmoke and I'd like to get him one. Yeah, sure, though this is a fair bit different from the actual program, haha. You can drop me a line at gunmetalannie at gmail and we'll figure something out. Rethy posted:(Drop Dead was super good A+) . I guess a western's more popular than I thought it would be, I'm real surprised at all the positive responses I've been getting. I thought it would be some weird little niche project of mine, but I'm glad people enjoyed it.
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Sep 22, 2015 23:00
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Double posting because Manga Studio is on sale again, digital version, until September 29. $87 for EX, or $50 to upgrade your copy of 5, or buy the vanilla program for $15.
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Sep 25, 2015 00:06
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Mercury Hat posted:Double posting because Manga Studio is on sale again, digital version, until September 29. $87 for EX, or $50 to upgrade your copy of 5, or buy the vanilla program for $15. I just picked up the vanilla program, thanks! I'd been using Corel Painter for the last decade, which is kind of awful in a lot of ways. I'd wanted to try out Manga Studio but the cost was holding me back.
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Sep 25, 2015 06:05
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Mercury Hat posted:Double posting because Manga Studio is on sale again, digital version, until September 29. $87 for EX, or $50 to upgrade your copy of 5, or buy the vanilla program for $15. Nice! for anyone on the fence, Manga Studio is definitely worth picking up. It paints as well (or better, depending on personal preference) as photoshop for a fraction of the price. Even good if you never make a single comic with it. Though I don't suppose people not interested in comics would be frequenting this thread much.
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Sep 25, 2015 06:25
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You can get the same deal on Clip Studio, http://www.clipstudio.net/en/purchase .. which is the same software, from the original authors, and has more frequent updates. This is especially important if you use Cintiq, as they wind out pushing an TabletPC support update out almost every time Wacom updates Cintiq drivers.
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Sep 25, 2015 06:40
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Mercury Hat posted:Double posting because Manga Studio is on sale again, digital version, until September 29. $87 for EX, or $50 to upgrade your copy of 5, or buy the vanilla program for $15. Does anybody know when manga studio 6 (or clip studio) is coming out? I haven't seen anything posted about it, or even what the new features will be. It's great software by the way, I use it every day. I used to work with photoshop, but I hardly use it anymore. It's hard to explain, but the drawing in MS is just better. The coloring tools, with things like the "area scaling" feature, are also better.
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Sep 25, 2015 07:37
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Every now and then I have to dip back into Photoshop to edit a thing and I just can't draw it in any more, compared to Manga Studio it's like dragging a stick through mud.
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Sep 25, 2015 11:57
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