Thumb-twiddling
Added 2022-06-22 15:44:44 +0000 UTCLast week I'd more or less committed to simplifying my comic pages, so that I might still be able to get 1-2 out per month while I'm under contract. I was expecting the job to start Monday, so I wanted to have my next page done - in black & white - by then. Neither of those things happened, though. I'm told the contract should be signed & verified today, so in the meantime I've decided I have time to color this page after all.
My approach to color and backgrounds for this page is much more efficient, compared to any previous ones. This and the next few pages recycle the same two camera angles, so I'm doing those backgrounds in separate files that can be referenced in. The nice thing about this is that when I update the main file, it's immediately reflected in all the panels that use that background.
Eventually I'd like to get my 3D sets to a point where I won't need to trace over them in Illustrator, but they're not there yet.
Another thing I'm kicking myself for not using sooner, are color swatches. Before, when coloring anything I'd copy the color values from file where each character's palettes are represented with circles. That was very tedious, and in the past couple of days I've found that using proper swatches is much, MUCH faster.
Another factor in my decision to keep doing pages in color, for now - I don't think black & white would be significantly faster. If I were to use solid colors or gradients for backgrounds, I'd need to fill the characters in with white, which would take the same amount of time as color. So why not use color instead?
