In my opinion, coloring is one of the weaker points of Variables and therefore, I’ve spent more time studying how to improve that element of the comic than anything else. In the first issue, I used a cell shading technique but after a few pages, I felt more was necessary to bring the comic to a more professional level. At SDCC, I attended a panel hosted by Hi-Fi Color, learned a few new tricks, and decided to test them out on issue two. The process was more involved than the cell-shading technique and after coloring the cover and first page of the issue, I realized that I needed to save time somewhere or the comic’s schedule could easily become derailed if coloring a single page consumed up to ten hours of my time. I couldn’t cut any corners on the penciling or inking because the results would be too noticeable. After a few days, I started mulling over ways to cut time out of the most annoying part of coloring; a step that took me up to four hours for no real reason.

Flatting.

Flatting is the first step of coloring. Before any nice shadows, highlights, gradients, etc. are added to a comic book page, large areas of flat color must be laid down as a base from which to work. Here is an example of finished flats with no highlights or shadows:

As you can see, all this step consists of is filling in areas like a coloring book with one large, solid color. That gives you a starting point to start adding whatever light sources, shading, and detail you desire on the page. It looks simple but it was taking me far too long to paint the flats by hand. I needed to save time. After searching for several hours to see if anyone had any plug-ins or advice on the subject, I stumbled across BPelt’s website. BPelt makes two plug-ins for Photoshop: Flatten Pro and Multifill. Together, they were exactly what I needed to speed up my flatting work. One plug-in filled in a blank page with random color while the other removed the inks to better give the person a “margin of error” while coloring. Great! This is just what I needed… until I saw that BPelt wanted $99 for the Flatten Pro plug-in. Well, that wouldn’t work. I wasn’t sure if this process was going to be successful so I certainly wasn’t going to spend one hundred dollars on a plug-in that I had never used. So I then set off to replicate the effects for free. I’ll show you the method I found below.

First off, download the Multifill plug-in from the BPelt website using the link in the previous paragraph. It’s a free download (unlike Flatten Pro) and is key to speeding up the time required for flatting. After you have downloaded this plug-in, be sure to install it and restart Photoshop. But first things first… the file has to be prepared for coloring. To do this, I take my raw inks fresh from the scanner and open the file in Photoshop. Generally, you should be scanning in either greyscale or lineart mode (I scan as lineart) in 300dpi or 600dpi (while I scan at 600dpi, it is not necessary) should you ever want to print the page down the road. Leave the image in greyscale. Duplicate your ink layer (ctrl/cmd+J); you’ll need the untouched layer later for the coloring. We need to remove the white areas from the inks layer. This is a simple step; pull up your Channels window in Photoshop and ctrl+click the image next to the channel name (should be Grey). That selects the entire non-white area of the layer. From that point,  fill in the inks with 100% black by right clicking and using the Fill command. After that, right click and select “Layer via Cut” to pull the inks away from the white background. Delete the white background.

Now you should have two layers; one with inks and a transparent background, the other inks with a solid white background. We’ll need the solid white background layer now so hide the newly created transparent inks layer for a few minutes. Now we will use the Multifill plug-in to quickly fill in the page with random colors. You will find this plug-in under Filters>Bpelt>Multifill. Under the options, it works much like the wand tool… default tolerance should be 32 and you can move it higher or lower depending on what you need from the plug-in. After you click Okay, your result should look like this:

Yes, I realize the image now looks silly but I just shaved an hour off my flatting time with this plug-in. There is one small problem, though… the plug-in only fills up the white areas, leaving the inks in place. You need to expand the selection a few pixels so that you colors will bleed under your newly-created transparent ink layer. For this, I created a Photoshop action. If you don’t know how to create an action, click the link and that will give you step-by-step instructions on how to do it. At this point, I start selecting areas that I will then turn into the “real” color I need for flatting with the area slightly expanded to create a bleed under the ink layer.

As you can see, the system isn’t perfect. It’s not only selecting the truck but also part of the road. You can counter this by using the subtract tool with the lasso or simply ignore it and color part of the truck by hand. Either way, it will save time over the traditional method of lassoing or coloring the entire thing by hand. Once this selection is made, I want to expand my selection to bleed over the inks on this layer. I use a 3 pixel expansion but I also work at 600dpi and many of my ink lines are thick so a larger expansion is needed. Your mileage may vary here so experiment with different expansion levels based on your resolution and style of inking. You’ll want to create an action based on the following:

Select>Modify>Expand and then select your desired expansion level of the selection. Stop your action from recording and then bind that action to your keyboard or tablet (I use the tablet because it’s much easier to quickly use a hotkey on the tablet). Expand your selection and then fill the area with your desired “real” color and move on to the next area, selecting, expanding, and filling to your heart’s content. Within two or three hours, I usually have the entire page flatted where using my old hand-and-lasso method, it would often take me up to five hours to complete a single page of flatting. That’s it!

This process may seem a little ridiculous and complex but my results have been outstanding. As with almost every webcomicker, I work under tight deadlines and every minute I can shave off a mundane process, that’s an additional minute I can add to something that really improves the look and feel of the comic (such as adding detailed gradients and effects to the page). With the improved coloring process I’m using for issue two and the additional 2+ hours it takes me to color using this method, cutting an hour or better off the flatting time makes all the difference in the world and allows me to continue to improve the comic.

In case you’re interested, here’s what the finished product looks like after adding all the effects. Without this methodology, I doubt I would have the time to add the details in texture, color, and gradient that you see here. I highly suggest giving it a whirl. Cheers!

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