How I Learned to Use Spot Color
Dec. 14th, 2021 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingA lot of American comics are created by a production team that generally includes someone doing flat colors, someone doing color touch-ups, and someone doing background colors. Personally I think this super-airbrushed coloring often looks like shit. Full offense.
I recently read an anthology that had a dozen pieces using standard comic coloring and one piece that used a more indie style of spot coloring, meaning that it's black-and-white with one flat color used for accents. All of the airbrushed pieces looked the same, while the spot color comic looked fantastic.
I've always wanted to try to make a spot color comic, but I've never found the courage. I don't have enough confidence in my line work, which is slowly getting better but still isn't great. To take a baby step forward, this past week I started working on a one-page comic that I wanted to use to test out a more limited three-color palette. I laid down a layer of flat purple, and then...
...I have no idea what happened, but the document collapsed all its layers and then saved itself. I'm sure this was my own error, like maybe I was listening to a podcast and wasn't paying attention or something, but the result was the same. Unless I wanted to start again from almost-scratch by tracing over my own lines, the comic was effectively finished.
And honestly? It doesn't look that bad:
https://rynling.tumblr.com/post/670387992276385792/the-dragons-curse-her-curse-is-that-shes
I recently read an anthology that had a dozen pieces using standard comic coloring and one piece that used a more indie style of spot coloring, meaning that it's black-and-white with one flat color used for accents. All of the airbrushed pieces looked the same, while the spot color comic looked fantastic.
I've always wanted to try to make a spot color comic, but I've never found the courage. I don't have enough confidence in my line work, which is slowly getting better but still isn't great. To take a baby step forward, this past week I started working on a one-page comic that I wanted to use to test out a more limited three-color palette. I laid down a layer of flat purple, and then...
...I have no idea what happened, but the document collapsed all its layers and then saved itself. I'm sure this was my own error, like maybe I was listening to a podcast and wasn't paying attention or something, but the result was the same. Unless I wanted to start again from almost-scratch by tracing over my own lines, the comic was effectively finished.
And honestly? It doesn't look that bad:
https://rynling.tumblr.com/post/670387992276385792/the-dragons-curse-her-curse-is-that-shes
