After finishing the 8 pager for Image, Alan asked me if I would color a couple commissions. Who am I to say no?

That looks beautiful!

My second commission for Alan Weiss. The character is from one of his creator owned projects. Lots going here. A cannibal queen, a carnivorous lizard, pygmy nazis and what appears to be a skunk ape, skulking around in in the pit. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun with this one.

If only those commissions had been drawn with coloring in mind.....

Another one for Alan and my first, dedicated shot at coloring pencils.

that looks good. do you have any advice on coloring pencils? it seems it would look better to color pencils since you can have varying shades of lead as opposed to solid black inks.

I wish I had some helpful advice. I'm still learning the process myself. After I do a few more of these I should be able to advise you better.

bored -- need color in my life

growing roses?

Nah. Just nothing to color. I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me.

It's been great catching up on my sketching though.

Looks good Derek! BTW, did you leave the JBF?

Yeah, I did. I had e-mailed Matt Hansel in private to have him remove me from the membership list since he is listed as the only mod. When my request was not fulfilled I made a public declaration in the forum. That of course got immediate results.

I've enjoyed my time in the forum, but the forum was becoming increasingly hostile. I'm the type of person that doesn't enjoy conflict and when the leader of the forum is calling people assholes and thieves and using the "f" word it won't be long before the drones start exhibiting the same behavior.

Unfortunately, with the transparency of the internet, that kind of juvenile behavior can become a problem for me professionally so it seemed like a good time to pre-emptively end my association with the JBF before it became a problem.

Some people may think I'm over-reacting or just being paranoid, but type your name into google. You might be surprised at what pops up.

I guess the same thing could be said about IMWAN, but the difference here is I have my own thread. If you read through the 18 pages accumulated thus far we don't have any infighting, questionable material or foul language. Snarky comments sure, but nothing potentially career threatening. You'll also notice I don't stray too far from my own thread for the very same reason. I don't want anything to become misconstrued or taken out of context.

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I know what you mean Derek. It's become a pretty hostile forum over there! Anyways, I'll leave it at that and say that I'm sorry to see you leave but at least we still have you here! I'm looking forward to seeing more of your work!

Good for you, Derek! I still have an account at the JBF but haven't posted there in ages! Post here more!

color something, you color monkey

Sigh. Been doing some sketching recently while the computer has been tied up. Matt's Batman/Demon will be the next piece I color. Hopefully next week.

yay

I'm so excited.

My life has no meaning without color.

BTW, if any of my paid comics pitches get picked up (including one with Alan), we're going to try and snag Derek before someone else does.

Yay! Good luck Steve and thanks for your continued consideration.

Some people have asked for this before so here goes. A step by step of my creative process. The pencils are Byrne and the inking is by Matt a.k.a Judge Wan. I use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and I color in CMYK using layers.

Not much to talk about here. Just basic flats. I make most of my selections with the polygonal lasso tool with the anti alias turned off and then fill with the paint bucket tool. For the more difficult selections (gas cloud and the Demon's cape) I use the normal lasso tool with the anti alias turned off and once again fill with the paint bucket tool.

Probably the most important part of this step is setting up your palette and making sure the colors play nice together.

From my flatting I thought Batman's blue portions were too dark and we were losing some of the finer details so I chose to lighten the hue. Afterall, we want people to be able to see all of Matt's fine inking, don't we? I also added more depth to the mist by adding some darker tones to the background and the zip-a-tone.

On to step two.

I like to color how most people would paint. I start by adding flat shadows next. Just like earlier I will use the normal lasso tool to outline all of the feathered shadows indicated by the inking and then fill the selections with the paint bucket tool.

To give the piece decent volume I use two different hues for the shadows in most of the colored regions. If you look closely you will notice the Demon's tunic is now comprised of dark maroon, dark red and red. Likewise the yellow areas now have dark orange and orange shadows.

Probably the number one rule when creating colors to use for shadows is to avoid using a lot of black. Adding black or K tones will make the image look dark, dull and muddy. I find adding a little bit of cyan or violet works best, however, there are always exceptions to this rule. Red for example frequently has to have black added to it to produce maroon. Adding cyan to red will produces purple. Also, adding cyan to yellow produces green. Yuck! That is why darker shades of yellow are usually derived from adding orange or brown.