{"id":806,"date":"2016-04-01T23:58:17","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T03:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/?p=806"},"modified":"2022-06-18T20:53:17","modified_gmt":"2022-06-19T00:53:17","slug":"do-it-yourself-colorist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/?p=806","title":{"rendered":"Do It Yourself Colorist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walk into any Barnes and Noble bookstore and you\u2019ll find, prominently displayed on a table near the front of the store, a host of adult coloring books and supplies of brush markers.\u00a0 It seems that adult coloring is a new pastime.\u00a0 I\u2019ve tried it and it is a lot of fun.\u00a0 To be clear, I never gave up on coloring the old way (crayons and kids coloring books), so maybe I am biased but whatever.<\/p>\n

At first, the only available books featured complex geometric patterns or stylized animal prints or nature scenes \u2013 you know\u2026 adult things.\u00a0 Fortunately, comics publishers have been jumping on the bandwagon and one can now get coloring books with content ranging from EC\u2019s horror line to everyone\u2019s favorite moral reprobate: Deadpool.<\/p>\n

All of that is well and good and I have purchased coloring books of both stripes \u2013 sober adult content and cheeky adolescent fare \u2013 and have enjoyed coloring in each kind. \u00a0Up to a point.<\/p>\n

Of course applying crayon or marker to page has its drawbacks.\u00a0 The most notable one is that the original unfilled image is lost forever once you start coloring unless you buy another copy or you photocopy, scan, or otherwise digitally reproduce the original.\u00a0 Personally, I don\u2019t want to indulge in the former and much prefer the reproduction route. But if one is going to do that, why limit oneself to what the publishers deem appropriate.\u00a0 Branch out.<\/p>\n

And so that is just what I did.\u00a0 Using a smart phone (or digital camera or a scanner), some photo-editing software, and some of those DC Showcase or Marvel Essentials black-and-white reprint volumes, you can make your own custom coloring book and get started practicing as a do-it-yourself colorist.<\/p>\n

For this post, I photographed an image from Essential Captain Marvel, Volume 2<\/em> in which Thanos first reveals that he possesses the cosmic cube.\u00a0 To capture the image, I used Genius Scan on my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (old but powerful and much beloved).\u00a0 I like Genius Scan since it corrects for some curvature and rotation automatically. The page was in the middle of the volume which is a thick as an old-fashioned phone book from a mid-size city.\u00a0 The raw image looked like this<\/p>\n

\"raw_Thanos_and_the_cube\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I then loaded the image into the GIMP and cropped it to<\/p>\n

\"sized_Thanos_and_the_cube\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next step was to start coloring.\u00a0 For this quick and dirty approach I didn\u2019t use layers nor did I try any tools except the bucket fill.\u00a0 This was a bit clumsy as certain regions that looked closed often had small gaps due to the publisher reproduction, the printing process, or the image capture.\u00a0 Whatever the reason, when a small, undesired gap was present the bucket fill would sometimes over fill as in this image<\/p>\n

\"oops_color_Thanos_and_the_cube\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At times like this, the undo (ctrl-Z) I your friend.\u00a0 Repairs involve the eye-dropper (color-picker) tool and the brush.\u00a0 Simply grab a gray\/black from some point nearby and close the gap using the brush (soft and diffuse seems best) and color again.<\/p>\n

Using this rather primitive process, it only took me about 10-15 minutes to color in the image to<\/p>\n

\"final_color_Thanos_and_the_cube\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Clearly the image needs work, especially around the crenellated chin of the Big-T.\u00a0 But, all told, it didn\u2019t turn out too bad given that layers and brushes and other sophisticated tools were totally ignored.<\/p>\n

So there you have it \u2013 a three-fold win: 1) a fast way to create your own digital coloring books using your favorite art, 2) a new use\/justification for buying the cheap B&W reprint volumes, and 3) a path to learn to be a real colorist without the need to find an artist and inker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walk into any Barnes and Noble bookstore and you\u2019ll find, prominently displayed on a table near the front of the store, a host of adult coloring books and supplies of… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1418,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/1418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}