By D. Lynn Smith
When you open up a comic book, the first thing you see is the color. It might be full color, black and white, or sepia like Gates of Midnight. Regardless, your first impression of the work comes from the color and that what makes the colorist so important.
I’ve always strived to be an atmospheric writer, but usually I do it with words. Obviously that is not possible in a comic book. For Gates, I wanted a gritty, urban feel to the work. I wanted there to always be a heavy feeling so that even when things were going right, there was general sense of foreboding that something bad lurked right around the next corner.
Enter Mirana Rievera. Mirana quickly grasped what I was looking for. She created a world of shadows that created the mood I was looking for. She told me that she also added a layer of “grit” to the finished product, just to give it something extra.
What you may not know is that the artwork is all done in layers, one over the top of the other. Most colorists these days use Adobe Photoshop. I don’t pretend to understand how this is done. I know that there is a Flat layer, where the colors are put into the art, then come different layers for shadows, special effects, etc. It’s a very complicated process. If you’re interested in learning more about coloring with Adobe, there is a terrific company that teaches the process called Hi-Fi Color. They also have two books out: Hi Fi Color for Comics and Master Digital Color.
When a colorist gets a page of art, it is up to them to make sure that the pages are set up so that none of the art is lost in the fold or the trim of the pages. Of course, the penciller and the inker also have to pay attention to this. In most cases artists create a Bleed area by extending the background shapes and colors beyond the final trim size.
In Gates of Midnight Issue #4, my husband Paul, who does all of the production end of the process (we’ll talk about that in a few weeks), realized that we had a page where the trim was on the wrong side and we were going to lose some of the important artwork in the fold of the comic book. That one mistake cascaded through the book so that there were several pages thereafter that were impacted.
We tossed around different ideas until I decided I could simply add a splash page that would make all the pages come out correctly—and that’s what we did. A splash page is a page of just one panel …this one is a gargoyle coming to life. See it below. Not only did it solve our problem, but it was a great addition to the story! Sometimes mistakes happen for a reason.
Leave a Reply