Off Color

One of the areas I’m really trying to improve in my work is coloring. 

Long years of working in the animation biz as a storyboard artist, and developing my penciling and inking for comics has made my black and white muscles mighty, while leaving my color sense as atrophied as the pasty, emaciated biceps of a computer nerd.

I recently created a cover for an issue of a friend’s independent comic, which was colored by someone else. I wasn’t too thrilled with the coloring job and felt I could do better in spite of my flabby coloring technique. I determined to create my own version, but it took some time, effort and extended periods of unemployment to finish the job.

Here’s the process from pencils to colors.

Pencils

Inks

This was my first take on the colors,

garish and flat, but I managed to

do a bit better with the final after 

a little bit (Okay, a LOT) of tinkering.

Okay, much better! 

I'm now planning on creating an exercise to continue working on my coloring. Watch for an Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars themed drawing to be developed in a blog soon!