Wolverine Cover

It's amazing what a simple gradient can do - with and without a background colour under it.

As seen in these Wolverine covers below. Which do you prefer?

To me, the blue background helps the blood and bullet impacts pop a bit more, yet the red - to me - helps denote the "don't give a shit" berserker rage Wolverine is infamous for having.

King's Watch - last page

Here's the last page from the test pages for King's Watch:
Flatted yesterday after work, finished tonight.

I gotta admit, I like doing gunfire ambient lighting effects. Always a nice challenge to blend it with the surrounding colours.

More King's Watch test page

Nothing like a full-time day[a.k.a. "real" job.. there's is such a huge disconnect for people not working in creative/jobs \ comics that drawing & colouring isn't actually work] and life-stresses to get in the way of doing what the work you enjoy.

Anyhoo, another King's Watch test Page.
The upside to life interfering is that it gave my brain time to figure out how to colour up the barns/wood frames, textures and such.

King's Watch Pg.3 comparison

Working a full-time day-job and then colouring pages can really mess with your social life. or is it the social life that messes with the colouring of pages - while still doing the day-job thing?..Either way, not as productive on pages as I'd like to be.

Anyhow.. the flats of King's Watch Pg3:

And the coloured piece

King's Watch test pages

Below are some test-pages [originally b&w, coloured by me] put out by Mr. Nate Cosby [ Tumblr & Twitter], who is looking for colourists.

A newspaper/media building while the sky is falling, The Phantom in the jungle, and some Flash Gordon - Flash is a work in progress, the flats are done.

I worked on the first page Monday to Friday after my "regular day-job", got The Phantom done Saturday evening after running errands all day and started on Flash's page, which is now flatted and ready for "prettying up".

I had to refer to the script a few times, and was glad to see that my gut was right on a couple of occasions, but keep kicking / reminding myself to read the script first, then jump into the colours.
Lesson learned? Always read the script!
Second lesson learned? Trust your gut - but read the script!!

Some X-men pages from class

This blog is for my art - and the stories behind some of the pieces.

If you follow my twitter account, you may have noticed I've been tweeting about Chris Sotomayor's Intro to Comic Coloring course that I've taken.

Being a mostly self-taught artist, I didn't learn much in the way of theory, but the application of said theories.. man alive, that's one thing - Chris' critiques in class, not just critiques but advice! - that's a world apart.
It looks expensive, and for 6 weeks, it looks really expensive, but let me tell you - it's worth every penny.
Learning not just from critiques of my own work, but of the other folks taking the course.

Before I took +Chris Sotomayor 's class, colouring this would take me about 8 hours:

The below are a couple of the X-men pages I coloured for class. After taking intro to Comics Coloring, already having an idea of the costume colours and effects and such, I can whip off the below pages in about 3-4 hours each.  This makes me a happier person.
If you share / reblog or otherwise pass along said image, don't edit the `for educational purposes only` bit on them. Thanks.

Like I said - that class is worth every penny.