Chapter 4 inking is done!
Hey guys!
I hope everything is groovy with you 🙂 I just wanted to drop a quick update. Besides a few minor updates, inking is finally done for the 24 pages of chapter 4. It is now in hands of my wonderful beta readers. Pretty happy with how it turned out. I can’t wait to share it with you! Biggest chapter yet, I actually added more pages to make it a standard comic book size and extend the fight scene. This means I will start blocking out colours now! Blocking colours is not the most exciting step for me, but it is a crucial one. This is when you define the flow of colours and your colour palette and insure legibility through contrast. As I’ve done with storyboarding and inking, I will complete all pages before going to the last step of detailing. I can then go back to the weekly update schedule.
Why do you ask is blocking so important? Well, let’s say I decide to make the character’s suit yellow on the first page it might look great, but at the end perhaps I might realize that the colour really is a bad choice for an important scene. Blocks of colour are much more easy to select with the magic wand (W) and try different things.
My main tools for blocking colors is the lasso tool, using alt or shift to add or remove part of the selection. A good trick for straight lines is using the brush tool with shift, you can pretty quickly make the contours this way. Another good thing to do is to go from big to small. For example, you can use the marquee (M) to select your entire panel and fill. Starting with details would prevent you from doing that. Avoid gradients at this stage, they are much harder to select afterwards. I often keep my blocking layer has a base when detailing just so that I can easily select the whole shape.
Another thing I do is a first pass of quick blocking, just to get a sense of the palette on key scenes.
Here’s a little process video of the current state of the panels.
As usual, you can follow my progress on instagram. or register to my newsletter to get more tips.
As always, thank you for your support!
