Tin Lizard Productions

Penciled and Inked by Christopher Jones
Colored by Melissa Kaercher

(Pardon me while I step out of the third-person.)

As part of my work on Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink, I have visited several conventions with my comrades in crime, John and Chris. While doing panels and thumping for our comic, I have been surprised by the amount of questions I get about more technical aspects of what I do as a comics colorist, so I figured I'd do a step-by-step guide of how line art becomes full color.

For this guide, I picked another project I worked on with Christopher: a wraparound programming guide cover for CONvergence, a summertime sci-fi/fantasy convention in Minneapolis. The convention's mascot is a robot named Connie. Since in 2005, the theme of the convention was comics, Chris decided to create a piece of artwork that spoofed the old Marvel Universe covers... only all the characters would be Connie in a costume.

Step 1

(Click image to see larger version.)

This is where I start. Chris sends me a giant scan of the line art, sometimes with notes on coloring.

The real-sized line art is much larger than the printed size, which is 15-3/4" by 20-1/2". Working oversized gives us a lot of benefits. First of all, if we ever need to print larger than comic-book size, we can do it without losing print quality. Secondly, shrinking the art tends to cover small flaws and gives a cleaner look. (This is a general standard in the comic book industry, but not all comic artists work this way. Gene Ha, whose super-detailed images graced the initial run of Top 10, works at a size just barely larger than print size. Cheeky bastard!)

So I get the scan at full size, at 300 dpi, in a non-lossy format such as .tif, usually in Grayscale. In this case, Chris included additional layers in the file, where he used shades of gray to indicate to me where Colossal Boy's body emerged behind other bodies, and to delineate Captain Carrot's and the Crimson Avenger's capes. If he hadn't done this, I would have been calling him into my studio every five minutes to ask, "What's this shape? Is this background?"

He also had included a layer that showed me where Cyclops' eye beam fell, but for whatever reason, you can't see it here. Just trust me that it was there.

From here, I converted the file to CMYK and kept the layers separate. I then hid the gray layers and used the Channels feature to remove the cyan, magenta, and yellow hues from the black line art. I then increased the contrast on the line art to bring it to 100% black. By doing this, it allows me saturate the blacks later in the coloring process, with more control of the ink. More on that later.

On to Step 2.