Colourification!

Gordon’s post yesterday got me thinking about some colour tests I did a while ago. As Gordon mentioned the hardest part of colouring up an image that wasn't originally intended to be colour is dealing with the blacks and the letratoned areas. Rather than remove the letratone I decided to colour it so that it still worked as a tone value for the underlying colour. I approached this in a very similar way to colouring a 2D animation cell. (About 10 years ago I worked in a 2D studio and it was gradually moving from hand painted cells to digital colouring. Hand painting was a fascinating process but too forever!!) I coloured up some of the original line work so it wasn't all a uniform black. Here is the original strip, this was one of a series of about 5 strips that ran over Easter and saw Dalton having to deliver Easter eggs without a supply of chocolate!
And here is the coloured version. I deliberately hyped up the sky as Dalton is supposed to be having one of those revelation moments!

Next up are two strips that have been partially coloured. This was to show publishers the difference between black & white and colour versions of the strips.


These two strips have had the lettering replaced with a comic font. I personally prefer the hand lettering but the strips are full of spelling errors. I plan on creating a font from the hand written letters and use that to give the strips consistency, clarity and correct the spellings.
Thanks to Gordon for posting over the last few weeks, it’s been a busy time here but hopefully as things get back to normality I'll be posting more.

Niel