Coloring has become an important part of creating comics, and the digital work space has created a new member to the comics workflow team, the flattener. Often hired by the colorist and almost always, uncredited. Flatteners make the colorist’s job a whole lot easier. Digital coloring is one of the most time-consuming tasks in creating digital comics and one of the ways to cut down that time is to use a flatter. To do some of the heavy lifting. When you are doing 20-30 pages or more, a flattener can save many hours by adding the basic colors. It doesn’t sound like much but when you are looking at 20-30 pages, it can be a big time saver. But even more important than the colors used, is the option to select any of those colors with a click. I can simply add or subtract to it, I can add light, shadow, or shade onto the selected area. As you see in the progression below.
Since Eve of War is a collaboration with writer Noel K. Hannan, I decided to add a color flattener to the collaborative mix.
Through a colorists group on the socials, I contacted Adriann at Iron Shrapnel Studios, fortunately, he was up for it, so we swapped files via WeTransfer. Adriann turned the 5 pages around in about 48 hours, I wasted no time downloading the files, it was important to specify the format of the files I needed to work on. I prefer to work on 300-600 dpi .tiff files. Nothing less than 300 dpi if the art has to go to print, as a general rule, you can always go down in dpi, but not up. That more than likely will change with the introduction of AI, but for now, I start with large files and work my way down.