I colored a Scud Page!

[click to view - 2 images total]

My cousin is getting married. In San Diego. The weekend before Comic-Con. I immediately began planning a way to convince my wife to spend the money to stay at least a couple of extra days past our original planned trip. I wanted to geek out a bit at a massive comic convention. Turns out my wife is awesome and we're staying. The next hurdle was to procure a pass, but all the passes were sold out. Thus enters Rob Schrab bearing his full-on manliness.

A few years ago Mr. Schrab turned out to be awesome as well. He granted me the privilege of working on his Scud omnibus. He then proved himself even more of a stud by actually printing my name in the credits of the book, something I totally was not expecting. Little did he know that he just bestowed upon me the status of professional in the comic industry. Thanks to him, I was able to apply for pro status with the Con and they gave me some credentials. I like to think Stan Lee himself vets every applicant and he deemed me worthy. So now I'm going. I'm a professional. And I'm excited.

I wanted to thank Rob Schrab for opening the door to Comic-Con and to remind people that he rocks.

Welcome to the Gun Zoo

[click to view - 6 images total]

A couple of months ago my friend from high school contacted me and asked me to color a comic that he was working on and pitching to various comic publishers. Being a person who loves to try new mediums of art I answered with an immediate 'yes' and asked him to send me some pages. Once I received them I began the coloring process.

I've never really colored a comic other than one panel that I did for fun a couple of years ago. This means I didn't really have a process or approach to working on an entire page. I'm happy to say after doing a few pages, that I thoroughly enjoy doing this. I often wish I had more time to work on them.

Since I don't really know how it's done in the actual comic book industry, I just kind of made up my process along the way. I began by taking the scanned images and removing the white so that I only had a line drawing. We scanned them in as bitmaps so there would be no anti-aliasing of the blacks which allowed the easy removal of the white. I then began filling in all the flat colors with a lasso tool and paint bucket in photoshop, again keeping aliasing off. I generally kept each panel on it's own layer. I then created a layer for the shading that was separate from the flats layer. Using photoshop's pixel lock option I could easily do line holds on the line art for certain elements like glass or smoke. I did all of this with a wacom tablet.

Below is the final cover. The thumbnail above is a link to more images in various stages. Like always I'm having tremendous fun with this and am already developing an argument to purchase a wacom cintiq for personal use.

Chris Paschal - Writer

Morgan Burke - Pencils and Inks

Josh McDowell (me) - Color

Brian de la Cruz - Logo Design