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