Digital Watercolor - what's your workflow ?
2mo
Maxime Scheder
I like the look of traditional watercolor of some comic book's artists and I'd like to achieve something similar digitally. I'm trying out some workflows and I was wondering if there are people out there also trying to do the same ! :)
- What I'm currently doing is to create first a "light" background
- Then I put some flat colors on a new layer in multiply mode
- I add the shadows on a separate multiply layer
- Finally I use a new lighten / color dodge layer to make the lights / effects
I would love to hear and discuss your specific habits / tips / tricks / favorite brushes ! For now, it feels hard to have consistent results (not ideal for a whole comic page :/ ).
And I don't know if it is CSP, but the watercolor brushes I use slow down my computer when I'm working with large brush sizes (and I don't think it is a computer spec issue)
Any suggestion for improvement is also very much welcomed !
Asked for help
For the inktober of the day I wanted to challenge myself to make a fully colorized comic page, process with which I'm not super comfortable yet. The more I look, the more I feel like there is something missing but I can't exactly say what...
Is it the choice of the color palette, maybe too muddy ? Is it a matter of composition, contrast ?
I would love to get some feed-back and be pointed at areas of improvement ! :)
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2mo
@Maxime Scheder This page looks great! I think you’re really on your way to developing your own watercolor workflow here.
Here are a few things I see in this page. Something about the storytelling flow feels backwards. By flipping the page it starts to read more clearly for me.
In your current page design, the first story beat of the first panel is wasted on the person descending the escalator. When we read western comics, the flow is top to bottom, left to right, in a zig-zag pattern (cyan arrows). When our eyes first enter the page, the first thing we see is the arrow pointing at the back of a small character’s head who is leaving the scene. They’re not the story focus on this page. That could be a tease for a later story point, if that person is revealed to be the one who placed the briefcase in the scene and is now fleeing before it goes off might pay off on later pages, but to start with it is otherwise a lost story moment. We don’t know who that is, so they’re just kind of background filler.
This first panel area typically would have some sort of speech bubble or story context box blocking some background elements, so it might work if you’re planning on adding text later, but the visuals of the story should always play out like we’re reading the story written in prose.
Also the arrow pointing down the escalator is VERY noticeable because of the darker value, so the arrow sticks out and leads me back into the corner against the read flow of the page, I get kinda stuck in that corner wondering who is descending the escalator rather than entering the rest of the scene.
When you mirror the page, the first beat we see in panel 1 is the woman finding the case, which leads to the drama of the Tic-Tac count down sound effect, which leads right to a man running up the escalator into the scene. This is a great dramatic lead in to the page. Something is bad is about to happen and this man is trying to prevent it!
The series of panels labeled 4, 5, & 6 are well paced, but I still think reversing these story beats would be beneficial just to have the briefcase the last thing we see before the explosion.
Reversing the order here helps the story flow, we see the Woman reacting to something behind her, the Man warning her, and then the final "TIC!" before the explosion helps land that last panel.
I love the full bleed of the last panel with the inset panels before it, it really gives the moment weight, but the action of the explosion is also pointing against the flow of the page, everything is exploding towards the left of the page, rather than leading us to the page turn on the right. The page turn is the most dramatic story element we have in comics, and you want your reader to (and the story flow) to continue forward, on to the next page.
As far as the page coloring goes, you’re really getting a nice watercolor effect with your techniques, but you can further separate your values to highlight the story focus by creating a value hierarchy. If you desaturate the page to black and white, you can see the main characters are about the same value as the background, and because you’re using a unifying color wash behind everything in the scene the characters kind of melt into the background rather than stand out from it. A quick value hierarchy would be lightest elements further away in the background, and progressively darker elements toward the foreground, but this scene seems to be set at night, or in a darker area, so you can flip that hierarchy around and make your foreground elements lighter and your background elements darker to pop out your main characters.
You can also use compositional shadow shapes to highlight certain areas like a Noir film would. The area entering an escalator would be illuminated so people could see the entrance safely, so you could drop a pool of light around the man bounding up the stairs to highlight the focus to his action.
In the last panel, some of your figures are a little difficult to read, so you could use edge lighting to define the faces, and hands of the characters to keep them more legible in the chaos of the explosion.
I hope this helps! This page really looks great, keep up the good work, looking forward to seeing more from you!