A Brief Outline

I've just started working on the colour for my current project. The comments on the roughs are in and are pretty good, so I'm just in the process of deciding how on Earth I am going to tackle working up this baby. I have to colour the cover and one spread for Friday so the AD can check the palette and what-not before I go ahead and do the rest, so this is the ideal time to experiment a bit.

So, decisions, decisions. It seems such a long time since I've coloured people I'm finding it a bit strange! (In fact, it was my Christmas card 2010. But only one Santa amongst eight reindeer. Whoa.) About this time last year, I took up a pretty good offer on Manga Studio Debut, which I bought, installed and promptly ignored. It's the standard software comic artists use not only to ink up their artwork, but also plan their storyboards. I'm obviously not planning boards, but I like the HUGE range of brushes it comes with. So I've been experimenting with drawing the outlines both in PS and MS using different brushes and with altering the colour of those lines. Recently, I've been outlining my characters in darker shades of their body colours, but with this book I think I'd like to outline the main action in one colour, probably a dark grey, then have the backgrounds with coloured, or even no, outlines. I'll have to see how that works out once all the background colours are in.

So, in the meantime, I just have to choose a line:



I'm edging towards MS in grey, the top right, but we shall see!