Old sample stuff

Some old samples for Frank's We3, which didn't get me that particular job, but did lead to the assignment colouring Seaguy.

Flex Mentallo

Well the Flex Mentallo collection is finally imminent. I recoloured the whole thing in close collaboration with Frank Quitely. He managed to unearth a lot of original pages, around a quarter of the whole book, which, although the production costs weren't in DC's budget, were scanned and used for as many pages as possible.
Here's a couple of images comparing the old colour with the new cleaned up line and colour. Plus the new page 12 from issue 1.

Old life drawings

Haven't posted anything in ages, so here's some old life drawings I came across the other day while looking for something else.

More Darrow

Here's some more pieces by Geof Darrow that were drawn for prints that he's selling at conventions. Geof very kindly leaves colour decisions up to me usually but he did request the Nixon piece to have a lot of blood!!

(Shaolin Cowboy © Geof Darrow. Nixon, Big Guy & Rusty © Geof Darrow and Frank Miller)

Breathing Space

Some pages of a 2000AD story, "Breathing Space", I coloured a few years ago drawn by Laurence Campbell--great solid drawing with clean storytelling. All I had to do was make sure the atmosphere felt right.

Bad Planet

Here's a trio of pages drawn by Greg Staples, coloured by myself, from the second of Thomas Jane's "Bad Planet" series, co-wrtten by Tom and Bruce Jones. Don't know when the actual series will be out on the stands but there was a give away version released at the San Diego Comic con which comprised of the whole first issue but some of the pages were presented, blue pencilling and all, shot straight from Greg's artwork before any processing was carried out, and some pages in their finished coloured state.

Retrospective "colour scripts"!!

I was recently reading Hans Bacher's Book "Dream Worlds" again, specifically a section on colour scripts. I first came across this idea in John Culhane's book on the making of Disney's Aladdin, where there's a photo of the colour script for the entire movie which consists very tiny frames that show no detail but the dominant colours of each scene in a continuity so the feel of each scene can be assessed together with those that both precede and follow it. I don't think anyone really has time to do this in comics but I try and think that way when I'm colouring my own work and when colouring other people's.
This all made me wonder if one could do a retrospective colour script to see if there is a feel of change between scenes, so I shrunk down a couple of stories and mosaic-ed that art to see if the changes of scene would still read. Below are a couple of Judge Dredd stories the first episode of Ratfink and the one off story "The Pusher". Haven't quite decide what I think yet!

I'm currently recolouring Frank Quitely's work for the Flex Mentallo collection and these ideas are particularly appropriate as the story chops and changes between locations and I feel that one of my responsibilities is to make sure that there is a distinct feel of location and atmosphere to each scene so the reader knows that panels separated sometimes by several pages are actually part of the same scene.