"Tower of Treasure" Colour Process

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the first book in my Three Thieves series represents my first foray into colouring my own comics work (I colour my own illustration work, of course, but that's a different kettle of fish entirely from creating colour palettes and "lighting" for a 112-page dramatic story).

Here's a glimpse into the process I've been using, which was arrived at by a lot of trial and error, as well as talking to and reading about how fellow cartoonists whom I respect have tackled the job. I don't claim to be an expert on any of this, but it's been fun playing with new tools, and I've been happy with the results so far (and, thankfully, has so has my editor!)

First, I scan the inked page into Photoshop, bringing art that has so far only been touched by traditional tools into a digital environment:

Then, on a layer behind the line art, I do the flat colours. Everything is coloured its bright, fully-saturated daytime colour, regardless of the lighting in the scene. Of all the steps, this one is the most time-consuming:

Then I use a custom brush tool to digitally "paint" in a shadow layer, using a dominant background colour (in this case, grey):

Then I select everything that's not shadow, and fill it with the ambient light colour. In this case, the scene is lit by a torch, so the light is very orange/yellow. Playing with this layer's opacity allows me to decide just how strong the light is a given scene, especially in terms of how much it contrasts with the shadows:

Finally, a layer of highlights. In this case I used the yellow/orange of the torch but also some white, because I felt that with torchlight on gold, there was enough yellow in the scene and I wanted to break it up a bit. As a final touch, I turned the black line around the torch's flame into a yellow colour hold. You might need to click through to the larger version to really appreciate the differences in this one:

And we're done! Woo-hoo! Just another 111 pages to go!