digital colouring.

The third and forth pages of my comics take place at nightime/ early eveninng.
This presented a colouring challenge. I decided to darken all the colours by a couple of shades including skin colour and hair.

I also made all the background s darkblues and purples. The result was this:

I used a lot of 2 tones to show light sources (the porch light, the light from the unseen scout hall).
here is just the colour layer, showing my process
.
I thought it still looked a bit bright and didn't accurately convey the dim look of nightime.
So I made a new layer on top of every other layer and set it to multiply.
I then used the rectangular marquee tool to select a panel and the brush tool to paint a transparent layer of nighttime blue on top. I then used the eraser tool, set to a soft setting to brighten up areas with a light source or where i wanted the characters faces to be more visible.

Below is the uncoloured drawing for the next page.

I did the same process for the next page but I made it even darker to covey that before it was dusk and night is quickly falling as it does in Southland. I like the muted tones in this page even more..

I was helped in this with my prior knowledge of lighting nighttime scenes with traditional media. I knew that using the usual colours with dark backgrounds would look artificial and all blues and whites would be monotonous and uninteresting to look at. the first and 5th panal look best below but I think the new pages are better and the darker shades are something I could have done easiest with digital. The new ones also look a lot more professional.



above I experimented with cool blues to shade everything, I present these as contrast as I think I have solved the problem of how to colour nighttime.