Digital Chameleon
Colors The Vertigo Universe - Part One

by Jerry A. Sierra | Publish Magazine | July, 1994

WHEN SHE SLEEPS HER SKIN TURNS TO BARK, and she looks like a beautiful tree sculpture made by nature's most inspired artist. She's "Black Orchid," a hybrid of human and plant life forms, and the title character in a monthly comic book from Vertigo, a division of DC Comics. The book features twenty-four color pages of story and eight ads, and is produced by the traditional arsenal of creative types, with a new twist: aside from a writer, a pencil artist, a letterer and an in-house editor, it features coloring and color separations by Digital Chameleon, a shinning new star in the world of comic book color.

By the time the twenty-four 11x17-inch boards containing the artwork arrive at the Digital Chameleon studio in Winnipeg, the pencil work has been inked and the captions and text balloons are already filled in. In the next two weeks the whole book is colored and separated, and the finished film is sent directly to the printer.

Colorist George Freeman, art director at Digital Chameleon, gets the same editorial direction as the artist who draws the book: a copy of the script with notes from the writer and the editor. Freeman has also looked at Xeroxes of the line art as it was being created, and has a good idea of what direction to take.

The artboards then are Xeroxed down to printed size (6-5/8 X 10-3/16 inches) on a smooth bond paper, and Freeman proceeds to color every panel in every page of the book with Prism Color Pencil Crayons. These colored Xeroxes are the "color guides" used by the painters who will generate the actual computer color.

"Writers will often request a specific look or a feel for a book," says Freeman, "and in some cases offer color directions." For "Black Orchid," writer Dick Foreman wanted to use colored captions and word balloons to identify not just the person speaking, but the species. The Niads of the rivers and lakes, for instance, speak a certain way, in a certain color, as do the orchids.

"That's one way the industry has changed, writers are beginning to make some of the coloring decisions," says Freeman, recalling a time in the 40's and 50's when the color was added by the engravers, and creators had little or no idea how their work would look until the book was published. "So color is really working it's way up the food chain, as it were, all the way to the writer."

One way Black Orchid stands apart from the herd of Vertigo books is the shading in George Freeman's color. Where most comic book color is flat and even (except in the rare cases where pencil artists add their own color) the colors in Black Orchid are rich with shades and textures, adding a dimension of reality to the fantasy world in which the characters play out their fate. In some cases faces come alive with vibrant realism, and in others they are flatter and deader, more insubstantial. Freeman is one of the only colorists in comic books to add shades and highlights into his color guides, and the results are a definite improvement on the traditional flat comic book color. This type of rich coloring, he says, must be approved ahead of time by the artist and the editor, because "some pencil artists don't want anything they didn't put in."

Coding

After the pencil coloring is done, Freeman color-codes the book using an alpha-numeric coding system adapted from the pre-computer era. The code is relatively simple: Y = yellow, R = magenta, B = cyan, K = black; and, 2 = 25%, 3 = 50%, 4 = 75%, the letter alone indicates 100% (i.e. Y = 100%, B = 100%, etc.). The letters and numbers are combined to form the code; for example, Y2R2B2 is 25% yellow, magenta and, cyan. In some cases, the exact percentage of a color is specified (eg. R56).

"I'll code a specific color when it first appears on a page," says Freeman, "but if sometimes I only roughly indicate what I want, it's because I know what the system can do, and what our painters can do." When the painters run across an uncoded area, they look on the page for a similar color. Then they'll just match it, or do their own interpretation of it. There are times when painters will give him a color different than what he asked for.

"Sometimes it's even better," he says, "in which case I'll leave it."

For the areas that remain uncoded, Freeman relies on the judgment and experience of their painters to interpret the color in a way that matches the overall effects of the guides.

"That's one reason we hire artists, instead of just computer colorists," he explains, "so they know when in a panel, or when in a composition, it should be lighter or darker. So that each color they create might not be the exact color that I've chosen, but the panel looks the way I colored it, and the page looks the way I colored it."

After eight monthly issues and one annual, the painters have grown quite familiar with the main character's specific look and style of color, and they know what it's supposed to look like on the screen and on paper.

Scanning

While George is adding pencil color to the Xeroxed copies, the boards are scanned on a Verityper 1200 dpi flatbed scanner at a resolution of 600-dpi. Each board takes about two minutes to scan.

In order to attain the "comic book" look that readers expect, the sharp black line married to the color, the artboards are scanned at a resolution higher than twice the line screen. The inside pages for Black Orchid are printed at a 120- line screen (133 for the covers), so a 240-dpi piece of color art would look just fine, but it doesn't provide the crisp black line of traditional comic books.

"We figured that scanning at 900-dpi was about as good as a line shot," says Kindzierski, "but that we could get away with 600-dpi, the quality was still there and the file size was about a third smaller." The bit-mapped files are somewhere between 8-1/2 to 9 Meg each in size.

Some of the artboards may come with a transparent overlay referred to as a color-hold. "This is a piece of line art that otherwise would have been drawn right on the art board," explains Kindzierski, "but because they want that line to be in color, and not in black, they'll put it on a piece of tracing paper overlay." The color-hold is scanned separately and put back in place in Photoshop.

After the 24 artboards are scanned into twenty-four separate TIFF files, the pages are sized down in Photoshop to printed size (6-5/8 X 10-3/16 inches), and the painters then begin to add color in Photoshop.

Digital Chameleon Colors Vertigo Universe - Conclusion | About Digital Chameleon - A SIDEBAR

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