| Posted: 08 August 2010 at 10:37am | IP Logged | 3
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Seems to me most of the complaints on this thread could be attributed to the colorists themselves and the choices they make, not computer technology itself
Yeah, obviously we could colour a page by computer and make it look like a page from 1974. But as this is basically never done, it’s reasonable shorthand to refer to the modern style, enabled by computer, as ”computer colouring”.
Now, what do I think about computer colours, really? I love the old style, probably since I grew up reading it – the stylized look, the clarity of linework that inspired me to take up drawing. I was going to say I don’t like the new style ”because”:
a) it’s too dark, because even when the inker used a lot of black the colourist sees fit to fill his part with every shade from dark to light, resulting in an overabundance of oscuro;
b) everything is made shiny, for some reason, perhaps because the colourist is masturbating at work;
c) colorists have insufficient art training and can’t deal with light sources, resulting in unrealistic play of light and shadow; and
d) it lets Photoshop effects such as blur, glow and lens flare obscure the line art and work against the nature of the medium.
But was that really true? These were just my knee-jerk reactions or received opinions, so I decided to look through my three most recent comics to see what I really think. They were three (not all that recent) TPBs: American Dream: Beyond Courage, Hercules: Love and War, and Spider-Girl: Whatever Happened to the Daughter of Spider-Man?.
American Dream, coloured by Rob Ro, doesn’t look dark at all, and perhaps not exactly shiny either, except where it should. Still, there is quite a bit of glow from bright light sources, and Dream has an enemy who is a ”crystal monster” who has a master called Silikong, and these guys’ blacks are rendered as light grey.
My hunch about light sources was correct. Highlights are all over the place, but overall the colouring is so flat and non-realist with no real sense of where light is coming from that this might not really be a problem. Except I suspect this is what is often meant by ”shiny”. Not like the Savage Dragon cover posted, where She-Dragon glistened like oiled-up emerald, but still.
Hercules, colored by Guru EFX, Raúl Treviño and Lee Loughride, does look moderately darker in places, but not to the point where it would be a complaint. A lot of the book is shinier than American Dream, and while lighting is handled pretty well in panels with obvious light sources, highlights quickly become corny in more ambient light. I don’t mind the glows, though, and there is no filter idiocy at all à la blur or lens flare.
(Even though I’m supposed to talk about colouring I must say I really like some aspects of the art in this book. American Dream was for the most part dynamic, but pretty ugly (Todd Nauk / Scott Koblish); Clayton Henry here draws pretty beautiful people with huge jaws and broad noses on both men and women, and the women’s limbs manage to look both strong and lithe, both realistic and stylized at the same time. I guess I won’t post any examples of this as it has nothing to do with colours, and the downside is that the action can get pretty static-looking.)
Spider-Girl, coloured by Gotham, is inked with a lot more black, but I thought the colourist handled this pretty well. Modern effectery is at a minimum, but the busy highlighting and the heavy linework really clash, and make each panel difficult to look at.
It’s much more pronounced on the printed page, but I couldn’t bring out the effect in Photoshop. And this simply is not a reasonable approximation of how we see the world. When I look casually at my laptop, at my pillow, at my lampshade, I register them as being silvery, red and white – the play of light and shade doesn’t demand my attention the way it really does here.
And this is probably why I don’t like computer colours very much, even though it’s difficult to put the finger on it very precisely. When you go for a ”realistic” colouring, two problems arise:
1) It becomes a compromise between the stylized and the realistic, and I don’t like compromises.
2) It doesn’t look more realistic at all, due both to the constraints of colouring line art and to the inept way colourists handle hightlights and shadow. A French Academic-style oil painting can look pretty realistic. Spider-Girl does not.
Of course it’s not reasonable to demand that each panel look like a Cabanel. That would requrie way too much work. But if corners must be cut from realism, I liked the old style better, because it cut so many more. Simply taking steps that could result in more realism doesn’t translate into better art.
This has been much ado about little, but at least I learned something in the process, if only about how modern comics really look and why I’m not crazy about them.
Edited by Johan Vikberg on 08 August 2010 at 10:46am
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Topic Closed)
