#froxposting

the color thumbnails were kind of my ending stage of planning, so while they are rough, they're rough because I already had an idea in mind of what I needed from the finished thumbnails based on prior sketches and general planning!

up until that point, i was doing a lot of sketches of different compositions, poses, interactions, etc. to get an idea for what i wanted (although not in order - just kind of knowing what beats I wanted to get to but not necessarily having a solid place to put them). This was actually before even writing out the actual poem / text when I was originally gonna make it a lot more loose (didn't even plan to post it to this account at all) before it got away from me.

heres an example of what a lot of these sketches looked like, including a couple that were done on receipt paper or scraps while trying to plan things out at work.

i reserved a lot of these scrap drawings to allow myself to be loose and messy with things just to get my ideas somewhere that i could reference later. my digital sketches tend to be a little cleaner, although still pretty loose, and were more for me to get a more exact vision of things I wanted. you'll kind of see theres a couple of instances of the same thing being drawn over and over in different ways as well.

after i felt that i had enough sketches to work from, i vaguely took them all and tried to place them into loose thumbnails in terms of where they would go in the little narrative.

you can see that a lot of it is super super messy and things are overlaid on top of each other since a lot of it was again, just trying to find out which sketches i wanted to generally be used with eachother instead of figuring out more comprehensive compositions. i think this was still before i actually wrote the poem out so i didn't completely have a solid idea on where things needed to go and had to take the time to write that out first just using notepad.

you can also tell this was before i chose the aspect ratio to work with (15x10in, although the full illustrations are 30x10in since its meant to emulate the look of double-spread book illustrations. also hey heres another tip separate your files if you do something like this. i was Really Really smart and put 4 pages to one file for all of these and ummm my computer. Liked it a lot (lie))

i actually have a bit of an abandoned file that i used to try and figure out what order i needed the pages for the poem to make the most sense. some of these are what i would actually consider my initial thumbnails, done in what i had as my initial color palette. i remember during this time struggling a lot to figure out compositions that made sense for this since i was working so large that it actually made it a bit difficult to see the forest so to speak, so much of it felt a little disjointed or disconnected.

i think this was around when i started doing the actual thumbnail page, where i took boxes in the same aspect ratio and stacked them all to be next to each other to be able to work on them all together instead of having disconnected folders of single compositions in a file, if that makes sense. getting to be able to look at everything at once to help me see how i wanted things to flow.

once i was able to get all of the text in order for myself, i ended up starting with thumbnailing compositions i was more confident about in terms of lay out first (notably the first 5, as well as the spiral one and the egg one). Since i was now able to see everything alltogther, it made it easier to find ways to get the pages to transition a little nicer into each other, which helps with placing where things are supposed to go in each page. And because i had already had sketches done of things i wanted, i had no need to be super precise with how they looked as long as it got the general idea across for myself to reference later when i needed them.

here's how my thumbnails kind of ended up looking for most of the process, with the included bits of text from the poem there as reference for myself. i went into this with a general idea of what i wanted from my color direction which i ended up using many adjustment layers to achieve (i counted. 21 total of either layers with color modifiers or straight up adjustment layers lol)

i often worked straight from my final thumbnails to reach the final image. (taking a screenshot of the thumbnail, scaling it to fit my page, and working on top of it). whenever i came across part of the thumbnails that were based on the prior sketches of mine, i would simply paste in the sketch to work over top of instead of relying on the thumbnail sketch by itself.

i actually had a couple failed attempts while trying to figure out how i wanted to stylize this. heres one of my fails where i ended up just kind of... working everything a little too hard since i was getting used to how to work this brush (my normal brush with a color jitter modifier for the painty look).

you can also see it doesnt quite match up with how the final illustration ended up looking, even though the colors of this one do match with my initial color thumbnails - i think i put some additional modifiers onto my thumbnails after this to make it a little more purple or pink, hence the red color scheme. i think i was trying to do some kind of one-layer thing but that sucked to do so i ended up just caving and using a lot of layers for all of these.

i actually ended up straight up using part of my initial thumbnail for this particular part of this illustration since the "lines" (dark areas of the sketch) and the colors were separate. you cant super tell since i painted over / colored the lines but its pulled and modified directly from that initial sketch.

I didn't end up one to one copying my thumbnails since they gave more of an idea for tone and general color areas, but didn't have as much nuance as the finals would have. my thumbnails had kind of a greeny hue to them that while i liked in the thumbnails, didn't quite work out in the final images. They're thumbnails after all - they're for reference for the bigger picture, but you might end up having to change things down the line if things don't work out.

something i would recommend would be, at least if youre working on a comic like this, try and figure out how you want the simpler pages to look first. i think i ended up doing that for some of this and it helped me get into a good mind set for approaching the more complicated pages.

also because these were all mostly lineless, my processes kind of ended up looking really chaotic in the middle stages since i usually just end up using random colors when i block things out to be colored later...

while i try to generally match values while im working like this it usually ends up getting away from me and i go "fuck it i just need a color here to work from." I maybe would not recommend doing this since it does actually make things a little bit intimidating to work on i cant lie.

but how i go about filling in the final colors of these is that i either try to colorpick from my thumbnails if i had something really specific to mind that i wanted, or i would try to go in and color things in their general "local" colors: the colors they would be without as many lighting effects or shading, kind of like this:

you can see the background isnt in there yet but tenna and spamton are colored generally with how their actual colors look.

as i finished up the background (since backgrounds end up dictating a LOT of what the tone of your subjects or characters will end up being toned with), i ended up adding more filters over them to give them a bit more of an duller, orangey hue in addition to any shading or lighting adjustments that i felt like were needed.

Probably the easiest way to get into understanding this kind of color work is to use local color first and adjust from there. steven universe for example i think does a really good job with this kind of color and tone shifting if you need a really good reference. Take a plain colored illustration of a character of your choice, slap it onto a couple backgrounds with different lighting scenarios that you like, and try to match the tone: add things like overlay layers, or multiply layers, hue layers are really nice for this, or whatever to try and match the mood of a background.

Something else i also do, at least for projects like these where theres a lot of illustrations as part of something larger, is i end up reusing colors from other pages as well to get things to look cohesive. that kind of ruddy red color was something i tried to add into the tone of a lot of the middle pages. Same with the really deep blue that ends up present in most of the darker pages. There's always exceptions, but in general i try doing this where i can!

i guess in short it would be that the thumbnails weren't completely, by themselves, being worked from: they were made loosely since i already had reference material (sketches) to work from that i didn't end up needing the thumbnails to be super precise, and while they served as a guide, they didn't always end up being completely followed depending on what the final piece needed from me.

i re-used my own sketches where i needed, and i had to take things in steps: that blocking process was the part that took the longest, where i then either colorpick from my thumbnail if i liked it enough, or tried to just work from local color and adjust from there. i ended up using a fair amount of adjustment layers after the fact to get colors to look how i wanted them to.