Subscribe Feed (RSS)An ode to my scratch-file
January 18th, 2009 by hpkomic | Filed under Blog.
I love having a scratch file to work with. While I have the recurring character colors saved as swatches (which is quite handy), it would be counter-productive to swatch every single color I use at various times per story and page. So, I pretty much make a separate PSD made of clippings of things I can sample color from.
The scratch file clippings are generally made from flat colored images that include the colored lineart. I don’t bother including shaded or overlayed clippings because I generally have the overlay settings written down, and my shading colors remain virtually the same across each page (#0d004c, the same color as character lineart, only at 25% opacity). You want the most basic colors to sample from, not something with a certain tint or overlay.
Scratch files are definitely not a unique concept, I am sure many other webcomic creators take advantage of them. If you do, let us know, and maybe even show us a picture of what clips you have on it.
Tags: clippings, coloring, how to, hpkomic, photoshop, scratchfile
I work in Flash. To keep colors 100% consistent I keep my character line-up and model packs open in a separate window. I just drag the eye dropper from the fill color box over the color I want and select it. Works fast enough and efficient for my purposes. This image I posted is my character line up and some stock poses from my model packs. Character Line-Up
I’m eventually going to create some nice model sheets and character lineups for that exact same purpose. The scratch file works out pretty well for now at least.