I did some colouring (in the sense that comics have colourists) for Hodag’s cover for Advanced Fantasy Dungeons today, and it looked great! I’m really proud. I’d do some things differently, though, next time. I lost a lot of time figuring out the process and so I’m going to work out my process, for next time. So this is for my future knowledge!

1. Make the inks transparent. You can do this in Affinity Photo more easily than in Procreate, but it won’t be perfect. You can make it perfect by using gradient map in procreate to eliminate the white outlines completely. Make the background bright to help identify its sorted.
2. Pick a colour palette. I found that straying too far from the palette caused me problems because I winged it this time.
3. Lay down flats, separated into their own groups, by depth (foreground, midground, background at least). Inks are top layer, background is lowest layer. Foreground is more saturated and usually brighter.
4. Add highlights based on the light source (this time it was the dragon’s breath!), and put them in the same group as their flat. Highlights are based on the flat colour, just brighter and less saturated.
5. Add shadows based on the light source, and put them on the same layer of their flat. Remember lay shadows form over shading as well! It makes a difference! Shadows are based on the flat too, just darker and less saturated. Oh I mainly used HSV values to choose colours for this because of this.
6. Colour the light source (s) separately, in their own layer! I did two layers, one for the flame on the edges, and one for the white hot flame in the middle.
7. Add in a brighter highlight. That’s the same value as the light source’s primary colour, but in a transparent layer over the highlights and I put in a few halos as well for reflections.
8. Add some texture in its own layer, that was a transparent layer, too, and pure black. Use different textures to differentiate different subjects in the piece, in this case the cave, the dragon and the heroes got their own unique textures.

I used faux copics for this, because they’re semitransparent and they’re not heavily textured, and I’m familiar with how to use them! But I reckon I could experiment with other semitransparent faux media like watercolours in future. I feel like layering opaque mediums like gouache and pastels wouldn’t work for this?

Anyway, this was lots of fun. I’m usually highly critical of my art but this was something where I felt I actually achieved a product I was proud of. I can add colouring to a list of things I can do.

You’ll see the finished product on Advanced Fantasy Dungeons’s front cover soon!

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