Outsourcing Comic Pages & Spread 5

Here is spread 5 of my graphic novel.  I am thinking of adding part of a row boat in the bottom left panel foreground. I already redrew Sonja twice and finally asked my wife to pose for me so I could get it right. I worry it looks more realistic then the rest of her frames.  And talk about negative space!

Now on to outsourcing.

To start this off, I'd like to say that I'm not trying to promote outsourcing. I'm sure someone will read this and be upset with me for showing a clear cut way to outsource your comic pages causing the American economy to collapse...again.  All I'm trying to do here is get my stupid graphic novel finished before I'm to old to draw.  Plus I'd rather spend time with my wife and son then flatting a page on the weekends.  After all, this isn't my job, it's my personal project/hobby.

Surviving the effects of globalization for an online freelancer?

Now that I've captivated you with that last link, I'll plow forward.  The whole idea of outsourcing arose after reading the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book, in itself, is a controversy. I think Tim is a bit of a salesman myself but I did pick up some interesting things from his ramblings.

Outsourcing was one of them. Outsourcing boring, time consuming, or monotonous things that don't need your special attention so you can focus on things you want to do. 

The book suggests a few websites that specialize in aggregating freelancers from around the globe.  Here are a few of them:

• elance.com (what I used)
• guru.com
  

I suggest Elance over Guru. Guru is slow and it's hard to find anyone for a good price.  Why would I want to pay someone $75 an hour to flat out my pages.  Elance, on the other hand is a pretty fast site to look through and you can find people around the world but it does take some getting use to.

I ended up using a small company of five from India called Dream Computers.  They have a few comic coloring samples in their portfolio.  Their hourly rate said $15 but after I paid them for my test pages they emailed me back, dropping their page rate to $15 a page for finished coloring. Just so you know, I never used what they colored because it wasn't what I was looking for but I'm thinking about emailing my contact at Dream Computers to show them a flatting tutorial and negotiate a new price.  After all I don't want to pay them the same price for flatting a page as I would for finished coloring.  My only problem with this method is it seems like you have to spend time and money to get the right freelancer and maybe even teach them what you want them to do.

Even though I can see how this might work out well with the exchange rates, I'm still curious about hiring someone who already knows how to do flats.  I mean how much more could it cost to have a professional flatter?  But where do I find one?  I'll talk about what I just learned next week.


P.S. I just got reamed the other day about my lousy lettering job in these pages.  I promise I will make it all better once I learn to do it right and I'll post what I learn.

How to color a comic - part 1 (comic flatting)

Here is spread 4.  Below are the stages I took to get to this final product.

For about 3 years now, I've been slaving away at my coloring process about as slow as possible.  I would spend hours and hours filling between the lines all while throwing textures over everything to see how it might look.  I would work on a page for half a day and then just leave it alone for a while. Perhaps I might dream of a better color pallet that night. Or maybe I'll be able to see something better if I open it up in a week or a month. 

One time I actually hired some freelancers from India and Japan to color a test page to see if they could match my style and save me precious time.  I gave them specific reference of how I wanted it to look and even examples of the color pallet.  I even gave them my homemade texture files. 

When I got the pages back they looked...well, lets just say I deleted the files even after revisions so that I wouldn't be influenced in any way by what I saw.  Don't get me wrong, they did a great job coloring the pages but it wasn't right for my project.  Even though it was far from what I wanted, it was money well spent because it sent me on a quest to figure out more efficient methods of coloring my pages. 

Later I thought about hiring one of them to paint all the sections of my pages a flat color on layers so that I could easily adjust it all and add textures and lighting myself.  This would save me so much time but how would I explain this crazy concept that, obviously has never been done before, to a guy across the world with a language barrier.  Maybe I can pay him less if he's just PREPARING the files for me, I thought.

I never got around to it. Finishing the line work for the first book was all I could think about.  Good thing too.  It was only a month ago that I came across a blog in which I learned all about the common practice of comic book flatting.  Or to flat out colors.

Flatting is what comic guys call preparing line art for coloring.  It's exactly what I needed the whole time but had no idea what it was called.  On top of that, I'm now noticing that EVERYONE ELSE knows what it is.  I guess that's what I get for trying to do a graphic novel all by myself in secret.  Here are a few excellent tutorials on flatting. 

• Tutorial on flatting - BoltCity.com (My personal favorite)
• Another approach
• Free flatting plug-in for Photoshop
• ProjectWaldo (where I learned about it all)
  

If you're wondering how I outsourced to a few guys on the other side of the world, I'll talk about that in my next post.

Here are some images of my process for spread 4.

 

 

 

Spread 3

I hope you enjoy this spread because I thought about it way to much.  For a simple comic-page layout, I must have sketched 20 versions before finally satisfied.  I had the idea of splitting the cats head into different panels early on and it opened a giant can of worms.  You might also notice the greenish red hand behind the cat which was another time-suck for me.  I still don't know how obvious I want this hand to be.  At one point I had a shadow on the cats body but that never looked quite right.

On the right side is my ode to Christian Schellewald I guess.  You see, I bought his book, LA/SF, at the San Diego Comic Con in 2006 after looking through the entire convention.  It was one of the only books that really stood out to me, besides Joshua Middleton's Sky Between Branches. Schellewald's book is filled with amazing little guasch paintings and sketches of completely normal things. Mostly streets, airplanes, and palm trees, but with every sketch is an amazing  composition and what amazed me most was his use of negative space.  Almost an entire panel would be painted white and then the lower third would be a cool tree or something.  This really opened my eyes to a few things.  One, negative space is a really good thing.  And two, the whole guash painting approach is a good thing too.  I know what you are thinking right now. This guy can't write to save his life.  I know, I know, I may not be J.K. Rowling when it comes to sharing my thoughts but I sure know when I love an artistic style.

Schellewald's and Middleton's books are some of the biggest influences on this graphic novel. Middleton's sketches on his blog just make my head spin. You might have to dig a little for them but it's worth it.

Anyway, I loved the negative space idea and as you can see, I wholeheartedly applied it to the right side of this page.

Below are a few of the steps that I had to take to get this finished spread.

Here is my final rough thumbnail minus the top frame.

A step is missing here where I blew up this thumbnail and printed it on 8.5 x 11 paper and traced over it using tracing paper and a bald point pen. 

This is the final line work after blowing it up again and printing it on two sheets of legal paper (8.5 x 14) taped together.  I used a light table, bristol board and a mechanical pencil. Scanned to Photoshop, adjusted the contrast and presto.

Now I have to really apologize to anyone trying to read the story because the cat's name keeps changing.  I will update the first pages soon to eliminate any more confusion. Thanks for spending the time to read all this.

Before you start YOUR graphic novel...

Here is a list of important things I have learned while making a graphic novel.  


1) Read Understanding Comics and Making Comics if you haven't already.

2) Start with an idea that you really believe in and want to share with others. This is important. It takes dedication to make a graphic novel so you really need to love and believe in what you are trying to say or do.

3) Write your story before you start drawing it.  This may sound like a no-brainer but I have a bad habit of doing this.  It always ends in disaster.  You don't want to spend 10 years of your life on something that has no ending.

4) Develop a style that is doable and wont take you a gazillion years. I learned that I didn't need to ink my pages because I can just boost the contrast on pencil lines in Photoshop. That alone saves me hours every page.  My main character is simple (the cat) and easy for me to draw.  If I were to draw a Mech robot GN it would take me forever.

5) Focus on your strengths. Draw what you love to draw. Don't make a story about the army if you suck at drawing tanks. Unless it's your mission to learn how to draw tanks while making a GN. But I'd suggest not using this medium to learn how to draw something. It will just look different from start to finish and you'll constantly want to go back and fix old ugly tanks.

6) If you plan to draw realistic human characters, make sure you know anatomy.  Take some classes or buy some anatomy books FIRST.  Practice your anatomy for a good year or two before starting your GN.  Trust me, you will waste a lot of time if you don't.

7) Make rules for yourself to follow for your book or it will look like a different book at the beginning and end because you got inspired along the way with some new technique. My rules are pretty simple.

• I only use the paint textures that I made. 
• Only 4 panels per page unless it's a sequence of frames where the camera doesn't move.
• I draw everything on paper and scan it. No digital lines except for subtle changes.
• All my pages are planned out as double page spreads so I can control the mood and story better. 

Those are my rules for reMIND. My next book will probably change as I figure out what's important to me then.


8) Make your files in CYMK mode. All printers print in CYMK except for some Print-On-Demand (POD) places. If you end up needing it in RGB for some odd reason then you can still convert it after the fact.

9) Work in at least 300 dpi. That's what all the printers I've talked to print at. Most Marvel and DC guys create their pages at 450 to 600dpi but it all gets reduced in the end to go to print.



Good luck!  Feel free to leave comments on what you think I should add to this list.

Publish a graphic novel?

Publish a graphic novel?

Most people look at me cross-eyed when I tell them my dream to publish my graphic novel. Most of the time I have to explain what a graphic novel is before I can continue describing my fantasy.  Then there are those who think I'm just a dreamer who's never going to finish because I've been working on this crazy side project ever since they can remember.

Well, now I can proudly just give them my blog address and keep my mouth shut.  

But posting my pages online has been a whole new adventure.  I can honestly say I'm terrified of what people will say when they see what I've been meticulously knit picking for the last 3 years of my life.  I just started using Google Analytics last week and can't even concentrate anymore while at work.  Every second I'm checking my stats.  Just yesterday I realized it only updates once a day.  What a relief.  Now I only check it in the morning. But that doesn't stop me from looking at my rankings on Comic Blog Elite.  At some point I figure it will all get out of my system and I'll be able to log onto a computer again without checking my feedback.  

 

Yesterday was rough.  I tried to pretend it didn't matter and I ended up with a headache and a stomachache. 

Spread 2

Here is the second spread (pages 3 and 4) of reMIND.  The text isn't final and most likely it'll change because I'm trusting it to Jeremy Barlow who agreed to help me with the final writing of this book.  He's a writer for Dark Horse working on many Star Wars titles, graphic novels as well as his own projects.  We use to go to the San Diego Comic Con back in the mid 90's when we were young lads.  It's funny how we both made a career out of our hobbies.

As you can see, every page of reMIND is drawn as a spread.  I hear that this method will make it harder to publish with problems like pages not lining up and things getting cut off in the fold but I'm dedicated to this idea and I can't turn back now.  Not that I want to.  The whole reason I'm building it this way is to control the mood.  In film you are forced to feel the mood on screen at any given time and in the same way I'd like to control the colors and feel every time you turn the page.

This is also limiting the formats in which I can publish this.  If I publish it as a softbound book then you won't be able to open the pages wide enough to see all the details close to the fold.  Hardbound seems like the only way I can go about it, but that's exactly the feel I wanted with this book so I'm not to worried.  It does, however, mean expensive printing costs so I've been looking into printing presses in China.  The two that I've heard about and briefly talked to are:

• Crossblue
• Regent Publishing

I've gone to the Crossblue office in LA about two years ago and I was very happy with what I saw and the quotes they gave me.  I heard about Regent from a friend who published through them but it took about a month and a half just to get some paper samples as well as waiting weeks to hear back from emails.  But the quality of their books are very nice.  I still need to get a quote so we will see how they stack up to Crossblue.

Does anyone have any other suggestions of good printers that do high quality books at a good price?

- Jason