Countdown 4: The styles of Master Digital Color

What defines an art style?  How many artist does it take to define a style?  One hundred, ten, only one? What styles of artwork would you most like to learn?  If you are a fan of classic animation may wish to learn how to recreate the look and feel of Saturday morning cartoons.  Perhaps you are a fan of pin-up art and want to learn how to render the most beautiful faces.  Maybe you prefer the action of Superhero comics and which you could unlock the key to coloring exciting superhero teams.  Good news true believer, Master Digital Color contains all of this and more.

Learn how animator Don Bluth inspired me to pursue an art career as a young boy and why dreams can come true.

Classic Cartoon Style

You will learn how to use custom brushes to simulate the look of a painted background and render cel shaded style figures while coloring Mike Worley’s Sherlock Hound.

Color Holds for animated art styles

Movie Poster Style

Fairy tales have spawned animated films from Anastasia to Cinderella and the Little Mermaid.  When these films are made often the movie poster and promotional materials are created in a softly rendered style that is quite different from the movie.  If you want to master this promotional style of coloring and love beautiful princesses you will have a ball coloring Dave Bryant’s Royal Treasures.

Learn to color the Royal Treasures Princesses by Dave Bryant

Action Adventure Style

One of the main tutorials in Hi-Fi Color for Comics featured a Tommi Trek cover by John Byrne.  What you may not know is Tommi Trek was once a comic book and at that time was penciled by cartoon artist extraordinaire Mike Worley.  If you crave action and adventure you will find an all new Tommi Trek illustration where you will learn to rendered textured animated backgrounds and mummies, lots of mummies!

Homework challenges:
- Animation Field Trip: Learn about creating cartoons with Dustin Yee’s Hard Time Candy then invent your own animated characters.
- Set the scene: Learn how location and setting effect animated characters then practice setting the scene with Matheus Wade’s Jetta.

Brush Style

Learning to render with the brush tool can be scary.  Without the safety-net of the lasso tool to control where your highlights are adding you are forced to learn brush dexterity.  Learn how reading the artwork to determine the best places for light and shadow will help you jump start your brush style.  Follow step-by-step instructions showing you how to build up your highlights in in three easy steps.  Learn how using brushes with harder or softer edges can help you define strong highlights and blend away imperfections.  Put your brush skills to the test while coloring Dave Bryant’s The Scarab.

Rendering shiny metallic surfaces

Cut & Brush

This is a style very near and dear to my heart and the style that made Hi-Fi famous.  The Hi-Fi team and I have used this style when rendering books like X-Men, G.I. Joe, The Flash and many more.  Cut & Brush is the quintessential superhero coloring style.  Using this style you can create rendering that ranges from subtle and moody to high contrast and explosive.  Once mastered you can adapt the basic concepts of Cut & Brush to create a wide variety of looks.  Coloring Ray Dillon’s The Shen you will learn how to render a frenetic superhero team in action.  From detailed backgrounds to skin-tight costumes and extreme special effects this project will push you to the limit and force you to unlock your full potential. (Custom Photoshop brushes used in this tutorial are included on the bonus disk)

Learn to render a superhero team with Ray Dillon's The Shen

Cut & Grad

Every yin has its yang and for every superhero project that is suited by a cut & brush style there is another project where an adaption of cut & grad will be more appropriate.  This is the style of coloring I used on J. Scott Campbell’s G.I. Joe covers and we use a version of this style at Hi-Fi when coloring Action Comics.  Cut & Grad focuses more on smooth gradations of light over a given surface and allows the line-art to show more cleanly than the more detailed cut & brush style.  Cut & Grad works particularly well on artwork with more angular lines or figures such as Transformers or Jim Hanna’s Code Zero.  If you love this tutorial you are in luck, you will find additional pages of Code Zero on the bonus disk for you to render.  The challenge is to Take the skills you learn  in the tutorial and apply your new techniques to the bonus art.  Have fun!

With Master Digital Color you choose which style to learn and when.  Work at your own pace using the step-by-step tutorials and bonus video content until you master the tips, tools, and techniques to create the look and feel you want to achieve.  Master Digital Color is a journey, you master one style then move down the path to the next. As you collect skills and learn to use them together effectively your completed images become more and more amazing.  Before you know it not only have you mastered the styles included in the book, you will also be inventing your own new styles others will be amazed by.  Once you unleash your creativity everything is possible.

Homework Challenges
- Establish the Era:  Can color change the time and place of an illustration?  You will never know until you try.
- Define mood & feel: Challenge yourself to make a character appear good or evil by changing only the lighting and colors used.

Lady Death creator Brian Pulido shares his insights about the role color plays in modern comics.

Pin-Up Style

In nature many beautiful creatures are also quite deadly.  The same is true of Shi inhere traditional battle armor.  Learn to combine beauty and grace with historical weaponry and mysterious atmosphere in this tutorial.

Bonus Tutorial: Rendering beautiful faces with Billy Tucci’s Shi

Art Nouveau Style

Learn to color a beautiful pin-up inspired by the lithographs of Art Nouveau pioneer Alfons Mucha. Leanr how to combine texture, color holds, color choice, lighting, and subtle rendering to create your own art nouveau masterpiece while coloring Terry Moore’s Stranger in Paradise.

Terry Moore gives you an amazing Strangers in Paradise Pin-Up to color

Pin-Up Noir

Learning new tool and experimenting with their settings and results can be fun.  Learn how to use Photoshop’s Smudge tool to blend areas of solid color together to create a hybrid style while rendering Martheus Wade’s Jetta. (Custom Photoshop smudge tool presets used in this tutorial are included on the bonus disk)

Mastering the Smudge Tool

Homework Challenges
- Rendering the face: Who says pin-ups are only female?  Your challenge is to render Shannon Denton’s Markus Fang featuring artwork Christian Duce Fernandez and incorporate what you learned about historical armor and facial rendering onto a male character.
- Pop Culture:  This is not your father’s pin-up featuring artwork by David Hahn

Those are a few of the styles and projects included in Master Digital Color.  Custom Photoshop brushes, color guides, Hi-Fi Helpers, and all artwork needed for each project is included on the bonus disc along with the bonus video tutorials.

Continue to Countdown 3: The Styles of Master Digital Color – Part II

Brian is a comic book colorist, founder of Hi-Fi colour design, and co-author of Hi-Fi Color for Comics and the upcoming sequel Master Digital Color.

Pre-order Master Digital Color from Amazon.com today you will save close to $10 off the cover price and give yourself the knowledge you need to succeed.