Double-Cross

The bears don’t always see eye to eye on business policy. Masha assumes its because her partner still has some communist brainwashing to work through.

The cyrillic, by the way, is supposed to say the Belarusian equivalent of “Bam!”

Process Experiment: Color Holds

For this comic, I knew all the hay would create problems. I wanted the hay to have the right texture, which meant visually, the comic could get very busy.

Color holds are basically when the line-art itself is colored. I guess since my line-art is not an aliased, black-and-white TIFF file, strictly speaking, I’m missing the point of a color hold. Typically, a colorist receives a black-and-white TIFF and works from there. But I’m just doing all the steps in one Photoshop file. But the basic concept is the same: I lock the transparent pixels on the line-art layer, and use the paint bucket or pencil tool to fill the (mostly) black pixels with a color.

In this comic, that all worked out pretty well. Except for two things.

First, I was a bit sloppy when I deleted the white pixels on the line-art layer. The reason there are masses of shadow, as opposed to further texture, on the haystack, is because there were still some white pixels in there. But, I ended up liking the overall effect. If I do it again, I’ll do it more carefully, though.

Secondly, I chose a darker color for the linework representing objects that were further away. This doesn’t quite make sense. The trees and barn should be lower-contrast than the overgrown grass in the foreground.

Ah well–as always, trying something new has taught me a few things :)