Time... manage it!

2011 is over, and it was a rather busy year for me. I have this thing where I tend to remember things a little differently than they actually happened, like being busy when I really wasn't for example. ;) However, I'm 100% positive that I was busy this past year because I keep a pretty detailed work calendar.

It started off as a way to plot out all of my projects as they stacked up, so that I could be sure I had enough time to color my books. I just couldn't keep every detail straight in my head, so I needed to have it written down. After a few months of doing this, I realized that I could keep track of how many pages I color on a monthly basis. This kind of stat keeping has always appealed to me as long as I can remember, so for me it's more fun than it is a chore.

In 2011, I set a personal record for pages done in a year with 1207 pages colored. After posting that number to twitter, I had the thought that aspiring colorists might wonder how someone can color "x" number of pages in a given time, and that it might be informative to show my calendar from this past year. Also, based on the hits my previous "behind the scenes" post about Wonder Woman #4 received, it seems like people like a peek behind the curtain.

Another reason I wanted to post this, is to stress the importance of time management for a freelancer. You have an editor that's giving you a deadline, but hitting that deadline takes a lot of self discipline, which can be hard when you're sitting at home and a video game is calling out to be played, or the internet is begging to be surfed. As you can see below, there aren't many days in which I don't color something, but the info that is missing from my calendar is the hours worked in a day. Some of those days I do nothing but work, and other days I can manage all of my work and leisure activities/household chores, etc. A page can take anywhere from 1-3 hours to color depending on my motivation, the complexity of the page, and various other factors. Another thing to keep in mind when looking at the calendar, is that I don't flat any of my own pages, which saves me quite a bit of time.

Other functions that my calendar serves (which are not pictured here) are the dates I invoice a project, and the dates/amounts I'm paid for projects. It's important to keep track of all this stuff when you're a freelancer. If a company forgets to put your invoice in and you don't get a check, you need to know when it's time to bug them about it. Or if you blow a deadline because you just forgot it was there, well you're going to look like an idiot.

So, here's my calendar for 2011...

MW

Thought process (Wonder Woman #4)

I wanted to share some of my thought process behind a scene from Wonder Woman #4 since it came out last week and I haven't posted about the issue yet. Hopefully what I share in this post will be helpful or insightful, and not seem utterly obvious and in no need of an explanation. :)

I want to talk about a scene in Wonder Woman #4 that was set in a night club/bar and that presented two challenges that could be addressed with color. The first is that we have our group of characters split up, and in different parts of the club, and I knew that I could use color help the reader understand which part of the bar each character occupied. There are also quite a few panels with a lot of people drawn in them, and if I were to do my job poorly the art could flatten out and become hard to read. I had to make sure that I did a good job of separating planes (foreground, middleground, background) to properly show the depth of space in the club. In this case coloring different areas of the club with different color schemes solved both problems. These different colored "pools" of light include the blue-green seating area, the yellow bar area, the red stage area, and the crowd being a transition between red (stage) and blue-green (seating area) ending up a pink-ish/purple.

One reason to choose this approach is that it's a bit of a literal interpretation of a club's lighting, as there are usually quite a few different lights/light sources in bars/clubs in real life.  The second reason was, this helps the reader quickly identify where each character is located within the club, and how those spaces relate to each other in terms of how the club is laid out.

In the second panel of the first page presented below, you can see where the seating area and the bar are in relation to the stage and the crowd even though you won't fully see those two areas until the next page. Once those two areas are shown on panel 1 of the second page, the red stage is in the background and the reader quickly gets where everyone in the scene is located, and how the bar is laid out. Another added benefit is that I often have a nice contrast between characters and background since you can usually see another section of the club in the backgrounds of most panels.

To help illustrate all of that nonsense I typed above I took each of the different areas in the club and reduced it to a single color...

In case anyone was wondering, my work files never looked like the pages above. I made these versions specifically to show this concept of creating pools of different colored light to define various areas of the club.

And to see how these ideas were used to create the final pages, here's the finished colored pages with some other notes about my thought process...

-Wonder Woman is lit by red-ish light but I needed her (and the crowd) to separate visually from the guys on stage. So I took the red from the stage, and the blue-green from the rest of the club and met in the middle (sort of) with pinks and purples...

 -You can see the red background (coming from the stage) in panel 4 acting as a nice contrast to Hermes, as well as the yellow background (coming from the bar) in panel 7...

 -This page is probably the most straight forward since it takes place entirely in the "crowd" section of the bar, with a few cooler backgrounds...

 -The warm yellow bar light brings the characters to the foreground against the blue-green seating area. Also, I choose red for the background in panel 1 because I tried the blue-green, but the panel became lost against panel 2. So I decided that the camera could just as easily be looking the other direction, with the stage in the background, and then the panel would stand off of panel 2...

  
-Cliff noted that the music should feel angry, so I picked red for the stage area. It seemed like a good idea to carry over that red to the background of the last panel where Wonder Woman is angrily stabbing Strife's hand with the broken glass...

 -Another pretty straight forward page with just the yellow bar area in the foreground and the blue-green seating area in the background...

MW

Men of War and The Fearless

Here's two books colored by me that came out recently...

Men of War #4 (preview here)

The Fearless #5 (preview here, although it's listed as issue #4, it's actually #5) Below is a page from later in the book. Probably my favorite page to color in that issue. I really like how the lighting turned out. :)

MW

The Fearless #4

CBR has a preview of The Fearless #4 up. Here's pages 7 and 9, where I had a good time coloring this shark...

On a related note (fear and sharks), I'm terrified of sharks. TERRIFIED!

MW

Red Skull #5

The last issue of Red Skull Incarnate is out today (11/30).

MW

Wonder Woman #3 and The Fearless #3

A pair of 3's this week. This past Wednesday two books that I colored hit the shelves.

The Fearless #3...

And Wonder Woman #3...

MW

Catch up...

Gotta love the rush before the holidays.  A lot of work getting done, but not much else as you can see from the lack of posts. So, before I dissapear for another two weeks, here's some colors!

I did this cover for a book called The Rinse. The cover is drawn by Paul Azaceta...

I did two versions for Boom! to choose from, and here's the one they didn't choose (forgot to make the lines on the table white in this one, whoops!)...

Men of War #3 came out last week and Here's a few pages from that book...

And there's a preview of Fearless #3 up over at CBR that has some of Mark Bagely's art, and here are some pages with Paul Pelletier's art (they split the art duties on the book)...

Now, back to work!

MW