Here's how we made the variant cover for Amazing Spider-Man #1 (out in stores now from Marvel Comics by Dan Slott and Humberto Ramos) -
After scanning and cleaning Rachel Dodson's inks in Photoshop - we move on to
THE COLORS
The first stage of coloring is to have the art "flatted".
Flatting allows the colorist to choose an area to color at any point throughout the coloring process - which is really helpful when you've almost finished coloring the art and realize the sky is supposed to blue not green etc.
I go in and adjust and correct the flats - especially for things like amount of blacks in color and a lot of the time I just lay a flat color over the whole thing like an orange or a blue but since I had given the flatter ref this was in the ballpark of what I was going to do...
I sent the flatter this photo for reference and it was my key ref for lighting this - I knew in my head what I wanted and was fortunate that I had a pic that matched what I saw in my head!
It's a selfie of me in Times Square, NYC, 2012 (how did I take this pic? The camera is setting on a ledge on a building :-)
My initial rough in of the colors, done in Photoshop CS3 with a Wacom Intuos Graphics Tablet.
Refining colors and volumes - plus begin adding the glow to the background so I can really see what it will look like to play off against the foreground figures.
I begin turning the black lineart into color lineart - specifically Black Cat's hair, fur, fleshes, and the jewelry.
For the final art I smoothed and clean up coloring and add more detail to jewels, etc.
Detail of Black Cat and my Photoshop workspace
Detail on Spidey and my Photoshop workspace
And the actual printed comic...
You can find this comic at your local comic book retailer
And digitally at Comixology
and for this actual Variant cover here
Enjoy!
TD
