Colouring techniques

Before I started in the game modification hobby, my highest talent was making my own comics either based loosely on existing creations or my own characters. I haven't done any work on comics in any great detail since 1997, that's about to change as I have a brilliant idea for a comic and I want to bring it to life.

Now I can pencil in a drawing and ink it ok but the colouring part is going to be a challenge, as I always used to use felt-tip pens and crayons, now I'm more used to working with computers with PS and stuff I want to colour it in on the computer. I'm thinking something like this:

[Blocked Image: http://www.fightersgeneration.com/fightgen/characters/spawn-bld.JPG]

I have no idea how to go about achieving something like that and I was hoping possibly Koko or someone would know and give some pointers on techniques to achieve something as rich and detailed as that.

I plan on scanning in some B&W drawings sometime when I'm happy with what I have so you can see some of my creations

Thanks!

Todd doesn't do the colouring anymore, not even the artwork, just the storyline

Christ, I'm thinking it might be an idea to get someone else to do the colouring, God knows the inks and pencils take long enough.. not to mention planning out the script and lettering

A video tutorial of your techniques would help a lot though I think.

Oh and that guy with the tutorials is a fucking GOD

Hmmm... Kristen is a guy's name as well... no? Whatever, easy mistake to make

Ok I was just messing with some techniques, I came up with this idea like how you use normal and diffuse maps for game textures. I cloned the image and painted over some of the bits I wanted to colour then added shades and texture onto it before setting the original image down as a multiply layer. As you can see this is very rough as it's not meant to be used for anything other than practice.

[Blocked Image: http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/7826/spawntest8bl.jpg]

I'll mess about with more stuff soon...

[edit]fucking jpg compression ftl...

[edit 2] The artwork is by Kevin Conrad, I'm not that good

Ok fuck that crappy test above, I've started again and so far it's going really well, I guess it helps to be a texture/skin artist in the first place to be able to do this kinda stuff

[Blocked Image: http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/1193/spawnfinal7my.png]

Ok I'm done, I used png this time, fuck .jpg and it's shitty compression

I've surprised myself at how good that's come out, I mean ok it's not perfect but for a first attempt it's not bad. Next attempt I'm going to use one of my own drawings, something a lot bigger, working with small brushes is not cool and takes far too long, next time I want it to take less time than 20 hours

Crap, I darkened the moon at the last minute as well

Yeah it took about 18 hours I think, 3 evenings worth of work and a bit more, mind you the way I did it was probably not the best but it's worked wonders as you can see. I tried putting each section on a different layer and using texture fill but there's just too much detail so in the end I had to copy the image, paint over it and then paste the original over as a multiply layer,

Original drawing:

[Blocked Image: http://img57.imageshack.us/img57/6407/spawn3ci.png]

+

Painted drawing:

[Blocked Image: http://img457.imageshack.us/img457/917/spawncolour8do.png]

=

Final:

[Blocked Image: http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/1193/spawnfinal7my.png]

The fact that the image was so small to work with probably doubled the work time as I had to keep redoing all the little bits because the smaller brushes kept going out the lines, even in the end I've still gone out of the lines anyway

[edit] Mind you, 20 hours is nothing really, I mean Merekat's creations probably took double that

Fuck's sake, I'm reminded why I don't draw so much nowadays, because I never get anything right first time, I've lost count how many times I've made the arms too long or the spikes too pointy and had to rub the bits out, this is going to take some time...

The lasso tool wont pick up everything because of the detail in the drawing, if I use 'find similar' it will tidy up the drawing but a lot of detail is lost