Q: I’m just wondering if there are any special consideration you need to take in your illustrations, colour wise, that you know are going to be printed?  I know in animation, when a background is being painted in Photoshop, there’s a filter that checks if the colours will show up on TV, but is there similar issues with colouring for print?

A: There are a few things you need to keep in mind about colors in print, especially when it comes to digitally created art.

First off, and probably the most immediate concern, is the difference between the colors you see on the screen and that which ends up in print. It’s difficult to get the two to come close to being a match, because the nature of the two images, computer screen and printed page, as so different.

The image on your screen is produced using three colors, red, green and blue (RGB) at a resolution of usually 72 dots per inch. However because the computer screen displays these using an ADDITIVE color system (meaning a 0% of all colors equals black)  and as a transilluminated image (the colored light shines out from the screen) an image on the computer can display millions of colors with  much greater range of contrast and intensity as well as a broader and more subtle range of color (color gamut).

A printed page image, using a standard four-color process, is printed using four colored inks: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Printing uses a SUBTRACTIVE color system (meaning a 0% of all colors equals no color or the blank paper) and relies on light reflected from the surface of the page as opposed to light from within. This limits the printed page’s colors, contrast and intensity. All this leads to a difference between what you see on the screen and what gets printed on the page.

With a good monitor and a color calibration system you can get some decent results with color matching, but since different magazines use different paper stocks, different ink densities and other factors, color will never be across the board consistent. Also the greater color gamut of a computer monitor can show you colors on the screen you cannot ever replicate in CMYK print. Personally I use the eyeball method. I take printed versions of my illustrations and hold them up to the monitor, then adjust the color balance to get as close as I can to the printed version. I have found I can get close that way, especially if I choose to match a certain range of colors more than others, and then whatever the differences between client’s printing end up negligible. I have found that by matching up the fleshtones in my images I get good results… as long as I keep in mind that the blues in my image need to be more subdued as they will print darker and more intense than the screen shows. When doing work I know will be printed on newsprint or a similar spongy stock I purposefully paint more garishly with the color knowing it will be muted due to the soaking in of the ink on the paper. I do this when I do newspaper illustrations or work for one of the Scholastic magazines.

I also always color my images as CMYK images in PhotoShop, as opposed to coloring them as RGB and then converting them. It doesn’t seem like it but the screen color does change when you do that conversion and it will be different than if you made the color choices in a CMYK mode in the first place. Also, PhotoShop will show you a little exclamation point symbol in the color palette if you have selected a color that is impossible to reproduce in print and will suggest the closest match to it that is reproducible.

One thing to keep in mind is the ink density of the target printing process. Ink density refers to the percentage of coverage of the four different inks on the paper of a given magazine or publication. Printers use a scale of 0% to 400%, 0% being on ink and 400% being 100% ink coverage of all four colors. What the ink density is depends a lot on the type of paper and the quality of the printing… glossy and heavier stock can handle a higher ink density than thinner or more porous paper. No matter what the type of paper, no one can use 400% ink density… the ink would literally never dry on the page as it could be too thick and gooey. A high quality, glossy magazine might allow an ink density of 300% or a tad more… this results in very rich blacks and a good contrast image. A less expensive printing process might have a max ink density of 270-280%, which leaves a bit to be desired in the contrast and black areas.

PhotoShop already knows this, and the color profile of a given image can have the ink density capped at any level one might desire. The default PhotoShop CMYK profile, U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, caps the ink density at 300%. If you select what seems like “total” black from the PhotoShop swatch pallet and switch to the CMYK sliders you will see that it is not truly total black… that would be 400% ink density with 100% of all four colors. It is what they call a “rich” black, usually the following formula:

• Cyan- 75%
• Magenta- 68%
• Yellow- 67%
• Black- 90%

That equals a total ink density for black, the darkest of all the colors, at exactly 300%. This is usually good for most printers, but if you notice a grayness and lack of contrast to your images from a client that will be a recurring one, you might want to ask about the ink density their print process allows. Not that you can change it, but by coloring with that ink density as the max in a custom color profile, you can avoid the washing out of other colors as well as your blacks by avoiding having them do a color profile conversion themselves.

This is the kind of stuff production people have to deal with all the time, and if you can avoid having them change or convert your image you will end up having more control over the final results… leading to less surprises when the illustration hits the stands.

Some Google searches on “matching screen to CMYK print colors” and “calibrating an RGB monitor for CMYK printing” will bring you a host of useful articles.

Thanks to Seth Wilks for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

Q: My question is about the application of color. I’ve already seen your tutorials about coloring, but I’d like to know how to use the right color for each kind of illustration you make. How do you make your color selections? How do you know what’s the right color to use? Do you do it intuitively or is it pre-meditated?

A: I am definitely the wrong guy to ask this question. In my opinion my color use skills are not very good, and certainly not very thought out. What (very) little I know about color I picked up on my own and never studied any color theory or application anywhere.

People that know what they are doing with color understand that “pure” or “primary” color is bad. In real life, the colors we see are never pure colors, but are always influenced by the colors and light about them. A red ball sitting on a blue floor will have elements of each other on their surfaces because of the light that reflects off each and onto the other, and the shadows that are cast also cause color shifts. Color is caused by objects reflecting different wavelengths of light off their surfaces, and that light can get changed by the various objects it comes into contact with. Therefore an environment tends to have an overall color cast, where the colors are pushed towards a common color. “Monochromatic” is a term that means something that is all in shades of one color… I don’t mean that. I mean having all colors incorporate a hint of a single overall color that creates a cohesive feel.

Painters can create this effect in several ways, one of which is to simply incorporate the colors of surrounding objects into the colors of that which they surround. Another method is to use a “limited palette”, where they might have only two or three colors of pigment and force themselves to paint their image with only combination of those colors. MAD Magazine genius Harvey Kurtzman used a variation of an old painter’s trick called an “underpainting”, where he would paint the entire area he was coloring with a layer of color… say yellow… then would paint on top of that color. The end result was an image with an overall warm, yellow feel but not monochromatic. Not paying attention to this concept (which I rarely do) is called using “local” color… meaning the natural color of an object unmodified by the light, shadow or any other influence from around it. I use a lot of local color in my illustrations…. I like the bright look and it works well with my cartoony style.

Color has a lot of complexities to it, but I take a very simple approach. I think of color in terms of depth and perspective. The more saturated the color, the more it “comes forward” in the image, and the less saturated the father back it seems. Likewise with warm versus cool colors. Warm colors advance while cool colors recede. Here’s an example from last years “Who’s thinking What at the Obama Inauguration”. I added increasing levels of blue casting to the colors the farther back the crowd goes. The colors at the bottom of this image are more saturated and less blue than those at the top:

Those are really the only rules I keep in mind when doing color, otherwise I select colors based on the subject matter and environments I am coloring. Sometimes what you are coloring dictates the type of color you should use. For example, some years ago I did a parody of the film “Van Helsing” for MAD. If you are unfortunate enough to watch the movie (yeah, it’s that bad) you might notice that there is very little color in it. They went for a drab and gray color palette to match the sullen Transylvania countryside in winter. I therefore leached much of the color out of even the skin tones in my art to give it the same effect:

At other times I might punch up the color to be more garish than usual, if I am doing something that demands it, like my MAD parody of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”… lots of color in this show with their decorating makeovers and clothes:

Mostly, though, I just pick colors to make things pop out that I want to pop out and to make things recede that are less important. Simplistic, I know, but I’m no painter.

Well, I managed to type a lot of words about something I don’t know much about. I’d seek knowledge about use of color from books or resources on painting. Color theory applies to any medium.

Thanks to Angel Flores from Mexico City for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

Q: When I was a kid, Mad was all in black and white.  All your jobs are in color.  Do you feel this affects how you work compared to when Mad artists didn’t have to worry about coloring?  Are there things in the sketching and inking process you have to sacrifice because of the coloring phase?

A: As I have said here in the past, I will always feel a little like I missed out on the “good old days” having not been a part of the old black and white MAD. That isn’t exactly accurate, as I technically did appear in the last issue of MAD that was entirely in black and white. My first job for MAD appeared in issue #399, which for all intents and purposes was the last issue of MAD to be completely in the classic, all black and white format with the cheap old paper stock. I did a piece in #399 called “Gadgets to Really Make Home Theater Like Going to the Movies”.

Click for a closer look…

All the subsequent issues of MAD were in color or mixed formats. #400 was an anniversary issue that was printed on the new stock and in color (at least all the pages were capable of color, even if some were still in black and white). #401 had a large color insert for the “MAD 20″, where I did the piece with the two inauguration scenes I wrote about in November. Half that issue was in black and white and still on the old stock… this would turn out to be the last time that stock and format appeared in MAD (so far). #402 was entirely on the new stock with a mix of black and white and color. #403 was the issue that MAD officially announced the move to color and (GASP!) the inclusion of advertisements. So, I did squeak one job in before MAD changed from it’s classic format.

Back to your question- Yes, working in color is different than working in black and white for a lot of reasons. First it obviously takes a lot longer. Even adding full gray values to an inked piece of art takes a lot less time than fully coloring it. Beyond that, using color makes you think somewhat differently about everything else as well, especially the inking. Knowing I am going to color a piece of inked art will mean I will not do as much establishing of values with the inks themselves… fewer areas of solid black and almost no gray washes or tones for example. What value work I do add needs to be in a way that will not mess up the color. I could rely even more than I do on the color to establish the values of a given piece of art, but I have always believed that color should be meant as a compliment to an inked illustration, and not to do the heavy lifting on it’s own. Therefore I have always sought a balance in the inks vs. color. I want my inked, uncolored pages to stand on their own as finished art, and not look like coloring books waiting to be finished. On the other hand, I want to use a color so that it would compliment my drawing style and add something to it, but also not overpower the line work. I don’t always succeed, but largely I feel my coloring does not come off as “digital” and allows the line art enough room to breath on it’s own. Only occasionally do I resort to coloring effects for funky lighting or whatever that doesn’t read in the black and white version as well.

Specifically concerning MAD, there are definitely some things I do differently than the old school MAD guys did because of the color format change. I don’t add any grayscale effects to the board themselves (or very little, anyway), whereas old school MAD work had a lot of values added in gray with markers, washes and rubylith overlays. Lacking those values I tend to do heavier linework and more crosshatching that will not interfere with or muddy up the color. I still add solid black areas with the inks, although maybe not as many as I would without know the color is coming.

Here’s a panel from last year’s “Ironic, Man” parody that shows the differences between the black and white versions and the color:

Even in black and white I established a lot of the lighting and
values with the inks using blacks and hatching to suggest the mood.

The color version adds form and dimension to the original inks, but
it is only adding to what (hopefully) was already suggested.

One major difference from the way artists like Mort Drucker and Angelo Torres worked is with regard to backgrounds. In black and white, it is okay to allow your backgrounds to be vignetted or to just draw partial backgrounds and objects to suggest environments. The softer grayscale nature of the art makes this read very nicely. In color to do that creates a very unfinished look. Therefore unless I am going to do just a simple color wash in a background (which I do at least one on evry page), I am forced to draw all the way into the panel edges with all the background environments.

Other than that my approach to the art I do for MAD is very much in the traditional vein… penciled and inked on drawing board with dip pens and brushes at 200% of print size.

One other point about the color… I may feel like I missed out on an era because my starting at MAD basically coincided with the introduction of color, but I have no illusions that is a coincidence. I am quite sure a large part of the reason I got into MAD, and made such a fast transition to doing the “continuity work” in TV and movie parodies is the fact that I worked in color, and digital color on top of it. The guys at MAD knew they were going to color, that their established artists were unwilling or unable to work in full color to take advantage of the new format, and they needed to find some artists that could pull off continuity work in color. I was in the right place at the right time and got lucky.

Thanks to John Vaughters for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

For years I’ve been using an easy trick to create a layer in PhotoShop containing my scanned, inked line art that remains intact as I color “beneath it” sort of like an animation cell. It’s a simple thing to do:

1. Scan line art as grayscale image
2. Duplicate background layer containing inked art, rename “Inks”
3. Set layer mode to “Multiply”
4. On background layer, press “Command” + “A” to select and then “Delete” to delete line art on that layer
5. Convert to RGB or CMYK

Finished. Because “Multiply” mode means that whatever is on that layer in “multiplied” with what is below it, all the black lines stay intact and all the subtle gray lines become transparent and overlay the color I place beneath it, while all the white becomes transparent. Neat, easy trick.

Except nothing is ever easy, is it?

There are two difficulties with that technique. First, the white areas on the multiply mode are not gone, they are merely inert when in Multiply mode. This means that once you take that final step and “flatten” the image for sending to the client, all the white areas combine with the lower color layers. Since it’s in Multiply mode when flattened that just means any color below it takes over and the white in effect is gone. That works great IF you have only one layer of lines in Multiply mode. But what if you need to have different layers of objects in a given illustration for some reason? Then it does not work, because if you merge a multiply layer with another layer, any areas on the other layer that have no color in them become opaque white, and no transparency is transferred. In other words, if you want to have a single figure, inked and colored, on it’s own layer on top of a background illustration you cannot do that with the “multiply trick, because once you merge the multiplied inked figure layer with it’s separate colored layer, the “white” comes back all around the figure:

The linework for the boat and the color beneath the boat are their own layers
in this image, with lines for background beneath and color for background beneath
that. It looks like this if flattened to all together at once.

This is what happens if I just merge the boat line layer with it’s colored
underlayer. The white on the inked layer comes back.

You can select the white areas with the magic wand tool and delete them to create the transparency, but that is problematic as the wand tool doesn’t do a very good job of making good edges and you end up with a kind of “halo” effect that necessitates a lot of clean up around your image. I’m working on a job right now that requires a multiple layered final file, and this is a real headache.

There is a larger problem with this technique, though, and it applies to the process of four color printing. I just learned about this from MAD after I noticed that the blacks in my “30 Rock” parody seemed dull and washed out compared to other MAD jobs.

“Multiply” mode doesn’t just drop the black linework “on top” of the color… it literally multiplies it with the color below. That means that your black areas aren’t just 100% black, but they are black plus the cyan, magenta and yellow inks of the color beneath it. All blacks in a CMYK printed image are more than just 100% black ink… they have the other inks in there as well (in fact, PhotoShop has a setting for “rich black” in CMYK mode that is a specific combination of the four inks in percentages), but the density of the inks easily becomes very heavy when using the Multiply trick.

The problem with this in printing terms is that ink density (the percentage of each of the four colors) has it’s limits for the printer, yet PhotoShop literally dictates the ink density based on absolute percentages. You have 4 different inks in CMYK printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Each can be up to 100% coverage. Therefore the max ink density is 400%, meaning 100% of all four colors. Printing a 400% ink density is impossible… it will never dry. PhotoShop’s default color setting profile calls for a max of 300% ink density, but even that is a little strong and those settings do not apply in PhotoShop to an image you are working on, but only to those that have been converted to that color profile. So, you may be working in a profile like CMYK SWOP v2 (default North American printing setting) but you can easily exceed that 300% ink density when working, especially using the multiply line trick. Printer’s want lower ink densities. MAD‘s printer, by example, wants a max ink density of 280%. Working in RGB and then converting to CYMK will limit you to a 300% ink density (or whatever the profile calls for), but I don’t trust conversion like that to keep the colors right.

So, in an effort to figure out a better way, I discussed it with several knowledgeable PhotoShop gurus and found a different line art trick that works around these issues. It’s called the “Channel” line art trick, and it works just as well and almost as easily, but results in a layer of line art where the white is literally not there and yet the black and gray lines are merely transparent as opposed to being in multiply mode, which results in a lesser ink density.

Here’s the process:

1. Scan line art as grayscale image
2. Create a new blank layer, rename it “Inks”
3. Go to the “Channels” palette, there is only one channel called “Gray”
4. At the bottom of the channels palette, click the “dashed circle” icon entitled “Load Channel as Selection”
5. In “Select” drop down menu, select “Inverse”
6. Go to your “Inks” layer
7. Press “D” on your keyboard to reset swathes so full black in active color
8. Press “Option” + “”Delete” to fill selection with black
9. On background layer, press “Command” + “A” to select and then “Delete” to delete line art on that layer
10. Convert to RGB or CMYK

Using this technique, your line art layer will contain all your lines but the white will be gone, rather than just inert due to the multiply mode. So instead of this:

You get this:

The great thing is that the channels trick also preserves the subtle gray lines and any washes or values you had in the original inks, as the selection of the channel is smart enough to not just select the absolutes but also the transparencies of the image. You can use this trick to create as many layers of line and colored objects as you want and merge them at will to create layered images. best of all, the transparent black reacts differently to merging than the “multiplied” black, resulting in lower ink densities.

The one caveat here is that you should scan your lines in at a higher resolution for this technique to make sure you do not lose any linework. I do most of my inks at 200% of print size, so that is plenty large if I scan at 300 dpi. If I was inking at 150% or closer to print size, I’d bump up the resolution of my scan to twice print resolution, or say 600 dpi as opposed to 300 dpi.

I am sure this technique has been used by many people, is all over the internet and I am hardly the originator of it, but it was cool nonetheless to “figure it out”.

Isn’t shop talk fun?

Lots of projects at lots of stages right now but as always nothing to show until things get into print. In the meantime here’s the latest workplace poster.

I often manipulate relative sizes of people or objects for either composition purposes or effect with these poster illustrations, and here is a prime example. I made the lady “winning” the race much bigger than her co-workers because I wanted to force the perspective a bit without having to draw those others too far in the background. That was because the humor of the piece rests in the actions and expressions of those other characters. Here’s the pencils, inks and final color of that job:

Click for a closer look…

Whenever I appear at a comic book convention, there is one thing I can always count on happening, and I’m not talking about seeing fat, sweaty guys in spandex superhero suits… It never fails that I end up defending MAD‘s taking on real ads in the magazine back in 2001 with some irate attendee. Sometimes they seem to really take this personally… like the fact that there are ads in MAD is an affront to their personal liberty.

Usually the person I have the debate with is an old hippy or codger, and they seem very offended that MAD has “knuckled under to The Man”. They also usually loudly question MAD‘s ability to continue to produce cutting edge satire amid the perception of their being answerable to advertiser’s direction. Anyone who thinks that obviously doesn’t know the people behind MAD very well. Having had the privilege of working with people like Sam Viviano, Nick Meglin, John Ficarra, Charlie Kadau, Joe Raiola and others, there is no reason to be worried about the content of the magazine in the least. Despite the self-depreciating humor that has always been a MAD tradition, MAD takes pride in it’s craftsmanship and the content of it’s magazine… a lot of it. The staff is involved in every single aspect of the content of the magazine from cover to cover, and they know what they are doing. They are given the editorial control they require, and aren’t afraid of going after whatever subject they want. At this point I usually mention the time they devoted a large portion of an issue to the “50 Worst Things about Video Games” (MAD #457, Sep ’05), which roasted virtually every video game company, trend and hype. In that same issue there were multiple ads for… video games! Funny, the video game companies continued to buy ads in MAD (and other DC comics). The addition of ads in MAD has meant only one thing to readers: 8 extra pages between the 48 they are used to seeing. What it has meant to the magazine is that they have the revenue to publish in color, with better paper and keep their accounting books in the black.

Logic dictates that with no compromise to their content, a MAD with ads is preferable to no MAD at all. Still there is almost no convincing some people. Many equate MAD with their childhood and some seem to consider any changes to MAD to be assailing those memories. Usually at this point I ask them when was the last time they bought a copy of MAD. Invariably they will say it’s been 15 or 20 years, but they still “page through it” at the newsstand… apparently just to make sure it hasn’t changed. I find it hard to take the opinion of someone who stopped reading MAD a long time before the ads started appearing seriously. An argument can be made that the reason MAD was forced to accept ads in the first place is because readers like this person stopped buying it.

There’s usually no winning this argument, as many of these folks just can’t accept that MAD has ads in it even if they haven’t actually read the magazine in many years. There is even some resistance to the fact that it’s in color now… yet another change that negates the comfort of having an unchanged MAD on the stands even if they never buy it.

The thing is that no magazine hangs around for 50 plus years and does not change itself to reflect the times and to try and stay fresh to attract new generations of readers. That is exactly what MAD is doing with it’s shortened segments and features like the Fundalini Pages, the color, the subject matter it makes fun of… they are trying to appeal to an increasingly plugged in younger generation. Unfortunately that means they might alienate some of their longtime fans and readers who either can’t relate or don’t like change. What’s MAD‘s recourse? Keep things old school, gain no new readers and watch their readership slowly die off? That’s short term thinking, and certain death for the magazine.

I certainly wish it was different, but it is what it is. My friend by this time has decided to move on, and gives me one last parting shot… usually something to this effect:

“Well, I’m sure Bill Gaines is spinnng in his grave.”

I could answer that Bill accepted advertising in the original comic book MAD back in the early 50′s, or that his longtime friend Dick DeBartolo has repeatedly said he believes Bill would have no problem with ads if it meant the survival of MAD and work for his “Usual Gang of Idiots”… instead I just call back after him:

“Gaines was cremated.”