Zub Tales

I’m on the hunt for a colorist for a creator-owned comic project I’m looking to release in 2014. I posted about this position earlier today on Facebook/Twitter and the response has been strong. I’m hopeful I’ll find the right person for the job. Yay, internet!

Anyway, here’s the quick skinny-

In addition to that Want-Ad style brief, I’ve been sending more extensive style notes out to the colorists who got in touch and have work in their portfolio that looks compatible with what I’m looking for.

I realized it might be helpful for other people to see those notes as well. Every project has different requirements, but you may find it helpful to see what I’m looking for and why.

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Stylistically, I’m looking for the following on this comic project:

• Color palettes that help sell the mood of the scene instead of just blue sky/green grass/blue water kind of obvious local color choices.
• Clean cut light and shadow reminiscent of animation. This will require a solid understanding of light direction, cast shadows, and volume even though the coloring ‘cuts’ may look deceptively simple.
• Light effects created by coloring the line art itself and using solid highlights instead of a lot of airbrush/gradients over top of the line art. I’m not looking for a soft/fuzzy/rounded rendering style for this project.

It’s a great example of what I’m looking for. I don’t mean Bill’s specific color palette choices but the way he uses hard cut areas of light and shadow to create mood, show depth, draw attention to characters, and instantly identify a change of scene or location. It’s not about detail as much as it’s about strong staging choices and powerful color palettes.

If you can deliver that kind of clean cut moody coloring, then you’d be a perfect fit for this project.

I have three sample pages completed by the penciler so far. I’ve sent them off for flatting, but should be getting those back by end of the week. Once I have those flats I’ll send over a layered-flatted page file along with color ref for the characters and the sample script. If you could color up one page as a test, that’ll help me compare coloring approaches and make a decision on the creative team.