A couple of days ago, I finished colouring Dr. Muscles #4 (drawn by António Brandão and written, as usual, by Austin Tinius.) To colour it, I adopted a method used and described by Alison Bechdel to colour Fun Home.
I printed the inked pages in double copy on a normal sheet and used one copy as background layer. On it I stuck a Fabriano 4 rough sheet, and coloured with watercolours on it with a light box. In previous situations, if I coloured directly on inks printed on a rought sheet, I had found out that watercolours often were repelled by the printed inks (as if there was a slight film on the ink that prevented them to be touched directly by colour.) So I decided to colour without any kind of immediate ink, keeping them as a background lightened by the light box.
This process lasted some two hours. When the watercolours were dry, I scanned the page and edited it with Photoshop. This time I added the inks on the colours as a layer set in Multiply. I adjusted contrast and layers settings, adjusted the colours, and everything else that was needed before reaching a result I was pleased with.
The Photoshop process lasted another two hours, more or less, including cleaning the spaces between the borders and so on.
Dr. Muscles should go in print next week. Stay tuned!
