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May 2020

Heyo. I've been think of a new comic lately.

Usually in a story's conceptions, certain things are really vivid, like the framing of a scene or the shadows and pallet. For this one those it is very different in that i cant imagine it in any color. I feel its a story that can only be told in black and white. (Its not like any film noir stuff if that what youre thinking) but i never not colored something except unfinished sketches. All my comics and illustrations so far have been in full color and idk how to go about making a whole project (graphic novel length) without it. I know the existence of screen tones and junk but i dont really know how to go about filling out a scene with them. I want the art to be clear and impactful but so look like a finished piece.

Any tips from those who do black and white or actuakly know how to mono color?

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    May '20
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    May '20
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My advice? Look at some mangas. Any is fine, and you'll see that there's a great deal of way for grayscale shading and monochrome. Some love to use heavy tone, some love to use pen hatching, and some didn't use it at all, and only use pure black and white (I remember it called block shading, but not sure). Just try out different kind of shading and see what's fit you most.

If you're not familiar with b&w, I'd suggest like @silverraven0 that you get some inspiration from other b&w work. Manga or comics like Campbell's From Hell, Clowes (any), Miller's Sin City, Burns' Black Hole, and so on.

I only work in b&w. Once I finish drafting the page layout, I generally do a lot of different sketches just to get the right approach depending on the mood I want to express (black texture, style, and so on).
Once I've found several workable approaches, I balance them against the work I'm planning. If you're getting into a long graphic novel, using detailed dots with a large range of gray scale might be too time consuming and should probably be dropped.
I'm not a pro nor a good artist, but below is a sample gallery I made two days ago to present one of my old project called Stand(H)ard4 in which I used a lot of different styles, if that can give you some ideas:

You can also check my latest comic on tapas:

In any case, wish you best of luck as black and white is full of potential.

When I work in black and white, which I admittedly haven't done in a while because I've moved away from print over the past decade or so, I try to avoid overuse of tones and to instead focus on using solid black and white fills with confidence.

Urgh... old art :grimacing:.... But hopefully these samples give a sense of what I'm talking about:

This first one is an old comic done for print:

This is an old pencils sampler I did based on a Runaways script I was sent by Marvel. You can see how even though this is the pencils, I've tried to be very clear on where I wanted to be black or white in the panels to make an inker's life easier. Even though this would be coloured, I've tried to make it read clearly in black and white, with the black fills helping block out the composition of panels just like in the example where I was inking myself for a black and white comic above.

Here's an example from a pitch I did of characters designed for black and white (It was for the Manga Shakespeare series by Selfmade Hero, I was pitching for Measure for Measure, sadly I discovered on pitching they'd decided to stop commissioning new books for that series). I always try to make sure that the character designs also block in strong areas of black and white so that they'll be bold and readable. In my head I tend to think of it like "any dark colour is black" "any light colour is white", so for example, a glass of red wine, the liquid will likely appear black, or to use an example from a different manga, Naruto's jacket is orange and royal blue, and in the manga, the orange is white and the blue is black; he'd look way less impactful on a page if his jacket was light dot tone and darker dot tone.

If you want a formulaic approach, I'd say start by grayscaling your existing art. Then compare it to the color version.

Which contrasting features in color lose contrast in b&w? Find them, and increase their contrast (darken one color and/or lighten the other).

Like in the pic you used as an example: that yellow and pink outfit will likely show up as a uniform gray in grayscale. If that's fine with you, fine. But if the idea of having two different colors is important to the outfit, you'll have to increase the contrast yourself; maybe keep the pink as a light gray and switch yellow to straight-up white, or something very close.

In general, the goals of black and white coloring are (a) giving the illusion of multiple colors in a monochrome environment, and (b) creating images that are easy to read despite that monochrome environment. It's an art form all its own, and you'll definitely have to do a little study and practice to get the effect you want. Hope this helps~

My grandpa, who was a great oil painter, said to me one time: "make beauty contrast. people love beautyfull contrast" (I guess this apply very well for BW art)

I say: surrender to style freely and independent, with your taste and identity, and leave the pragmatic spirit to the technique. Maintain a uniformity in the ink style and choose the scenes in which you will outshine or dedicate yourself more to the whim. Be concise and didactic in the shadows. consider the reader's experience. Combine the narrative with the enchantment of the final art.

and please, check out my webcomics! :grin: @gatoleo

My comic is fully in black and white (except for some red) and it's been a learning experience of how to combine the aesthetics with legibility--because the biggest thing about black and white is that it needs to stay legible first and foremost, and that can be hard if characters are wearing a bunch of different tones.

And my biggest takeaway is that how you decide to color it can be largely influenced by the colors of the page if it were in color, but it doesn't have to. You can get pretty abstract in a very fun way and lately I've been using screentone and accents more to direct the eye than to "color" it, if that makes sense. And since I'm going for more of an Archie-inspired graphic novel comic style, I honestly don't care that who has black hair or a black coat, because it matters more that the page reads.

But occasionally I still will reference the colors of their hair, especially if I want the mood to get darker.

So in this regard, Black and White is a lot freer than doing stuff in color where the same colors must be present in every scene. You can get kind of wild with it and you hardly have to tone everything (in fact, in most manga they hardly tone anything at all, and tone mostly serves as a composition tool than a shadow-rendering tool. Sailor moon is a really good example of this.)

Only caveat though, I've learned through long experience--if you use screen tone you have to have a really dark line layer. I actually multiply my line layer like 2-3 times so the screen tone doesn't overpower it (and, my lines are so thin and have so little detail that I put most of my screen tone at 15-30 percent opacity, it's rarely full black) But it's all a process of learning by doing, so I hope you have fun with it.