Tips on changing a comic from coloured to Black and White?

[BobbyjoeX]

I might have made a thread like this before... donno its been years

So my comic has changed a lot in the going on 5 years i've been making it. Currently. i realised something that has progressively upset me since i made this change. I went from Black and White to Colour. basically talked into doing so by some people but now, i look at it and i go "how am i supposed to print this crap?!"

I went back and forth a few times cause i wanted to go back to black and white, but instead i got talked into going back to colour cause "people prefer coloured comics. No one will read your comic if its in black and white!"

So this year. I have many things planned for Royal. one is printing Vol 1. i planned fro the start that the books would be traditional black and white comics. now i need to go and change it to black and white but how do i do that and it still look clean? and no, i dont mean "just greyscale it".

I donno,.. my brain is dying and im not wording properly, i apologise.

[redfish]

It's recommended that for black and white art you work on a canvas at 600 dpi as opposed to a colour comic at 350dpi. The higher dpi allows for better details which is important to the lineart I believe.

If you're trying to print it, you should see if you have the option ti mess around with the formats and try a few test prints.

[feuersichel]

What program do you use? Are you working with base color layers? If so you could just select and replace the color. Or if you have clip studio, you can select and insert a monochrome pattern.

[darthmongoose]

A good start is probably to look at some manga where you like the toning.
Personally I tend not to use a lot of tone in my black and white comics, and rely much more on black fills, with an example being this old short comic I made (aaagh old art!):

With this one, I mostly left off tones on the characters and approached it like anything kinda dark is black, and anything fairly light is white. The main thing is to try to use black fills to break things up and make them readable.

The tones here were done in Clip Studio... or actually this is so old it was "Manga Studio" back then It comes with a really great collection of screentones you can paste into a layer by selection, or use masked laters. You can move and rotate tones as needed.
The only caution with tones is ALWAYS use tones where the DPI matches the DPI of the art (in this case I think this was 600. 300 looks okay for colour, but fuzzy on black and white and tones) and NEVER use a scale tool on a tone, if you need a smaller or finer tone, use a tone pattern that's at the same DPI but smaller and finer! If you don't, you'll get "moire", where the tones turn into weird chequered patterns.

Clip Studio is on sale right now, which might be handy!

[BobbyjoeX]

It's recommended that for black and white art you work on a canvas at 600 dpi as opposed to a colour comic at 350dpi. The higher dpi allows for better details which is important to the lineart I believe.

If you're trying to print it, you should see if you have the option ti mess around with the formats and try a few test prints.

Yeah. i kept thinking about getting text prints but i am so broke that i cant really afford to do it right now XD

What program do you use? Are you working with base color layers? If so you could just select and replace the color. Or if you have clip studio, you can select and insert a monochrome pattern.

that is kind of what i wanted to avoid really...

and yes i have Clip Studio Paint EX (bought it when Smith Micro was trying to get rid of all their physical copies after they lost the licenses so it was $100 cheaper than what it usually is)

TL;DR: been reading manga, was hit with nostalgia of when i first decided to do comics (age 12) and that i need to really see who are really my friends cause one toxic one mentally brought me down to nearly quitting Royal

I have currently been reading my massive manga collection. (why have them if i'm not going to read them? also decided to sell some cause why keep them if im not interested in reading them...)

the current Series i have been going through are D.Gray-Man, Are you Alice and The Seven Deadly Sins. reading these, i can see where the artist said "screw it" on things (especially with how sketchy 7DS is).

My comic i believe has suffered from the colour because im too overwhelmed to work on it nowadays. I recently ended a friendship where i was kinda pushed to make my art "look better" than it did before. the colouring and shading i did for the beginning of chapter 5 is kind of where i hit my peek. i lost so much interest in working on it. i was talked out of by other friends to not up and quit.

I feel actually reading some media made me go back to when i was like 12, reading Inuyasha and marveling over the art and how... simple but appealing it is in detail. Royal suffered cause i worried to much about how my art looked, and when i was in that friendship that i ended, it was worse cause i had someone get pissed off and bring me down with their own self destructive tendencies when i started to feel even the slightest bit proud of my work... since the start of 2022, i've been trying to get back to where i could get 6 pages out a week and the one thing i had to learn is to stop caring.

I appreciate the advice. yeah, i was told by someone who actually IS printing books to never use screen tones because of the weird thign it can do. glad to know how to actually use them cause i always liked the look of it. I'm going to go through the manga that inspired me again and see what they did.

[system]

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