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ferronickel · 7 months ago

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Hail, flatter! This one, who is a layperson of the arts and comixcraft, has a query for you:

So like, what is flatting?

I've seen your flats in Wifwulf, and I've read about the flats in Looking Glasses, and generally get that it results in an image with similarly coloured areas sharing the same false-colour.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this? Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones? How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

Thank you! I come in the spirit of humility wishing to relieve my ignorance of your noble craft!

OHOHOHO!!! You've activated my trap card and now I get to ramble about comics craft! And in my area of professional expertise, too! Be prepared for a long post

I'm going to start with the last part of your question:

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

So the thing about comics is that it is one of the most intensely time consuming mediums to create. One person can make comics on their own fairly easily, but it takes forever to produce. Consider that I've been working on Looking Glasses for 18-19 months and have drawn about 87 pages. Now, the western comics industry expects issues to be produced monthly, generally 24 pages in length. It's very difficult for a single person to work at this rate, so the labor of producing comics has been divided. Generally these jobs become:

Writer (writes the script)

Editor (edits the script)

Artist (draws the lineart)

Colorist (colors and renders the art)

Letterer (adds balloons, dialog, and sfx)

Flatter (sometimes 'color assistant' they take the art and prepare it for coloring)

This isn't comprehensive though, there are a bunch of other jobs, like designers and layout artists. Occasionally the artist job gets broken into Pencilers (who sketch the art) and Inkers (who ink the sketch). Basically, by splitting the work amongst a number of people you can produce comics much faster. Not all of these jobs are required, and creator-owed books might have artists do their own coloring and lettering, while big work-for-hire books might have twice as many people working so they can pump out a spider-man book every other week.

Okay, so why Flatters?

Flatting at it's most basic level is just coloring inside the lines. You take a black and white page of art, and you have to fill in every part of the page that will eventually be colored. It's a pretty time consuming task depending on how involved your lineart is.

Flatting a page of Looking Glasses doesn't take me all that long, usually less than a half hour, which is pretty quick. Looking Glasses pages tend to be... optimized for flatting though. There are only ever a few characters and there aren't a ton of background details.

You mentioned Wifwulf (created by my longtime friend and collaborator Dailen Ogden), here's one of it's pages:

Basically everything that's a different base color, (every tree, plant, bit of moss, character, etc.) needed to be picked out separately. Each page of Wifwulf took me a few hours to flat. If Dailen had been doing that themself, those hours would have really added up, but instead they could spend that time drawing and coloring. Now, that said, these pages have a lot of texture, so it's hard to see exactly what I did.

Here's an example from a comic I worked on early in my career. (Lineart by Patrick Custodio)

The writer for this comic loved to put in these incredibly complex crowd scenes, which is something the artist excelled at drawing. I was coloring and flatting at this point on the book, and before I could even start coloring properly, I would need to flat for like eight hours. (I have a much more efficient method these days) It was frustrating because I just wanted to work on the actually creative part, but the majority of my time was spent on something monotonous. As soon as I got the writer to hire a flatter for me, coloring a page would take me only one or two hours, not nine or ten.

So that's why flatters exist, mainly to ease the workload on colorists.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this?

Flatting serves a couple of purposes. It's main function, like I said above, is just coloring in the lines. After finishing your lineart it has to get colored in, so in a layer below the lines, you add colors.

The secondary function is preservation. I like to work in a way that is non-destructive, basically, at any point in the process I can restore an earlier version of the drawing if I make a mistake or don't like something. Flats are integral to this.

In digital art, there's this thing called anti-aliasing, where the edges of a line or shape have a drop off of pixel color or opacity. It makes the edges look smoother or blurrier. The three dots on the left are Anti-Aliased, while the one on the right is Aliased, there's no drop off, just hard pixels.

Anti-aliasing is fine until you need to change the color using the paint bucket, or select using the magic wand...

See how the anti-aliased art doesn't play well with these tools, but the aliased art does? So with something like Wifwulf, the final art is going to be full of texture that makes it impossible to select anything again once it's painted. By having a dedicated aliased flats layer under the rest of the artwork, you can always re-select any part of the image you want.

I always leave my flats layer alone, and do any detail work in layers above. For example when I was painting this, it really helped to be able to select just the titan so I could work on those paints without worrying about brushstrokes overlapping the rest of the characters.

One of the other things you can do with flats is quickly selecting certain elements. On most pages, I flat my panels, figures, and background elements separately. Later, with a single button press, I can select just the characters in the scene, or entire panels at a time, which makes things like shading a whole lot easier.

Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones?

If you're flatting for other people you often don't know what the final colors are going to be, so you just pick random ones. Garish colors can be helpful because it makes it obvious that they're not the final colors. Why don't I use the correct colors on my own pages when I'm flatting? Habit, mostly. It's also faster to grab random colors than to track down the correct ones. Sometimes two different things will have the same final color but I like to flat them with different colors so I can select them individually if I need to.

You can see the process a bit here. In my flats, Lancer's spade (eye? eyes? thing) is a different color from his tongue, even if they end up being the same white in the final image. This would help if I ever needed to select just his eyes for some reason. You can also see how I select his body fur color and then add details on top, like his colored fingers and the grey on his arm. Those elements have blurry anti-aliased edges, and it would be impossible to re-select them without flats.

How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

I use the default "additional color set" palette in clip studio and just work my way through it. I pick row and work my way down (for a change of pace I vary which row I start with). How many is mostly dependent on the artwork. You just keep going until you run out of individual objects to color. I have worked on pages where I've run out of colors on this palette and had to start making up more. Typically a page of Looking Glasses only needs around 20-30, though.

So! That's flatting! It's a little known job, and it's how I got started with my comics career, so I have a lot of thoughts on it. I was trying to be concise (lol), so I hope this all makes sense, but I'd be happy to clarify or answer any other questions about this process. I know I didn't really go into how I flat my work, so I can make that post if anyone is interested.

#ferrouscomicscraft #comics craft #ferrousask #I find flatting very relaxing actually #I can generally put one a video or a podcast on while I work #and then turning the false colors into true colors is so satisfying and fun #I will say (down here where it's harder to quote me on this) but flatters are incredibly exploited by the industry #like... below minimum wage work if you're actually taking the time to do it right #I started at $10 a page and have worked my way up to $20 #but remember that it can take hours depending on the complexity #it's not exactly lucrative #but it's a way to break into the industry so it's easy to exploit people #I don't flat professionally much anymore. Mostly only for Dailen because I like working with them.#Thanks so much for the ask! I had a lot of fun with this (obviously)#sorry it took so long to finish but I wanted to be comprehensive #I may have still missed explaining exactly what a flat layer is...#hmm #I have a few other comics craft posts in the works. There's one on paneling and layout that's been kicking my ass for weeks

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sunshinereddie · 2 years ago

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stay calm

so i haven’t quite finished my ACTUAL fic for day 5 of reddie week yet (it might not be ready until tmrw, unfortunately) so i’m deciding to share some snippets from another crossover idea i had…

reddie x five nights at freddy’s!!

im aware that this is a pretty niche crossover but it’s one of my favourites, so i hope you enjoy this small snippet! 🐻🐰🐤🦊

1,726 words. cw: blood and child death mention.

@reddieweek Day 5 Prompt: Books/Games/Movies/TV!

read under the cut!

“Hey,” Richie says, dropping his headphones to dangle around his neck. “Did you know that a kid died here once?” Richie bites down on his bottom lip to try and hide his smile when he sees Eddie’s shoulders stiffen and his hand freeze as he toggles through the different cameras.

“Yeah right,” Eddie finally says, but Richie can see right through the false confidence he’s trying to put on.

“I’m serious,” Richie presses, rolling his chair over to the cameras, leaning close to Eddie. Eddie flinches at the harsh squeaking of the chair’s wheels and the sudden appearance of Richie at his side. Richie grins at the sight of Eddie’s pale face and his wide, worrying eyes before he continues. “Back in ‘87, there was a birthday party going on here. Apparently, the little birthday boy just loved one of the animatronics and wanted to give it a hug, but kids aren’t allowed on the stage. The employees told him it was dangerous, but the kid thought, what could be so dangerous about them? So, when none of the staff were looking, the kid climbed up onto the stage and tried to start playing with one of the animatronics, the fox one. He must have pushed a button or yanked the machine the wrong way or something, because next thing he knew…” Richie jumps forward in his seat and slams his hand down on the desk, the harsh clap cutting through the silence of the office and making Eddie recoil back in surprise. “The fox freaked out and bit the kid’s arm clean off. Apparently there was blood everywhere- he bled out before the ambulance even arrived.”

Richie leans in closer towards Eddie, waiting to get a reaction from him. When Richie finishes telling his story, Eddie looks like he’s about five seconds away from pissing his pants. Richie tries his best to hold in a laugh as he watches the story sink into Eddie’s mind, the images Richie planted into his head haunting him.

“You’re full of it,” Eddie says eventually, rolling himself back over to the desk. “Stop making shit up.”

“I’m not!” Richie defends. “It’s true. I went to middle school with the kid’s older brother. He told me all about it.”

“Well, then he was a liar,” Eddie says firmly, some of the shakiness disappearing from his voice. Richie isn’t sure if Eddie is trying to diminish Richie’s story, or comfort himself.

Richie shrugs, leaning back in his chair. “He wasn’t. That’s why they keep the fox off the main stage nowadays.” Richie reaches over to the camera panel and switches the monitor from the main stage to the camera titled “Pirate’s Cove”, which displays a fuzzy image of a small stage closed off with a curtain and a sign attached to the stage reading, Sorry! Out of Order. “They weren’t sure why it bit the kid in the first place, so they couldn’t repair it so it wouldn’t do it again. And, apparently there was so much blood that they couldn’t get it out of the suit.”

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not nice to tell lies?” Eddie says, switching the camera from Pirate’s Cove back to the Main Stage.

“Oh, she did,” Richie replies. “She also told me never to come back to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, because they say that the ghost of the boy who died still haunts the place to this day…” His hand sneaks around the back of Eddie’s chair, then grabs the collar of Eddie’s shirt. Eddie practically jumps out of his seat, letting out a string of curses as he smacks Richie’s hand away.

“Asshole!” he says, grabbing a ball of crumpled paper from the desk and launching it at Richie’s face. Richie also nearly falls from his seat, but in his case, it’s because he’s howling with laughter at Eddie’s reaction. Richie didn’t mean to really scare the poor guy, just to poke fun at his nerves, but he couldn’t help himself. Besides, Richie thought it was kind of cute, the way Eddie’s cheeks and ears flushed bright red as he attempted to regain his composure.

“Oh, man, that was good,” Richie says, pretending to wipe a tear from his eye. “I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.”

Eddie grumbles something that Richie couldn’t quite hear, though he could assume the general idea from Eddie’s tone. Richie wheels himself back over to his side of the desk, lifting his headphones back onto his ears and pressing play on his Walkman. He glances over to the clock on the wall- it’s 1:37am. The night had been going by painfully slow, but at least that amused him for a little chunk of time. And hey, Richie thinks to himself as he reassumes his position of resting his feet up against the desk and leaning back in his chair, at least if I start to get bored, I know a way to entertain myself.

Eddie, on the other hand, was not as impressed by Richie’s idea of “entertainment.” It took a few minutes for his heart to slow back down to a normal pace, with Eddie glancing over to the side every once in a while to make sure Richie wasn’t getting up to anything else.

Eddie doesn’t believe a word that Richie said. What kind of a business would keep things open and running if a kid was brutally killed in their restaurant? And they would especially never keep the animatronic that did it. There was no way. But still… Eddie shivers at the image that his over-active imagination created in his head, of the scene- the false scene- that Richie has described.

Eddie also does not believe in ghosts. Out of all the things that Richie said to try and scare him, the idea of the ghost of this child haunting the restaurant is the most ridiculous. It was just a silly ghost story, one that Eddie is much too old to be getting scared of. But still… Eddie had to admit, there is something haunting about the animatronics, as he stares at them on stage through the camera. He knows that they are supposed to be fun and exciting for the kids, but Eddie wonders how anyone could enjoy a party run by those things. The rabbit one isn’t that bad- it looks dirty and its jaw hangs at a weird, broken angle that makes Eddie wonder how it got like that. The bird, sitting on the far end of the stage isn’t much worse, but it also isn’t any better. Its beak is full of teeth that Eddie thinks are just a bit too sharp for the mascot of a children’s restaurant, and it wore a bib around its neck displaying the words LET'S EAT, but the words are faded and hard to read underneath several dark, splattered stains on the white fabric. But the worst had to be the bear, Freddy, the face of the business. It's not that Freddy is necessarily scary, but Eddie finds it hard to not get creeped out by those eyes staring back at the camera, eyes that seem a bit too humanlike-

Eddie freezes.

Wait a minute.

Had the bear always been looking into the camera? The rabbit and the chicken are staring out to the room, their metal eyelids shut, and Eddie could have sworn that the bear had been in the exact same position. But even through the static of the camera and the darkness of the dimly-lit building, there was no mistaking it- Freddy is staring at the camera. Staring at him. Eddie tells himself he must have just not been paying attention before, that Freddy had always been looking towards the camera, and Eddie only just noticed now because he was actually looking at them, not just scanning over the pictures of each camera. Yes, that was it.

Eddie stares at Freddy. Freddy stares back. His eyes are open wide, so much so that Eddie can see most of the white of the white ball in the sockets, with the black pupils painted on directly in the center. He knows that they’re nothing more than plastic balls painted to look like eyes, and yet… something about it still makes Eddie feel unsettled. He knows that they’re nothing more than plastic eyes in an animatronic suit, but it still feels like they’re… watching him. It still feels like they can see him.

Eddie starts to turn to Richie to ask if he could remember if Freddy had always been looking to the camera or not, but he quickly catches himself before the words can make it out of his mouth. Surely if Eddie asks a question like that, Richie would make fun of him for the rest of the night. Eddie can already feel the embarrassment burning his cheeks as he imagines Richie’s teasing, “Wait, don’t tell me you actually got scared from that story! Oh man, I really got you!” Eddie shakes his head and lets out a grumbled sigh, unheard by Richie through his blaring music. As much as Eddie would have hated to hear Richie say it, he knows Richie would have been right. Why is he getting so worked up about it? The animatronics don’t move, he was just letting Richie’s stupid story fill his head with an even more stupid idea, and causing himself to uncessarily worry. Eddie is sure he must have just not noticed where Freddy was looking until he started paying attention to it. Eddie turns back to the cameras, ready to switch off from the Show Stage to do another check of the building.

Freddy isn’t looking at the camera.

Freddy, now perfectly in position with the rabbit and the bird on either side of him, is facing the room in front of him, leaving Eddie to stare in shock at the side of his head. Eddie leans forward, getting as close to the monitor as he can to make sure that yes, he’s seeing things right, that yes, Freddy is not looking directly into the camera, he’s looking out in front of him, in fact he’s not looking at all, because his metal eyelids are shut. It almost looks like he’s sleeping.

As Eddie looks at the camera, there’s only one thought in his mind.

What the fuck?

#reddieweek #reddieweek 2023 #reddie #reddie fic #reddie au #reddie fnaf au #it x fnaf #it 2017 #it 2019 #the incredibly niche crossover that satisfies no one but myself lolololol #oh well!!!#actual fic coming tmrw 👍👍

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