#the others are mostly flat

[halorvic]

[heartorbit]

🩷💛💚💜

[canarydraws]

Portrait 7/7 ~2.2hrs

Final portrait study is my favorite girl Karlach!

[caesarinsalata]

I didn't think he was so tan and she was so pale until they were in the same piece 👀

Good god

[frittercrittern]

I am feeling entirely normal and nothing is going on at ALL in my brain about this triangle and his horrible awful dimension he is from

[ferronickel]

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.

[fakeoutbf]

five stages of grief but it’s five stages of social anxiety

[sunsetzer]

On one hand, I want a final fantasy 6 remake, because the game is criminally underrated and the amount of fan content (which is all absolutely fantastic btw) is Not Enough for my neurodivergent, hyperfixating brain.

On the other hand, that would inevitably encourage more people to join the fandom, which would be great, except it seems these days the bigger a fandom gets the more toxic it becomes, and I really like what we have going on over here in our little corner. We all just love the game and its characters and nobody fights about who should and shouldn't date who or who you shouldn't like because they're ~problematique~. Nobody's trying to make one ship morally better than another, nobody's calling anyone names or threatening to doxx people who don't agree with their opinions. It's so peaceful and I love that for us. We're just vibing. Moisturized. Unbothered. In our lane. Flourishing.

[shiroselia]

Also for the record can we remember SSE are trying to do textual transgender cookie points with a confirmed afab character as transfemme

(Read: Current Concorde is a girl. Current Concorde is Explicitly said to be AFAB, because she doesn't have balls. SSE also throws out the line about "how a soul isn't defined by a body it's born into")

Basically

By their logic Concorde should be transmasc

And she is VERY MUCH NOT MASC

[of-solitude-past-and-present]

holy shit that scar fic 😨

ITS SO MESSED UP ITS GOOD RHDHDHE

Pls write more scar stuff /nf please never quit writing you ate and cooked with that fic 🙏

hiiii anon *tucks hair behind ear* /hj I'm glad to hear you liked them!!! i actually do happen to have a little something, though it will likely be fairly short, like the other drabbles. here's a hint as to what it's about, though. I'll probably revise it a lot later but this is what I have for now.

Back to the fic... he really is such a menace it's unreal. Usually Scar is very patient and reigns in any impulses that might be dangerous to his plans and ideals. However, when it's something as harmless and inconsequential as you... he doesn't exercise this restraint.

I wrote those after brainrotting abt him to a friend.

for clarity's sake, this third screenshot is talking about the second screenshot.

here are some screenshots of me chatting with a friend about the flavor of nuisance he is. worst man ever invented (positive) I need you guys to see how funny that one drabble is when you separate it from, you know, the horrors. Scar totally gets why you're freaking out, so it doesn't really bother him, but also could you keep it down a little? he's not done telling you about the necessary steps humanity must take to progress human evolution yet :(

that being said, I don't think I'm gonna write longer fics about him until we know more about him and Fractsidus in general. I need them to give us more scar scenes. he has such a chokehold on me he's become my absolute wuwa fave with 0 competition.

Oh, and! The insert in that fic is a civilian, but I think it would be difficult for Scar to fall for one. The easiest way would probably to be a sort of contrarian; he's interested in new and unusual perspectives, especially as someone who has a number of them himself. Another hurdle is in what scenario would you reasonably meet Scar and still be able to go about your daily life as usual? See him doing his Fractsidus duties, and he would probably just kill you... what would he be doing chilling out in a city, in the open.... I could totally come up with something, but I'm putting it off until kuro gives us more Scar and Fractsidus crumbs.

[sysig]

Clash of sensibilities (Patreon)

[inquisitor-julia]

Iggy, my large hermit crab, on any given day: I *hate* you and I am prepared to pinch you at all times for any reason!!! I will run to a corner when you enter the room bc you are big and scary!!

Iggy when I break out the catappa leaves: LEAF??? MOTHER HAS PROVIDED LEAF???? I LIKE LEAF SLIGHTLY MORE THAN I HATE MOTHER!

[merlinmerlot]

I could play one of the most beautiful well crafted video games on the planet and it will never be as appealing to me as one that kind of sucks shit but has soooo much potential

[phoenix-clan]

finished a little bit more work on 5, then immediately went on to work on this very quick mockup of the territories in inkarnate

check my tags for information on the territories and their inhabitants :)

[doyouknowthisjewishcharacter]

Do you know this Jewish character?

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

this alone will ensure america's power and prosperity for centuries to come.