I was looking at some cartoon color schemes when I discovered that the old-style comic books had a fixed palette of about 60 colors that they could use, due to printing limitations, and I thought it might be interesting to colorize my Poser toon renders using that fixed palette. I wanted to do something like they way animation cels are painted on the back, so I thought I'd make the B&W render as the top layer, and paint my colors on layers below that.

The problem is that making the B&W render transparent turns the sharp black into wishy-washy grey and makes the colors look milky and watered down. So I really needed the B&W outline to be transparent where the white is. But that removed all the shades of grey. So Here's what I came up with. I used Paintshop Pro to turn the B&W version of the color render into a halftone layer. Then I posterized that halftone layer to remove the anti-alias edges around the halftone dots. That way I had pure black dots and clean transparent spaces between the dots for the color to show through undiluted.

Then I painted each object in the image on a different layer, leaving the floor and background to the very bottom layer so the higher layers would cover up the background, and the top B&W layer would giver me crisp black over the top of everything. I could be as sloppy as I wanted on each paint layer, because then I would go around the edges cleaning it up with the eraser tool. Then I'd lock that layer and create another layer beneath it for the next object to be colored. The pants layer was below the sweater layer, so any sloppiness on coloring the pants was covered up by the sweater where it met the pants.

Here's the result of my first experiment with that method, using colors from the standard print comics palette, and letting the halftone dots provide the shading:

Looks nice.

Very Nice. I like that a lot!

Thanks to Boni and geep for the comments.

For anyone interested in old-style comic book coloring, here's good article about it that includes an image of the standard comic book color palette.

Oh, and what's interesting about this coloring technique is that it remains crisp and clear when reduced way down in size, like when I might want to make it a small panel on a full comic page:

That is a great point and a lot of comic artists will appreciate that.

And even teeny-tiny:

Most of the time when people are doing things like this, I tend to think: oh, he's just trying to reinvent the wheel. But this actually does look like the printed comic pages from the newspaper! It looks like you did your research.

Top black and white line layer properties: multiply. See end of this video Preview Toon Line Technique

You might also be interested in various filters or posterization techniques in your image editor, combined with scripted actions to streamline your workflow. There's many filters and plug ins that emulate 4 color comics printing process. I use Snap Art and Toon It for photoshop. You can quickly vary the Ben Day dots size, color, and spacing with these filters, allowing for some interesting Pop Art or old comics optical mixing effects... Ben-Day dots

... I guess my point is, you can simplify your workflow (important with a high output requirement like comics) with a few different plug ins that will yield identical results. I don't use PSP (I use Corel Painter and Photoshop), so I'm not aware of plug in availability for that software. I'd be really surprised if plug in developers haven't created similar for PSP though.

EldritchCellar posted at 7:54PM Thu, 01 October 2015 - #4231896

Top black and white line layer properties: multiply. See end of this video Preview Toon Line Technique

Thanks for those suggestions. I knew about multiply, but for some reason I didn't think of using it in this application. Doh!

I'm not actually using Ben Day. It's more like a transparent watercolor wash on an ink drawing, except that the ink layer has B&W halftone dots for grey shades. The colors are solid, rather than Ben Day. (Paintshop Pro also has Ben Day tools, but I stuck with greyscale images for my experiments.)

As far as work flow, this is a hobby, so I'm not worried about efficiency. I'd rather fiddle with image and make adjustments by hand till I get just the look I want. I'm also exploring using B&W cross hatching instead of halftone dots to see what that looks like. (No images to post yet. Still exploring)

Interesting. I've been trying out different ways to get that exact effect. I shared this post on our Facebook page as well.

Kendra posted at 3:56PM Fri, 02 October 2015 - #4232003

Interesting. I've been trying out different ways to get that exact effect. I shared this post on our Facebook page as well.

Thanks. As for the 63 colors (not counting black and white) that vintage comics used, here's a chart from DePaul.edu

Y means 100% yellow ink, Y2 means 20% yellow ink, and Y3 means 50% yellow ink. Same for R (red ink) and B (blue ink). The percentages refer to the halftone dot density for that color of ink, since the ink itself was always 100% strength. For example, Y2RB (deep purple-blue) was made up of yellow on a 20% dense halftone, plus both red and blue on a solid, no-halftones, plate. Combining those three inks in that proportion resulted in the deep purple-blue.

fiziwig2 posted at 10:10PM Fri, 02 October 2015 - #4232006

Kendra posted at 3:56PM Fri, 02 October 2015 - #4232003

Interesting. I've been trying out different ways to get that exact effect. I shared this post on our Facebook page as well.

Thanks. As for the 63 colors (not counting black and white) that vintage comics used, here's a chart from DePaul.edu

Y means 100% yellow ink, Y2 means 20% yellow ink, and Y3 means 50% yellow ink. Same for R (red ink) and B (blue ink). The percentages refer to the halftone dot density for that color of ink, since the ink itself was always 100% strength. For example, Y2RB (deep purple-blue) was made up of yellow on a 20% dense halftone, plus both red and blue on a solid, no-halftones, plate. Combining those three inks in that proportion resulted in the deep purple-blue.

Sigh....I still have my Doc Martin Watercolors..... And then that pesky Adobe Photoshop came along....

"Sigh....I still have my Doc Martin Watercolors..... And then that pesky Adobe Photoshop came along...."

Ironic words to hear on a forum dedicated to Poser. Just scan your painted work, then you have the best of both worlds, there's alot of artists who do so. Can't really get by without some kind of image editor, just the nature of mass communication and printing nowadays. Here's an ancient history comic horror image I did using india ink, pantone markers, and a little bit of Doctor Martin's concentrated watercolors. Problems with original artwork using traditional media are lightfastness (which the concentrated watercolors aren't) and worrying about acid discoloration of the paper over time. I keep this image in an archival box separated from other works with layers of glassine and it still looks about the same as when it was made about 25 years ago. I really only step away from digital coloring if I'm doing ceramic glazing (which is utterly impervious to light and aging) or acrylic painting (where most colors are lightfast, or marked otherwise) and there's uv inhibiting varnishes. Photoshop is awesome, and its use is only as automated as you want it to be. Mainstream comics went over to digital media for coloring and lettering more than 20 years ago I guess, for the most part. Anyway, just being conversational...