We are fast approaching the deadline for
Creatures and Monsters (aka: The Hellbound IV Anthology) to make everyone work on creating their amazing pages one of our editors Bob Flynn has created this very detail guide and helpful color samples. Please read our careful description under this sample image and let us know by commenting on
Submission Guide if you have any questions and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Attached is a coloring guide with templates and color samples to help you prepare your comic for the risograph printing process. The primary thing to keep in mind here is you will need to deliver an art file for both the blue and orange colors. This can be done in a single Photoshop using spot colors, or by saving out a grayscale TIF for each color.
[ 6.5 x 5 nobleed_template.psd and
6.5 x 5 bleed_template.psd ]These files should help you size and prepare your comic. Ideally, you could color directly in this file. Most of you will want to use blue for your line (because it's the darker color), so you can paste your linework right into the blue channel to start. And you can easily color in any orange or additional blue shades right in the channels as well (on a grayscale range of 0 to 100).
[ color_overlays.psd ]Using multiply, this is a better approximation of what the colors will print like compared to what color channels in Photoshop show for overlap. Remember the inks are transparent. You probably won't get as rich a dark green as you see in this file (100% blue + 100% orange).
[ color_palletesamples.psd ]This includes a handful of honest swatches taken from the print sample (also included)
[ spotcolor_sample.psd ]This file show examples of applying color in a variety of ways. We don't recommend mixing the two colors for line-art because the registration won't guarantee that level of printing accuracy. Best to stick with either blue or orange for line, but feel free to get creative with mixing colors or playing with halftones for solid shape areas. Also, as a coloring trick, you can temporarily duplicate a color channel (say, blue), to keep your line separate from addition blue fills you want to paint in, but you'll want to merge them in the end. (TIP: to merge two blue channels, simply copy them into a new grayscale file on layers, set them to multiply, flatten the file, copy it, and paste it back into your blue channel.)
[ firstlastname_pg1_blue.tif and firstlastname_pg1_orange.tif ]
This is how your files should look before you sent them to us for submission.
[ print_sample.jpg ]
This file is a scan of how the printed pages look on paper, this is just an example and results may vary.
