Click on the image for a better view of the side-by-side comparison
I was looking through some old files and I found this from 2006. This is a great example of why Guy Davis is such a great artist and a great collaborator. A lot of artists may have a specific idea of how they want the colors to look like on a page. Most send along some notes on what they are thinking, but often they seem vague and confusing. Guy, however, would send along a diagram for every page. Many didn’t have quite this many notes on it, but this is a good example of the type of things he pointed out.
You can see here that Guy points out specific local colors, lighting, identifying visual elements so I don’t get confused, etc. Now, a lot of this I probably could have picked up from the visual cues such as the back-lighting in panel 6, but this takes out a lot of the guesswork. Also, he never went overboard and took away my creative license as a colorist. He still allowed me to put my stamp on book. This was a perfect medium, I knew what specific things he wanted yet he never treated me as a mindless color zombie.
Perhaps some colorists wouldn’t appreciate getting a diagram like this for every page, but I loved it. This took away a lot of guesswork and cut down on much of the corrections I would have to do afterwards. I’m not saying every artist should make diagrams like this for the colorists they’re working with (though some may benefit from it). I’m only saying that Guy is a master at being able to communicate his ideas with his collaborators and that’s often an underdeveloped skill amongst many comic pros.
