Once upon a time before Adobe Photoshop, the color palette of comic books was very limited. Instead of the millions of colors that you can blend and gradiate and add filters to, there was a time where you were limited to 64 colors on average (that number is liquid if you’re a nerd about the printing process. In fact, this blog entry is completely inspired by Frank Santoro’s collected archive of such minutia. http://www.tcj.com/intermission/).
The main complaint I hear from pretty much everybody with good taste, is that there is a total abuse of color and computer effects that is committed in most comics. Take a look at nearly any mainstream book and you will see the atrocity. Stand 10 feet way from a rack of comics and tell me if you can make out any particular focal points on any of the covers. Toward the bottom of this link, Gene Fama illustrates of few great comparisons of “good” color and “bad” color.
Anyhow, the color work that I’ve always responded to positively seems to share the similarities of operating within a select palette of color. With this sparse set of colors, the artist is forced to be pretty inventive and has to put some thought into his choices. The mind isn’t boggled by the “candy bowl” effect of seeing too much information at once. This goes without saying, but a consistent palette also creates a cohesion throughout an entire work which helps to pull the story together as one unit ( I have seen comics where The Hulk was 10 different shades of green throughout).
It wasn’t hard to find this old 64 color guide through some Google searching. (Thanks to CO2 Comics for posting it originally.)
So I decided to put together a photoshop version based on these values so that you don’t have to. The image below is just a RGB jpeg example and shouldn’t be used when doing your own color work. Under the swatch image below is a link to a Zip archive that contains the CMYK PSD file with all of the correct color mixtures. I also included a pretty transparent layer of 100% yellow that you can turn on and play with the opacity to make sure that all the colors work better together in a pleasing way, similar to the underpainted effect those old comics have now with their yellowish-orange, aged newsprint.
You can click the image or the link below to get the ZIP file with the color chart.
Fantastic, sir. Thank you very much.
This is great! Thanks for sharing
Thanks for doing this, man.
Amazing! I created a file just like this 6 or 7 months ago with that same chart (Yours looks much better BTW) I also created one with an old comico (I think) color chart that I found online.
You really can’t beat the look of those old color separations. Thanks for putting this together!
Really enjoying wizzywig got the first 3 volumes last year at heroes con. Didn’t realize it was continued online. I’ll have to catch up.
Really wonderful. I so totally agree about the horrid state of comics coloring.
I’ve used an old DC chart I found somewhere but after scanning etc. it was a bit off. (Seemed dark.) This is much better. Thanks!
Now that is very useful. I’ve had an older and rougher version for a while, but this seems much better. Thanks.
I created a Photoshop CMYK palette a couple of years ago based on the principle but not the exact colours. This reminded me to put it online for D/L, on my website.
This is awesome! I’ve wanted something like this for a long time, but never took the time to make one. Thanks for doing all the hard work.
Thanks for this! I actually used the old version of the color chart that you are reposting to color ‘Black Dynamite’ for Ape and I could really appreciate how difficult and interesting it was to color with that kind of palette. I think I’ll be using your color chart for some personal project.
Thank you very much, Ed! I’ve wanted this for a long time but hadn’t had the chance to make one myself. You’ve saved me a lot of work, and I owe you a sandwich.
Thanks for this, Ed! So many times I’ve lamented on the fall of the glory days of color before the digital age. Those lines of new comics on the stands all sort of melt together in an over-polished, hyper-toned glob. Pick up a vintage Sunday comic strip newspaper section and you’ll notice that every strip has some appeal because the color has a personality of its own. My hat is off to those color strippers back in the day, theirs was more of an artform than I think we give them credit for.
You da man!
For most of the 1960s, DC did not have the 25% and 50% shades of yellow, giving them only half the tones shown on the chart. That’s why Marvel’s coloring looked so much better. Eventually, DC started using the shades of yellow, and from then on, their coloring had the same number of tones as Marvel. I remember enjoying DC’s late 1960s reprint books much more than the originals, because the color was so much better than the originals.
I tend not to use colours for the very reason that there are far too many possible combinations. It’s wicked daunting for someone like me who not only prefers the look of black & white, but doesn’t know where to start when it comes to colouring. So this post has been indispensable! I’ve downloaded the zip file and I can’t wait to fiddle around with my comics and see what I come up with.
How wonderful! Thank you!!
Great stuff! color mixing itself is something we artist can now do our self in this digital age. Over whelmed by different colors and effects can sometime trick my eyes until i see it printed.
Thanks for the color chart, this is extremely useful.
I have a story that I’m publishing* that I wanted to have a Golden-Age naïvete to it, so I told my colorist do it as much as he could in bright primaries and secondaries. Ouf of curiosity I just downloaded this file and tried to redo a couple pages in this authentic palette, and got totally stuck when I tried to color the Latino kid’s skin. There was NOTHING that didn’t look horrid. And if I’d been looking for an African skin tone… forget it. While I recognize the aesthetic value of a restricted palette: this one had serious problems.
*shameless plug: CaptainMiracle.com
@Jason, You don’t even want to know how asian peeps were colored in these old comics.
I was very curious about finding a chart like this a year ago after reading that article on DC’s colouring department. I ended up creating my own which I have recently put to use as my blog header
I don’t know if anyone would find this helpful: it’s an article called “How To Color Comics The Marvel Way” that I scanned from an old Marvel Age comic from 1984 (© & ™!). It had the old color chart in it… I actually cut it out and hung it up in my locker in high school.
Link is here: http://goo.gl/7rUst
I did some comics-coloring for Marvel and ahem some covers for SCREW Magazine and you pretty much had to memorize this chart. But ever since I can analyze any color and give you the percentages.
Great stuff Ed and wonderful comments. Zip, Thanks for the great link!
@Zip Martini: Another indispensable read! Thanks very very much.
Sorry for spamming the comments like this, but I just did a thing I believe most of you guys will appreciate.
I took the time this morning to create a Photoshop swatch from the colour chart Ed posted. Each quadrant (from No Yellow to 100 Yellow) conveniently takes up one row each, making four rows and 64 colours. I’ve kept the RGB and CMYK Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta, as well as the White-Black gradient on the top two rows for the sake of uniformity.
Right-click and Save As: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23208095/Silver%20Age%20Colour%20Chart.aco
Nice. Thx,
Ze
I don’t want to be a party-pooper but there’s a conceptual flaw in a lot of the responses to this, where readers are whipping up color charts of their own or even scanning this one.
The entire point of this color chart is that it was printed on the same sort of paper by the same sort of press that the artist referring to it was going to have to use. Otherwise, it’s not of much use. Screen proofing, reprinting with your own printer, none of this really will match the color builds on the chart.
I’ve done a lot of color pre-press and this particular idea is still very prevalent. Color charts only work for the paper/press they were done on originally. That’s the entire point of doing them.
This is awesome. Thanks Ed, I took your colors and created a Adobe Photoshop. ACO Palette. They are available through Pseudo Press here:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pseudo-Press/150589605001399
Thank you! Please enjoy!
Btw I think the color chart/palette is just a way to get some new colors to experiment with. I don’t think any us are trying to reproduce the printing with 100% accuracy. We will use the colors for whatever, if they look good- they are good.
Thank you very much, sir.
I have a project in mind, and I want it to look like the books of my youth. I’ll probably use Photoshop’s color halftone filter to recreate the old dot patterns from the printing of the time.
Some of Gulacy’s old Master of Kung Fu books in the 70s were colored by Janice Cohen. That person was where I noticed differences between color artists as Cohen was not coloring things a single flat color but using highlight and shadow colors on faces along with multiple colors in the skies and lakes as artists do now. A very unappreciated, unsung profession that took just as much work and time as the other disciplines. Other good colorists off the cuff were Max (Christie) Scheele, Lynn Varley, Petra G., George Roussos, Mazzuchelli on DD#228 Purgatory, Les Dorscheid on Badger.
Noelle Giddings, Julia Lacquement, Marie Severin were a couple of other good color artists.
Back then, few females worked in the male-dominated comic-book field, but those few that I’m aware of were terrific color artists.