By Mark Sweeney: Master of Flats

Here's my quickie flatting tutorial. At some point down the road I will post another tutorial featuring advanced flatting tips and tricks.

If you don't already know what flats are, or what they're used for, you've come to the right place.

A Flat color is a color that is solid - no gradient, shading, highlights, shadows, etc.

Flats are a page with lineart that has all the details filled with FLAT colors. Sounds simple enough, eh? What are they good for? Read on and find out.

Flatting a page first means you've already pre-selected everything on the page. You won't have to use the Lasso Tool to manually select all of Bat-Dude's cape, or Duperman's boot's every time you want to change them.

Once a page is flatted, you can quickly change the colors on a page using the bucket tool. Choosing the right colors, you can make a page moody, dramatic, eerie, somber or whatever suits the page. If you're flatting a page for someone else, you don't have to worry about making the colors accurate, or exact.

As a matter of fact, one colorist told me "You can color each page in shades of pink for all I care."

At the end of the tutorial, I'll explain more about how the flats can be used to speed up rendering time.

This is a page from Witchblade that I'm re-doing, since the my original was lost when my hard drive bought the farm.

The first thing I do is make sure all my tools have the proper setting.

Lasso - no feather, Anti-alising OFF.

Bucket tool - Set to foreground color, NORMAL mode, 100% Opacity, Tolerance = 0, and Anti-Aliasing turned OFF.