#below minimum wage

[chloesimaginationthings]

I love this about your art

Michael + Vanessa Afton: 😃

Vanny + Mike 😐

The Afton’s are just an emotional bunch

[somecunttookmyurl]

every time R comes to clean i give her extra money (she asks for £11/h, she gets 11.50-12.50 kind of dependent on my exact change situation but always at least 11.50) and she argues her rate is £11 and tries to give me change and it's like ok minimum wage is 11.44 i literally cannot pay you less than that and at that point you might as well round up to 11.50 but also. i am a white woman hiring a black woman to clean my house. stop asking for slave wages. girl.

[ferronickel]

Hail, flatter! This one, who is a layperson of the arts and comixcraft, has a query for you:

So like, what is flatting?

I've seen your flats in Wifwulf, and I've read about the flats in Looking Glasses, and generally get that it results in an image with similarly coloured areas sharing the same false-colour.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this? Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones? How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

Thank you! I come in the spirit of humility wishing to relieve my ignorance of your noble craft!

OHOHOHO!!! You've activated my trap card and now I get to ramble about comics craft! And in my area of professional expertise, too! Be prepared for a long post

I'm going to start with the last part of your question:

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

So the thing about comics is that it is one of the most intensely time consuming mediums to create. One person can make comics on their own fairly easily, but it takes forever to produce. Consider that I've been working on Looking Glasses for 18-19 months and have drawn about 87 pages. Now, the western comics industry expects issues to be produced monthly, generally 24 pages in length. It's very difficult for a single person to work at this rate, so the labor of producing comics has been divided. Generally these jobs become:

Writer (writes the script)

Editor (edits the script)

Artist (draws the lineart)

Colorist (colors and renders the art)

Letterer (adds balloons, dialog, and sfx)

Flatter (sometimes 'color assistant' they take the art and prepare it for coloring)

This isn't comprehensive though, there are a bunch of other jobs, like designers and layout artists. Occasionally the artist job gets broken into Pencilers (who sketch the art) and Inkers (who ink the sketch). Basically, by splitting the work amongst a number of people you can produce comics much faster. Not all of these jobs are required, and creator-owed books might have artists do their own coloring and lettering, while big work-for-hire books might have twice as many people working so they can pump out a spider-man book every other week.

Okay, so why Flatters?

Flatting at it's most basic level is just coloring inside the lines. You take a black and white page of art, and you have to fill in every part of the page that will eventually be colored. It's a pretty time consuming task depending on how involved your lineart is.

Flatting a page of Looking Glasses doesn't take me all that long, usually less than a half hour, which is pretty quick. Looking Glasses pages tend to be... optimized for flatting though. There are only ever a few characters and there aren't a ton of background details.

You mentioned Wifwulf (created by my longtime friend and collaborator Dailen Ogden), here's one of it's pages:

Basically everything that's a different base color, (every tree, plant, bit of moss, character, etc.) needed to be picked out separately. Each page of Wifwulf took me a few hours to flat. If Dailen had been doing that themself, those hours would have really added up, but instead they could spend that time drawing and coloring. Now, that said, these pages have a lot of texture, so it's hard to see exactly what I did.

Here's an example from a comic I worked on early in my career. (Lineart by Patrick Custodio)

The writer for this comic loved to put in these incredibly complex crowd scenes, which is something the artist excelled at drawing. I was coloring and flatting at this point on the book, and before I could even start coloring properly, I would need to flat for like eight hours. (I have a much more efficient method these days) It was frustrating because I just wanted to work on the actually creative part, but the majority of my time was spent on something monotonous. As soon as I got the writer to hire a flatter for me, coloring a page would take me only one or two hours, not nine or ten.

So that's why flatters exist, mainly to ease the workload on colorists.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this?

Flatting serves a couple of purposes. It's main function, like I said above, is just coloring in the lines. After finishing your lineart it has to get colored in, so in a layer below the lines, you add colors.

The secondary function is preservation. I like to work in a way that is non-destructive, basically, at any point in the process I can restore an earlier version of the drawing if I make a mistake or don't like something. Flats are integral to this.

In digital art, there's this thing called anti-aliasing, where the edges of a line or shape have a drop off of pixel color or opacity. It makes the edges look smoother or blurrier. The three dots on the left are Anti-Aliased, while the one on the right is Aliased, there's no drop off, just hard pixels.

Anti-aliasing is fine until you need to change the color using the paint bucket, or select using the magic wand...

See how the anti-aliased art doesn't play well with these tools, but the aliased art does? So with something like Wifwulf, the final art is going to be full of texture that makes it impossible to select anything again once it's painted. By having a dedicated aliased flats layer under the rest of the artwork, you can always re-select any part of the image you want.

I always leave my flats layer alone, and do any detail work in layers above. For example when I was painting this, it really helped to be able to select just the titan so I could work on those paints without worrying about brushstrokes overlapping the rest of the characters.

One of the other things you can do with flats is quickly selecting certain elements. On most pages, I flat my panels, figures, and background elements separately. Later, with a single button press, I can select just the characters in the scene, or entire panels at a time, which makes things like shading a whole lot easier.

Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones?

If you're flatting for other people you often don't know what the final colors are going to be, so you just pick random ones. Garish colors can be helpful because it makes it obvious that they're not the final colors. Why don't I use the correct colors on my own pages when I'm flatting? Habit, mostly. It's also faster to grab random colors than to track down the correct ones. Sometimes two different things will have the same final color but I like to flat them with different colors so I can select them individually if I need to.

You can see the process a bit here. In my flats, Lancer's spade (eye? eyes? thing) is a different color from his tongue, even if they end up being the same white in the final image. This would help if I ever needed to select just his eyes for some reason. You can also see how I select his body fur color and then add details on top, like his colored fingers and the grey on his arm. Those elements have blurry anti-aliased edges, and it would be impossible to re-select them without flats.

How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

I use the default "additional color set" palette in clip studio and just work my way through it. I pick row and work my way down (for a change of pace I vary which row I start with). How many is mostly dependent on the artwork. You just keep going until you run out of individual objects to color. I have worked on pages where I've run out of colors on this palette and had to start making up more. Typically a page of Looking Glasses only needs around 20-30, though.

So! That's flatting! It's a little known job, and it's how I got started with my comics career, so I have a lot of thoughts on it. I was trying to be concise (lol), so I hope this all makes sense, but I'd be happy to clarify or answer any other questions about this process. I know I didn't really go into how I flat my work, so I can make that post if anyone is interested.

[lesbianhallieparker]

You guys i can’t believe I’m going to be unionized 😭 and will have almost free healthcare 😭 and will be working for people who want me to take a leadership role in creating/carving out new curriculum/programs

[murderballadeer]

born to sew cute clothes for myself & others, forced to sew 5 identical pairs of elastic waist pants in 5 different sizes

[finnlongman]

if you don't mind sharing, how much do you make from your books/articles?

From my articles, absolutely nothing. Academic publishing doesn't really pay. Well, I did win a prize for the seven Maines article, so I got £200 for that, but a prize is not really the same thing as earning money for it, and my other articles (both published and currently in progress) have all been done for free.

The general idea with academic publishing is, I think, that you will do your research as part of your salaried academic job and publish as part of your contribution to your university's research community. Which is all very well if you have a salaried academic job, but for the rest of us, means you spend a lot of time working for free in pursuit of knowledge. 🤷🏻 It's a broken system but it's what we've got. It's one of the reasons I do my best to make my articles available open-access when I can, because if I'm not getting paid for them, why should anyone else have to pay to read them? I didn't do all that free work to hide them from the people who'd benefit most from them!

As for my fiction, the maths is a little complex due to how advances are structured (and because my first two books were jointly accounted, so I got part of the advance for both of them together, whereas my third book was a separate contract), but roughly it works out at a little over £10k/yr so far. This is, evidently, not a living wage by any stretch of the imagination, which is why I also have a day job, and am actively pursuing multiple genres/writing opportunities to try and increase this number.

The median income for a primary-occupation author in the UK is £7.5k/yr, so by that metric, I'm doing pretty well. Unfortunately, the bar is on the floor. If you want a lucrative job, I cannot recommend either independent scholarship or writing YA fiction, sorry.

This is also why I laugh hysterically and then cry for a while when people make statements about authors being rich, because most of us are earning way below minimum wage even if we're lucky enough to get published. Woohoo, capitalism!

[totallyseiso]

In Australia you get paid extra for working on a sunday. Minimum wage for someone my age on casual hours when working a sunday is something like $43 an hour. My bosses had some legal bullshit that allowed them to pay me a bit less at like $37 an hour for sundays. So the whole time I've been here I've been getting underpaid. The courts have informed them that they're no longer allowed to do that and now they have to pay me the actual minimum wage on sundays.

I've been informed that I will no longer be working weekends, unless I agree to become full time or part time, which would mean getting paid even less than I already was. Which they claim would be better because I would get holidays and sick days... they also give you the lowest amount of those they can legally get away with.

Man, I fucking hate small business owners

[sensivs]

YUKI WAS WAY TOO FLAT IN THE ANIME!!! I WANT EVERYBODY WHO ANIMATED YUKIS ASS SCENE TO BE EXECUTED THIS INSTANT

[familyabolisher]

job search is going well

[glitch-h]

Today i found out a previous employer was investigated for unsafe labor practices and underpaying employees for the better part of a decade and they owe me some damn money... I KNEW I WASNT CRAZY AND THEY WERE TREATING US ALL LIKE SHIT

[happyendingsong]

just got fired over the phone babes

[rapha-reads]

Remember how I was a whooping THREE (3) minutes late for work yesterday? Which didn't impact my work at all, I did my job, everyone was satisfied and all? Well my bosses sent me a mail asking me to come to their office next week so we can "reinforce some dynamics in regards to punctuality".

LIKE HELL I WILL.

Three minutes late EXCEPTIONALLY - I don't make a habit of being late - and it did NOT impact the quality of my job, so you know what, I'm going to involve my union rep and let them deal with them, because y'all do not pay me enough to care.

I am extremely pissed off, I have a tension headache and my eyes hurt too, I haven't eaten much since yesterday and I am, as always, all out of fucks to give. They have no idea who they're trying to mess with.

[c4tto626]

hmm as much as i enjoy not having to work as much lately, getting paid 25% less sure fucking sucks hm

[spacedoutsheepy]

living in an expensive ass city is just realizing that shoplifting is good and cool, actually

[sigritandtheelves]

news flash: water is wet

[deepinthedirt]

Man. I am counting down the days until I can quit my current job. This company violates sooooo many labor laws.