Flatting A Page

The role of a comic flatter is to prepare inked pages to be coloured. Some colourists flat their own pages, some hire their own flatters, and some don’t flat their pages at all.

Wait… what’s a flatter?

A flatter works before the colourist, separating the elements of each comic page into “flat” colours. This makes it easy for a colourist to digitally colour specific regions of a page since they can now just use the magic wand tool to quickly select and edit each individual colour.

Flatting can often be a tedious step in the colouring process. Not everyone does it, but if you’re going for a colour-in-the-lines art style (as opposed to something more natural like watercolours), flatting will ultimately save you a ton of time, and help keep your colours looking tight.

Here are some beginner tutorials to get you started on flatting:

There’s even a free course on udemy containing 40 minutes of flatting tutorials.