Using Ai to make colour flats... Don’t!

The colour scheme I finally went with.

I thought I would do a bit of colouring as it’s been a lot of black and white drawing recently.

Having not done computer colouring for awhile the thought of making colour flats to isolate different planes always fills me with dread. It’s a very tedious process.

I had a thought. Can I use CoPilot Ai to auto colour the colour flats for my work? This seems what CoPilot is built for,  taking the drudgery out of the comic colouring process. Other Ai’s are available but for this I went for Microsoft CoPilot. It seemed the most accessible. Gemini  would have been my second choice.

I started by writing a short prompt, basically asking politely what it is I want it to do. And uploaded a version of the drawing I wanted  the colour flats for. Most artwork for print will be 300dpi or more. for example this page I am working on at he moment (page 5) is A3 size at 300 dpi.

With hindsight, my prompt could have been a bit more detailed but I went with...

“Using my  attached drawing, can you create flat areas of colour for foreground (blue), midground (teal) and background (cream) layers.”

Two versions, each slightly different but usable.

Having used CoPilot in the past (see this post from Sept 2024) telling it to generate a specific size never works and seems to be capped at 1024px x 1024px. I don’t know if  the paid for subscriptions allow for higher resolutions or if it’s a data centre ‘that’s all we can cope with’ issue.

For some reason CoPilot started to generate multiple versions. It gave up while creating version three: I’m sorry, I’m having trouble responding to requests right now. Let’s try this in a bit.—

The original prompt, then it got tired and gave up.

I did give it another go 'in a bit', but wasn’t happy with the results at all. It felt flat and and for me, the colouring did no visual storytelling, was lo-res and not suitable.

Another attempt but too generic.

So this is the problem. The output is small and has to be resized. Not a big problem as I am only using this for the colour flats below the main colour. But the proportion is off too. Which means I still had to go around the edges of the characters and tidy up enough of it to work. Exactly what I was tryin to avoid.

Scaling, proportion and areas that don't align.

Did it save me any time. Did it take the drudgery out of colouring. Would I try it again. No, not really. It was  a fun exercise and the thought of colour flats being produced at the click of a button was exciting until it wasn't. Maybe human drudgery is part of the process.

Alternate colour version

Having done this in the past I appreciate how difficult it is so thank you CoPilot for all your flat colouring effort. Comic colouring is not for you and I think you would be better employed in an office, rewriting job descriptions. Nothing personal.