Help with values - New to all this 1 1

[Customx12]

Hello,

I'm not even sure if this is the sort of stuff this forum is interested in but I have some production art from the 80’s comic Avengelyne and an old anime comic called Project A-ko. 

They’re drawings of some pages with notes in the margins that talk about which colors to use and where to add more. I also have some multilayered plastic sheet things for the cover of another comic but I can’t recall for which one (I have this stuff in a box somewhere and would have to dig it out).

is that the kind of stuff this forum is for? If so, is it of much value and/or would people like to see photos?

Thanks for your time.

[Will_K]

Pics would be helpful.  In general, production art has minimal value.  But it seems like these are niche characters / titles, so you'd probably find someone with interest but not willing to spend big bucks.

[Customx12]

Ok, I’ll try to find where I put them. They’re in one box of many in the garage but I’ll see what I can do.

Bummer to hear about minimum value for production art. I’m sure if they were from a major comic book or something, they’d have more but I didn’t even know what these were when I bought them. I got the whole pile for about $10 so at least I’m not in them for too much.

[tth2]

Do a search in Heritage's archives for auctions of production art, color guides, etc.  They sell a lot of the stuff, so you should be able to get a sense of their market value there.

[Customx12]

Sorry it took so long but I finally found them. Here are pics. Thank you

 

[Customx12]

Oh and I took front and back photos of a couple near the end so you can see they’re original with the ink bleeding through. 

[Customx12]

Any guesses on value?

[malvin]

Sorry, my gut says they are not worth a lot of money.

Colour guide tend to go in tens of dollars max.  If any of them were colour guides to highly desirable pages (e.g. the original art page would sell in the tens of thousands) then the colour guides would be more.  But at a glance, I didn't see any highly desirable pages.

It's still neat to have regardless.

Malvin

[Customx12]

On 10/25/2022 at 1:25 PM, malvin said:

Sorry, my gut says they are not worth a lot of money.

Colour guide tend to go in tens of dollars max.  If any of them were colour guides to highly desirable pages (e.g. the original art page would sell in the tens of thousands) then the colour guides would be more.  But at a glance, I didn't see any highly desirable pages.

It's still neat to have regardless.

Malvin

Thank you. What about the ones on paper that appear to be hand painted/colored?

[malvin]

On 10/25/2022 at 3:54 PM, Customx12 said:

Thank you. What about the ones on paper that appear to be hand painted/colored?

The same comment applies.  Those are colour guides, where the original art is photocopied and the colourist either colours directly on it or adds notations for the printer so they know what colours to use.  They tend to only go for the tens of dollars max.

Malvin

[thehumantorch]

On 10/25/2022 at 4:54 PM, Customx12 said:

Thank you. What about the ones on paper that appear to be hand painted/colored?

TTH2 gave you excellent advice.  Google Heritage Auctions, create a free account, and search their extensive auction history.  A search there for "color guides" yields over 800 past auctions.  That should help you value your pages.

 

[Customx12]

Alright, thanks everyone. Don’t be surprised if you see these on eBay in the near future

[Customx12]

Sorry to be redundant but the paper ones and the plastic material ones are both color guides, right?

[malvin]

On 10/25/2022 at 7:20 PM, Customx12 said:

Sorry to be redundant but the paper ones and the plastic material ones are both color guides, right?

The paper ones are colour guides.  The plastic ones harder to tell, they might be more colour proofs with no hand coloured elements

Malvin

[Customx12]

On 10/25/2022 at 7:21 PM, malvin said:

The paper ones are colour guides.  The plastic ones harder to tell, they might be more colour proofs with no hand coloured elements

Malvin

Awesome, thank you for your help!

[Dr. Balls]

On 10/25/2022 at 8:20 PM, Customx12 said:

Sorry to be redundant but the paper ones and the plastic material ones are both color guides, right?

Back in the WAY olden days of offset printing, you would hand-color xerox copies of artwork and the colorist would interpret those "color guides" to create the color separations, which would be photographed and turned into their respective color plates. I think the paper pieces you have were probably created for the digital colorist to use as a guide since the 90's saw the advent of digital coloring.

The ones on acetate material were referred to (back in the 90's) as a match-print (there were a few different names for it). They would expose each of the printing plates (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) onto a separate piece of film, then overlay them together and mark out corrections that needed to be made before production. Offset printing was a time-intensive process back then, and you wanted to minimize any errors or problems before it ended up on press - otherwise starting over was expensive. Reprinting four color plates after corrections was much cheaper than setting up the press and finding problems there. Plus, printing companies scheduled press time, so when it was your time on the press, you didn't want any problems that would require you to reschedule - because it would have likely been a days-long delay that affected not only the printing schedule, but bindery as well.

As the 90's progressed, there was a specific brand name of match-prints that revolutionized the proofing process, as you could replicate each of the printing plates accurately all on one piece of paper or acetate. I never saw this first-hand, but saw plenty of proofs from it and it was much more accurate in color than the old match-print overlays. It looks like you have a few of those.

Color guides are kind of the catch-all terminology since there are many types of methods to produce color proofs and it spans many decades of printing methods from traditional to digital production.

Offset printing was an art-form that the digital age eradicated. I was only in it for a few years in the early 90s before digital imaging and plate-setters became affordable to most printers by the late 90s. Advancements in color proofing throughout the 2000s really helped dial everything in. It's utterly amazing how easy and skill-less it is to actually produce a printed piece nowadays, where only 30 years ago, it required 4-5 professionally skilled people to perform different tasks to produce a comic book.

What you have there isn't valuable as much as it's a cool piece of comic history.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Dr. Balls

[Customx12]

On 10/26/2022 at 11:28 AM, Dr. Balls said:

Back in the WAY olden days of offset printing, you would hand-color xerox copies of artwork and the colorist would interpret those "color guides" to create the color separations, which would be photographed and turned into their respective color plates. I think the paper pieces you have were probably created for the digital colorist to use as a guide since the 90's saw the advent of digital coloring.

The ones on acetate material were referred to (back in the 90's) as a match-print (there were a few different names for it). They would expose each of the printing plates (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) onto a separate piece of film, then overlay them together and mark out corrections that needed to be made before production. Offset printing was a time-intensive process back then, and you wanted to minimize any errors or problems before it ended up on press - otherwise starting over was expensive. Reprinting four color plates after corrections was much cheaper than setting up the press and finding problems there. Plus, printing companies scheduled press time, so when it was your time on the press, you didn't want any problems that would require you to reschedule - because it would have likely been a days-long delay that affected not only the printing schedule, but bindery as well.

As the 90's progressed, there was a specific brand name of match-prints that revolutionized the proofing process, as you could replicate each of the printing plates accurately all on one piece of paper or acetate. I never saw this first-hand, but saw plenty of proofs from it and it was much more accurate in color than the old match-print overlays. It looks like you have a few of those.

Color guides are kind of the catch-all terminology since there are many types of methods to produce color proofs and it spans many decades of printing methods from traditional to digital production.

Offset printing was an art-form that the digital age eradicated. I was only in it for a few years in the early 90s before digital imaging and plate-setters became affordable to most printers by the late 90s. Advancements in color proofing throughout the 2000s really helped dial everything in. It's utterly amazing how easy and skill-less it is to actually produce a printed piece nowadays, where only 30 years ago, it required 4-5 professionally skilled people to perform different tasks to produce a comic book.

What you have there isn't valuable as much as it's a cool piece of comic history.

This is great information and really helps me conceptualize what I have and what it was used for. Thank you!