Colors

Some of you know that I do some amount of comic book coloring for my day job while I'm between freelance assignments. I flat the pages before the final colors are chosen and rendered by Jose Villarrubia, who I work for. Whenever I start, I just choose a more or less random color and build off of that as I separate out shapes. A lot of times it turns out to be a big mess; things get out of control and it's all I can do to make sure each shape reads against the rest. Sometimes, though, I like how the pallets turn out in the end. I can't show you the actual flats, so I'm going through the hundreds of pages I've done and pulling out swatches.

I've been meaning to do this for awhile now, since I end up agonizing over color about as much as I agonize over drawing. Maybe it'll help me avoid tinkering with those little color sliders for as long as I do now. Just from these few pages, you can probably tell my preferences are for earth tones and desaturated colors punctuated by a brighter red or yellow.

These ought to be helpful in the coming weeks as I'm beginning to think about the color for the Hobbit.