Significance of Color
How Color Can Be a Storytelling Tool
Well, it's been quite some time since I last posted but I've never promised to be a consistent writer. It's been a hectic month for me, and I'm hoping things stay this busy, but I'm going to try to post at least once a week! We'll see if I can keep up with that but for now, I thought I'd talk a little bit about color and storytelling.
The colors of a comic page can really make a difference. Whether it's affecting the mood or atmosphere of a scene or how the reader (knowingly or not) perceives characters, you can add a lot of meaning to a page depending on your palette.
This page is from a western comic I recently worked on. The writer and I decided that earth tones would be the best fit for this genre. When I sent him over this first page for approval he was happy with the overall look of the page but had me change one thing. In this first round, the man in panels 1, 3, and 5 is the only character colored with a cool tone; I did this to distinguish him as the antagonist of the comic. But when the writer got back to me he explained how while his original intent was to have the man in panels 2 & 4 be the main character, the story evolved to focus on the female in panel 5. She played a special role in this story and with her being the true focus, he felt that she should be set apart some way with the coloring.
In this next round the woman, Elizabeth, is the only character in this story to be colored in a cool tone. I changed the antagonist's clothes to be made up of dark brown so that he visually fit in with the rest of his cowboy crew but was still distinguishable from the others. This version rang true with the writer's perception of the characters.
So next time you're coloring your artwork try thinking about how you can use color to not only make your piece look good but to also serve the characters and move the story forward.
Do you have a favorite comic or movie that uses color in a significant way?
I find myself constantly in awe of the color palette Guillermo Del Toro uses in his films such as Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. La La Land also comes to my mind when I think of visually stunning films.
Thanks for reading!
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Lovely artwork. I am happy to discover you here on Steemit. And to visually stunning films: Do you know the movie "Amelie" from Jean-Pierre Jeunet or "Hero" from Zhang Yimou, which influenced me a lot with my photography work. Hero has one of the most impressive scenes in the movie history, in a artistic sense.
I haven't heard of those, I'll have to check them out!
Oh, this is a wonderful post about colours! <3
I really like how thoughtful you are when selecting the colours to use for each panel and characters. It is great that the comic is colour coordinated nicely and made to emphasise the important point of the story, subtly. Nicely done!
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Yeah it always interests me how much goes into making comics. Thanks for reading!
I agree. The color of a page really does set the tone, the mood, and contributes greatly to the storytelling. I've seen it change from page to page depending on whether there was a vision or a dream sequence, a flashback, and other such instances.
I can't think of any comic books off the top of my head that I really like for the coloring, though. I think a lot of the modern comics actually have colors that pop out because they're using better paper stock (if they're print) or because they're digital. Colors just don't look the same when they're halftones on newsprint or something pulpier.
Nice looking page, by the way. :)
A lot of my favorites comics, or even just most of the comics I read, happen to be in black and white which is I why mentioned some films. But now that I think of it black and white comics still use heavy black inks strategically as they would with color. Thanks for reading and for the feedback :)