The Color Palette
Added 2016-08-28 03:31:29 +0000 UTCI have no idea who would actually be interested in this, but I figure it might be neat for some people. This is the color palette and lighting schemes from about chapter 3 to the present page. If you can make sense of my nonsense, you can see the progression of the light from normal daylight to the darker sunsettiness we're getting into. You also have my notes and color order for the various details like scars, magic, acid, etc.
The coloring of DotL has pretty much been broken down to a science for me. And doing it for so long has brought me to the point where I just use color dots and very rarely need to reference a character sheet or previous pages to keep myself straight and consistent.
Fun Tidbit about coloring characters:
-Thistle's Base (the large grey dot) is used to fill in all the characters first, and that layer is made into a base from which I make a masked layer for each character.
-each character is filled in with their base/skin color from back to front, which almost always is Brent/Lyra, Orrig, Thistle when it comes to the protag group.
-each character has their own color order, which basically goes in the order of skin to outermost garment/weapons- this is mostly because I think best in terms of 3D spaces, so coloring that way makes logical sense to me. For example, Lyra is Skin>Hair>Eyes>lips (if applicable)>Red shirt>maroon part of her armor>armor trim/leather>elbow pads>metal latches>belt and boots>bow>quiver and arrows (if applicable).
-Once all the characters are flatted, they're merged down to a single layer to make lighting easier.
Thistle is actually the easiest/most fun to color. Due to the reduced number of colors but also because she wears cloth so there's more wrinkles/her clothes aren't snug, so it makes painting her form more fun.
[Yoko]
Comments
Omigosh, I'm so sorry I didn't get back to this before! (Life reared up and snagged me! And I can't reply to replies! RAWR!) I was curious about the steam-to-ice effects in particular -- although I loved how they all balanced with the ongoing color scheme, something about the ice and steam-to-ice made me wonder if it was particularly hair-raising to put those together.
Mary Williams
2016-09-05 17:50:46 +0000 UTCDo you have a certain page in mind? I can give you more information if I know what you're specifically curious about :3 Generally for the most part, when a new element- especially magic related is introduced, Meg usually gives me a reference picture (like a glacier for the ice) or tells me what the effect is supposed to be/look like and I find my own reference (like finding pictures of lighters and using that as a ref for Thistle's gold-blue/raw magic at the school). Once I'm able to establish how it looks the first time, I record all the colors and the order/process in the color palette for future pages as needed. [Yoko]
Meg Syv
2016-08-29 17:33:15 +0000 UTCthose are a lot of colours!
Siegfried Pinzer
2016-08-28 17:18:56 +0000 UTCVery interesting! Thanks!
2016-08-28 11:57:53 +0000 UTCThank you for all of the enlightening notes on color!! You can always count me interested about color: my ideal life would be one where I spend my day color-scripting stories. ;) It can have such an important role in conveying mood, emotion, drama, and changing everything about a scene! You can take the same set of lines and color it ten different ways, and each way will tell a different story. That you guys work so well as a team together is what makes DotL one of my favorite stories to read. :) (It fights for the top slot with FttN, which updates in... 18 minutes!) How hard was it to handle all of the elemental effects in the recent fight scenes? (Don't kill me for asking, just curious!!)
Mary Williams
2016-08-28 03:44:09 +0000 UTC
