New colouring idea 1- paint...

Looking at my inspiration, I have taken particular interest in Vanessa Gong's style of using block colour. I want to see if I can create colour and the idea of light and depth without using much tone or difference. Texture may still be included but that depends on the medium.

EXPERIMENT 1: Paint

After drawing out a cell, I put it on a light box.

I put a separate piece of paper over the top and paint in the specific area that I want to colour. This way, the colour still follows the general area and pattern, but there is room for slight variations. This effect of imperfect lines and shapes is quite interesting.

Line work of cells and the paint layer.

Put together with writing example and a textured scanned in background (using grey to make all the other colours stand out).

This was a good experiment, but somehow I feel that I did not get the right emotion. When paint is involved, I am too inclined to add tone and shadow which, for this new idea, is exactly what I didn't want to do.

Using a similar hue of colours, I tried to recreate the same double page but this time using digital colouring. Though I had mentioned that I wanted to stay away from as much digital manipulation as possible, I wanted to see how effective a perfectly flat solid colour would look.

The result was very positive. In this way,  I could use the colours almost like individual highlights, with specific colours used for specific objects or moods. In the case of this colour experiment, the skin colour is used as a shadow colour on the old woman, blue is used as a background colour and a sign of a sullen atmosphere (hence the goodbye envelope and the oxygen tanks in blue) and the red was to draw attention to key central points of the narrative.