Take a seat friends, welcome to another color workshop ๐จโ๐ซ today we'll talk about how color can aid storytelling.
Color and Roles
So how do you think about color and story?
Seems simple enough. But how do we go about assigning roles to color?
As always, let's start with questions to ask yourself before starting.
The characters and environments in Disney's Aladdin reflect this very simple theme:
Notice how Aladdin is purple because he's caught between the forces of good and evil in the movie? Simple things like that can go a long way to re-establish theme through color.
- If you need a refresher on the properties of color check out this quick guide to color theory!
Over the Garden Wall also uses simultaneous contrast to make its predominately warm scenes feel like it has cool colors.
Limiting the colors you use in a story can make the times you get out of that set scheme really impactful ๐ฎ
Now let's talk about how colors relate to a character design's storytelling!
But remember! Character and environment are connected.
- we briefly introduced how characters play against their environment in this tutorial.
You can suggest a lot of things by having environment and character change in relation to each other. Is a character losing their status in the world? How does the world feel about your character changing? And how does your character feel about the world they inhabit?
Because I made these slides for a comic workshop, I included a comic example of a story with strong color storytelling.
Notice how even the caption boxes (which stay in the voice of the protagonist as the narrator throughout the story) change color when referring to the green fox?
Now let's talk about color and genre.
If I drew a vague dessert and gave it a warm sepia color scheme, you'd start thinking about westerns. But if I colored that same desert mostly red with an unnatural sky color, you'd probably start thinking it's a drawing set on Mars.
Again, you don't have to be married to genre associations with color. I'd love to see a brightly lit, pastel colored horror story! But keep those conventions in mind so that your subversion is coming from an informed place.
We'll wrap up this workshop with some notes about saturation, contrast and what commonly works for using them.
Always remember that roles you assign to color aren't limited to the color itself, but its properties in saturation, brightness and how cool vs warm the color is. Color doesn't have to be literal, it's one of the many tools you can use to reinforce theme, character and their internal feelings!
And that's it!
That's how you use color to suggest story and themes.
Go forth and color! ๐จโ๐ซ
