This week our lecture content was on colour theory.
I was looking forward to the work this week since I’m generally uncomfortable in using colour. The results of my subsequent experiments are perhaps not where I want to be in my understanding of colour and its application, but I enjoyed looking finding references and taking inspiration from them.
The first exercise was to take one of our previous thumbnails and try adding colour to evoke a particular mood. I chose the magical forest thumbnail I did for the Magical Academia world last week, and went for a complimentary yellow and purple colour palette in an attempt to add to the idea of a mystic, fantastical setting:
Generally I think this was successful. Working in Photoshop, I was able to play around a little with brightness and contrast to create a more striking result. If I were to add more colour to this I would try and create a more colourful glow with pinks and oranges and blues.
Our second task was to take a colourless linework and colour it to evoke the sense of a particular emotion in the viewer. I tried colours to create the idea of anger and fury, alongside a different take (to my first thumbnail) on a mystical/other-worldly effect.
Of course this wasn’t all of this week’s work. In switching groups again, I was sent to group 9, whose world is based around a portal to the underworld hidden in a sketchy curiosity shop that sells human hide to demons and monsters so they can disguise themselves as people and visit the overworld. The main character is a naïve little hald-demon girl who doesn’t know that she’s part demon. The owner of the shop is after her skin as it doesn’t rot as fast as the regular stuff, and chases her through the underworld where she meets several friends who help her along the way.
I’ve found working in this world challenging so far because it’s so far beyond my usual style, however as soon as I heard more about the world my head was buzzing with references. The main idea by way of the colours was had by Caz; the hottest part of a flame is blue, so we have a cool-toned underworld. Although it’s effectively hell and still a hostile environment, we wanted to make the whole story less ‘Dante’s Inferno’ and more ‘Wizard of Oz’. The main character is a child after all, we didn’t want her traumatised by the end of it.
Two further ideas I had were to have a Jazz Club setting with ‘Sing You Sinners’ by Mel Tormé being played (one of my favourites)- which was elaborated upon by Jodie who had the idea for the girl’s demon mask/disguise to fall off as a suspenseful moment in the story
and the idea to reference the opening sequence of Citizen Kane when the main characters approach the devil’s fortress to search for a portal home (some further Wizard of Oz parallels) to help establish its grandeur and status.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNL6kNKvm6k&t=53s