IXD304 Apollo Project : Colour

When starting to consider my colour palette, before I had really settled on and committed to  the idea of going the comic route, I took a couple different notions.

The first was to watch Apollo 13 and pause it and take a screen shot whenever I saw a cool colour, then take the screen shots and swatch the colours to find the hex code on illustrator. This didn’t work out great because the colour I got ended up being too muted and dark on a white background and I didn’t like the palette that came together, so I scrapped that idea.

My next idea was to take the logos of all the apollo missions and colour swatch them and then pick colours from there. This didn’t work out so great either as there were so many variables in the colours and it would take way too much time to widdle them all down to a smaller palette.  I also again just wasn’t really feeling the colours, they were just to muted for my taste and what I had envisioned.

Then as I started researching the process of creating comics back in the 60’s I fell further and further into the research rabbit hole and discovered that due to the arduous process of colouring comic in that time, they were actually stuck with only a certain selection of colours. I think it this was because they had a limited number of dye colours and then they would use different densities of film to create more variation but it still leaves you with a strict set of colours. I learned a lot about it from this video on youtube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn1iv3thp8g&ab_channel=CartoonistKayfabe

To be honest, event though I didn’t know why it was like this till now, I did notice the strict palette in prints of older comics. Nowadays there are no restrictions as to what palette colourists can utilise which I suppose is better but I think the restricted palette give older comics this brilliant flamboyant, or even camp quality which I really adore about them. So with that I’ve decided to stick to the exact colour palette that they were stuck with back then.

I’m going to use the above palette as a colour reference to swatch from as I continue to work on my Apollo project.

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