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Nov 12

Referencing the "Why are the curtains blue?" question that's memed on.

How do you use colours in your comics?
Like, are you realistic with it always, do you just pick them for aesthetic reasons? Do you use them to "mean" things? Or do you not put much thought into such things?

I'll give a few examples of what I mean: in my sci-fi/thriller I use blue and red to both represent "humanity", specifically around the two robot/android characters. Red being Hansel's humanity. The darker, scarier parts. Anger, fear, obsession...

And blue, mostly connected with the human boy Timothy, is the "humanity" Gretel adopts for herself. venerable, love, peace. calmer and less volatile.

And I often bathe them in those lights to push the opposite paths they take to become as "human" as a pair of inhuman robots can get.

And for a more... normal, less pretentious example,
Rune wears blue to represent water since that's what she's heavily associated with lol

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I would say, yes and no. ^^; I do use colors to mean things, but often very specific things that I basically spell out to the reader-- that is to say, I make overt 'assignments' of certain colors to certain characters or concepts.
Trying to analyze my work to figure out why I made the curtains blue in a certain scene will likely be a fruitless endeavor: 99 times outta 100, they are just blue. HOWEVER, if you really wanna see how I work with color symbolism, you need only look at the giant neon arrows pointing to what I am actually doing. ^^;

One thing people need to learn about literary analysis: just because it wasn't a hidden message you had to figure it out for yourself doesn't mean it's not good enough, despite what your Language Arts teachers might have convinced you. Sometimes artists and writers tell you what they want you to pay attention to. What a concept. :smiley:

Like, for example, I have this comic where the MC is being tormented by a psychic being, and that psychic being's influence on his mind is always associated with the color red. It's also associated with specific imagery-- eyes, blood, raw flesh--but there's always a focus on red. You can see plainly in the comic when he's talking to it or being given a vision by it, simply by the color of the pages/panels:

To give another example, I have a story where the central characters are all 'products' given designs in different colors, which impact how the MC (and the audience) see them, and allow them to make inferences about their personalities.

Sometimes they seem to match up perfectly: the main antagonist's design is "sickening lime green", reminiscent of cartoon acid or toxic waste, fitting for their vicious personality. Meanwhile, the MC's main love interest wears seafoam green, a calming color that matches her gentle demeanor.

And then other times, the color assignments don't match: One of the MC's friends wears blue, in a cool, professional design that only matches the mask he puts on to survive in an abusive environment-- underneath it, he's a very jokey unserious person, and the fact that his real self is the first side of him that she sees draws attention to this mismatch.
Another one of the MC's friends is designed in red and gold: he looks fiery and dangerous, and he can be when fighting. But outside of that he's actually very sweet and shy...in direct contrast to the MC herself.

Her color is "neon pink", and she hates how loud and cute it is. She feels it gives people the wrong impression of her, making them think of her as childlike and 'entertaining', instead of the serious, hardened warrior she actually is. It reflects how, throughout the story, her antagonists look down on her and oversimplify her motives, refusing to see her as a mature adult just because they designed her to look like an edgy teenage girl.

Of course, throughout the story, the MC's perceptions of these colors change along with her perceptions of these characters, including herself-- In this way, I use color itself as a symbol of who each character is and how they are perceived by the people around them.
...They ARE also fun aesthetics; as a character designer I can't deny that. ^^; But you can always develop an aesthetic and flesh it out by giving narrative reasons for it; two things can be true at once.

well, in my currently dead comment (i'll remake it someday when i find a new artist to partner with) colors were used to represent personality traits. A fairyish glow appeared around the female lead whenever she switched personalities to try to fit in with a different crowd. there was her assertive feminist personality, her cutesy pretty girl personality and her kind of crass jokester personality, each represented by a different color.

in my current comic, i use colors to make the characters stand out but also to sometimes contrast each other. The female lead has blue hair, she likes cool colors and things like moons and stars, so we gave the male lead fiery red hair to contrast with her because they are a very 'opposites attract' type duo.

now in my novel "Crystal Blue" color has a very important role in Phant history. they have paintings homo erectus have yet to 'crack the code' too. Colors are used to represent different species of phant and those paintings tell stories that are part of their history. humans are blue because according to their lore, humans ate a blue apple from the ancient dryads tree while different species of phants ate different apples.

In paintings, Fauns are green because of their ties to nature and animals. Fairies are pink because of their role as 'the immortal flower.' Mermaids are purple because their bioluminscent usually shows itself in shades of purple or blue. Dragons are gold because of their obsession with gold etc.

I'm pretty intentional about how I use colors in my comic. Most of the time it's pretty obvious, like how the character Red is associated with the color red, and there's a certain shade of purple that represents the Darkness. But for some potentially pretentious and/or cheeky examples...

I made the decision early on to make the main characters specifically not wear the colors associated with their magical girl forms, but then subverted this by quietly making their backpacks the appropriate colors. Though I bent the rule a bit for Aijou because 1) I didn't think she would wear a bright yellow backpack, 2) I wanted there to be reasonable doubt about her being Yellow.

A more character-centric one is Rikou's fascination with rainbows, implying both her obsessive nature and her reverence toward the Niji Chikara (notice the bookshelf):

Probably the most pretentious one was when I gave Teinei an "off-white" car, which I joked(?) at the time was a subtle nod to him being not as pure as he seems: