Limited Color Palette or All the Colors?

[CVa]

Hi! I just re-found the forums and super happy to meet you all!!

I'm working on my first comic so I thought this would be a good place to ask. It's also my first real dive into digital art and I'm honestly struggling, but it's been fun! (Even if it's been kicking my butt with the learning curve. Haha.)

The comic's going to be a ghost story. And at first I was going to do a limited color palette of mostly oranges and browns, and when the ghosts show up they were going to be blue. I still like the idea. But I did seven pages and I'm already starting to get a little bored of the color palette. I think I'm bad at choosing limited palettes that work.

So I made a mock-up of what it could be like without a limited color palette. The character likes pink so of course she was going to wear all the pink.

Can you please vote on which you prefer, A or B? (Or neither haha) It'll also help me if you could tell me how you go about making color choices in your own art?

And any advice for a new digital artist is very appreciated. Especially about colors/lighting. That was one of the reasons for the limited color palette because I've never worked with colors before and I'm not comfortable with color theory (or any of the fundamentals yet )

Thank you!!

[darthmongoose]

I have a slight preference for A, but honestly I think they both look really nice and it might be that while I like the restraint of A personally, that B would be the more successful on Tapas, where bright colours are good to catch the eye and keep readers engaged.
You have a good sense for keeping your saturation cohesive and using the value and saturation to draw the eye where it needs to be, so you could pull off either. Go with the style that offers the best balance of time taken to quality of output and that you think "yeah, this suits the mood I want!" best. Trust your instincts, you have a good eye for colour!

[TheLemmaLlama]

I ... honestly don't have a preference, actually. You're pretty good at making the colours look cohesive when you go all the colours. I would probably go for whichever takes you less time to make; even if you feel bored of the limited palette now, you'll probably get just as bored with full colour when you've done it a gazillion times and speed becomes the pressing concern. The exception is if you like to continuously experiment (e.g. with bolder lighting etc), which ensures you never get bored but will also make your comic's style inconsistent. It all depends on what's the most important to you!

I personally am using full colour in my comic, but I aim for naturalistic lighting and less of an 'illustrated' look that most limited palette comics tend to evoke, if that makes sense. My 'lineart' is very sketchy and not very readable or impressive on its own, so I need my colouring to carry the team

[NickRowler]

Technically your first comic isn’t a limited palette, it’s sepia. And similar to grayscale comics, you would have to think about if that would capture what you need visually for a comic.

Your second one I think is well done. Most well done full color comics use a limited palette but they are done in a way that you might not really notice. Like you have used reds, blues, and greys.

I prefer the 2nd one. But if you do go with sepia, I would recommend bring down the saturation a little bit.

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

So, like others here, I like both options, although I like each for different reasons. Your color work in either is good, and you have good understanding of contrast/light and dark to make it not seem flat no matter what you do. I concur with the earlier opinion that more/bright colors will probably do better on Tapas, but I also understand the appeal of a well-done limited color palette. That said, I ALSO also understand that using the same colors page after page after page gets really old really fast.

For my own work, I'm trying to replicate natural colors as closely as possible (down to color picking from actual photos if I can), so I have sort of the opposite of a limited palette... at least in theory. Thing that I've noticed happening is that my colors DO sort of limit themselves... based on the light in a scene. Deep sunset looks different from morning, which looks different from night colors, and each one instills a different, somewhat limited palette.

So I suggest a middle ground: As scenes change, especially if the lighting/atmosphere/vibe in a scene changes, give each scene its own partially restricted palette. It'll be more interesting for you as the artist to do, since the colors will change once in a while, it'll still have that limited palette vibe, AND occasional color changes will help the readers mentally transition from scene to scene, too.

[BLTX]

SHORT OPINION: I prefer the colored one. Frankly, the brown one kind of makes me think of poop. It's probably just me, but, I figured I should tell you.

[system]

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