The, um, incident with the clam was back in issue 1.
So in my neverending quest to not color quite so badly, I found some articles on four-color comics. That’s how things used to be colored in the ancient days, with four colors and 3-4 intensities (25%, 50%, etc.), resulting in a total of 64 colors. Not all those colors were usable on newsprint, but I got a copy of the old 64-color grid and tried recoloring some of my panels with the old limitations.
It was a fun experiment. The results, while a bit garish, are probably a bit more unified than the mess I tend to produce when I have millions of colors available to me. I think the color set works better for a science fiction work than fantasy, though, since there are only a handful of greens and browns to choose from, which makes woodland environments tricky. I also can’t do shading easily, though I imagine that with more familiarity with the 64 colors (and more skill) I could cobble something together. Also evident: without Photoshop tricks, the inking becomes much more important, since skilled inking is needed to distinguish grass from, say, the middle panel’s bare stone–coloring alone won’t cut it. Mastering how to ink different materials has been a long-term goal of mine.
Anyway, that’s today’s experiment.
And I don’t know if “life-like” or even “beautiful” are the words you’d use to describe the coloring in Golden or Silver Age comics. But I still find the experiment appealing in an odd way. It’s so bright and luminous and… how do I say it… contentless? Transparent? It triggers my eye to pay more attention to the words than the pictures, but I do love how the colors work together. They seem to all be at the same intensity, so it almost reminds me of stained glass or something.