WIP! Part 2: Colour tests continue

Yesterday I posted the first in this series of colour explorations for my new comic project Last Chance: Dead or Alive. If you didn’t get a chance to check it out, it’s a good place to start.

When we left off, I’d decided that my original ideas for how to colour Last Chance just weren’t working. So I needed to stop and re-think things a little bit. The biggest concern I had is that the colouring was overpowering the artwork and I wasn’t getting the right “feeling” from it. I was going for this barren desert landscape and what I had done with the colours was really vibrant. After noodling things over for about two weeks, I decided to dig through some old project files to locate a photo illustration I’d done. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted the final art to look like, but the desaturated colours were much more what I thought was appropriate. I took that artwork and created this…

Not too bad. I really liked the simplified, desaturated colours and the paper texture. So at this point, I decided to start trying out different ideas…

Slightly different colours throughout and I was still toying with the idea of a red sky. The next step was to really ditch the photos and start playing with drawing in Photoshop to see what I could come up with….

A couple of hours of messing around and I’d ended up here. Now this isn’t perfect, but I liked the mix of colours, textures and brush marks.

Up next, I jump back colouring the illustration and see if these new experiments actually work in practice.