On the internet, colour is free. So when it came time to start the new DFS online, we of course decided it would be in colour. And Jeff was already doing the art, so it fell to me to do the colouring. I’d done a few things way back when for posters, swag and such, but we’d never actually done pages in colour. And I worked with traditional stuff like markers, pencil crayon or watercolours. The only digital colouring we’d done was for the previous website, and that was mostly just figures.
What I’ve learned so far is that there’s a lot of decisions to be made when colouring, and I had no basis for them, except what seemed okay to me.
One of the most difficult decisions was how to handle the eyes of Mississauga Jay’s sister Celeste. Jeff had drawn her with empty ovals for eyes with an indication of eyelashes. Eyes were kind of a new thing, Alex and Walter are always wearing glasses, and most of our other characters had done so also, kind of a little oddity of the DFS’verse.
My initial inclination was to just fill them with white. I did up a page or two that way, but Jeff wasn’t so sure that worked, so I tried some other options.
What’s funny is that in the end, the all white still seemed best. But I saved the others, to share. Okay I saved the others cause I thought the Lynn Johnston eyes were funny, sue me.
– Chris
