riibrego

"Netherlings" Color Explorations

Added 2025-10-20 22:32:53 +0000 UTC

Since I recently turned inks in, I've been working on figuring out how I want to approach colors in this book - which is always harder than I expect!! So here's a look into how that process has been going.

This is some of my oldest color concept work: at this time I was thinking it'd be cool to make it super limited with areas of stark black to push that eerie otherworldly feeling, but I felt like it'd become monotonous really quickly.

I also have old concept work that takes it in a slightly different direction. Instead of being totally monotonous, it uses warm but saturated colors, plus a sort of sickly green to make it feel a bit "off."

You can see traces of both of these in the promo picture I drew for the official announcement a while back! I'm still fond of this direction, actually, so I'm still kind of considering it...

But to be honest, it's hard to juggle really cohesive limited palettes in a comic AND keep things interesting! So what I'm testing out right now is a palette that isn't so strict, but instead relies on "unnatural" colors to make things feel different from what we know. This gives me a lot more leeway with changing scenes and groups of characters and lets me create more points of interest. But I'm still not 100% sure that it's the right choice... hopefully I can decide soon, because I need to get to work lol!!

As a bonus, here's a page where I decided to have a little fun. I like "dramatic" moments because you get to focus more on how something feels as opposed to how it should look.