Easiest Way to Pick Colors for Your Webtoon and Comics: No Color Theory 

same girl

I had the same epiphany: "Oh... this is actually a lot less time consuming but... oh ... he explained how to avoid my assumed future problem as well"

Colors are hard and it really takes time to understand them, I still don't really understand them. They also tend to look like crap until you're done. It's weird. Just stick with it, you got this.

@@walterostlie I'll try, but it gets discouraging. Makes me feel dumb that I can't get it 😕

I don’t have any formal art schooling either, so I understand all well that color theory let alone colors in general is so mind numbingly hard. I’m currently doing the flats on a Batman comic that someone did the pencils for and for the first time I’m doing well and that’s only because I have an exact idea, no matter how fuzzy, of what I want the general colors and feeling I want to portray using them to be. Try picking 1 or two colors you want to show most on the page or scene and work around that. They say “limitation is the mother of all creativity” and I find that to be true, so narrowing down your colors and giving yourself in a sort of mental box can help free up your mind. I’m probably sticking my nose in and giving unwanted advice at this point but I hope this helps. And Walter is completely right colors take time to get used to, just keep working that part of your brain and you’ll work it out.

@@brodenmckinney8168 Your advice is helpful and I thank you for it truly; I was going to try testing out color palettes, but the more tutorials I see about how to choose colors the less inspiring it gets me. It sounds very precise; I'm a simple individual and like unsaturated colors. I'm not trying to draw/color realistic characters...they're just...simple if you follow me. It's the same feeling I have if I made a color comic; how would I know what colors to lay down? Should I color the character first, but what if the BG colors clash? What if the character gets lost? I started out just writing stories; drawing everything is new, but I enjoy it very much. I love bringing my stories to life; I just don't understand this part.

@@Sammy_47 I understand completely. It is a lot of effort and playing around. I like the more muted colors too but just so you know and this is coming from Alex Sinclair one of the top colorist in the comic industry, and that’s to stay on the upper half of the color graph. If you go on the lower half where it gets darker it will be more muddy in print and you won’t get the same look you want. Also don’t have any lights behind you while you color, if you can help it. And always have your screen lighting somewhere between 50% and 20% since the brightness of the screen can give you false colors. I’m pretty simple too so I get it. Limiting your color palette will help you immensely. Oh, and to help with the contrasting problem of your characters and backgrounds. Decide on an over all feeling you want to portray, I mean the temperature of the page/panel. A cool white is a bland feeling and an intense red I a feeling of danger. So tying together what colors give off what feelings can help you with picking colors. I found the panel with Alex Sinclair on Wacom comic week, last year, to be extremely helpful with this. You can find it on RU-vid I’ve watched it several times and since he’s one of the industry’s leading colorists I’m sure it will be helpful. He goes over an example of him picking out the colors and over all feel for the page in the video. The panel is like an hour long but it’s a good watch if you have the time to pay attention to it.

Oh yeah. So once I get the colors right for a scene I just open both pages. New and old. Then i use paint bucket to pick colors from old page and fill in the parts on the new page.

@@walterostlie Do you start new with every different comic you make, or do you carry over between them? do you make sure the characters always have the same base colour? Hope my question makes sense, i am having trouble navigating colour, great video!