Backstage Pass #20 (Patreon)

On this week’s edition of Backstage Pass, I’ll be talking about…

Color palette transitions in OBT! Aka, Woo gets owned by color theory.

Folks who have been following OBT for some time may have noticed a slight shift in colors over the years. This is something that’s most prominent in the lineart, which went from a mid brown:

To a much darker brown:

This was due to wanting more contrast with lines, and also due to getting owned by color theory! While I liked the softer look the brown lines gave, they also had a tendency to sort of muddy the colors of the comic, which made vibrants scenes look… Not so vibrant. Take for example the Marowak Dojo in Chapter 3 vs Chapter 4:

The latest rendition certainly is a lot more striking! Which isn’t to say that having a faded palette was bad, it just wasn’t what I wanted for my art going forward. Though this transition definitely had some rough patches, and still needs a lot of tweaking to get it where I want! This particular page from Chapter 3 had a lot of growing pains compared to later pages:

To accommodate for the darker lineart, I had to really tweak character palettes to get just what I wanted out of them! You might notice that Malachi’s yellow highlights aren’t nearly as deeply saturated as they are in later pages, as an example.

It’s a difficult process to work through, but I’ve been making the journey one step at a time! My current weakness is background palettes, but as time goes on I’m sure they’ll come along.