Tandra Page 1074, January 10, 2010

Created on 01/12/2010

by Hanther

Colouring each Tandra Page continues to be a fascinating adventure in its own right. I am coming more and more to sampling real world colours in choosing the colours I use for objects in Tandra and, in so doing, I am reminded of the admonition of my favourite college prof who instructed his students that colours are not absolute, but vary depending upon the light shining upon them.

I have, over the year past, wandered about the woodland that surrounds my studio and have taken numerous photographs of trees, flowers, leaves and clouds among other things. Most every comic strip selects a standard colour to use for trees and their leaves. When a tree is called for, the standard leaf colour and standard tree trunk colours are pulled up. Selecting colours from my photographs, it becomes obvious there is no standard leaf colour. Leaves vary dramatically in hue depending upon the variety of leaf, the time of day and if the sky is a perfect blue or if it is overcast. There is just no standard Leaf Green! In fact, there is no standard colour for anything.

I have written years past, so most of you reading this will not remember, as to my experience in producing the title design for the Tandra TPB titled Tandra Double Exposure. I painted the word “Tandra” on a rather large sheet of illustration board using a colour known as Cadmium Red Light which is a bright Fire Red or pretty much your full force standard comic book red, the colour used for Superman’s cape. With the painted piece laying on my drawing board, I noticed the end of the board closer to the window showed a bright orange red while the end of the board farther away had a cooler magenta bias. This from the same paint from the same tube on the same sheet of illustration board! Confirmation of my college prof’s wisdom.

Returning to nature’s colours, it becomes apparent upon close observation, sunrise colours have a cooler magenta bias while sunset colours bias toward the hotter orange red.

While this knowledge is useful to have inside one’s head, it is really not practical to attempt to reproduce natural colours with total accuracy for a computer coloured comic strip, but it is worthwhile to keep such observations at hand so as to use it to tweak the computer colours in the direction of natural colour.

And it makes colouring the pages more fun.

May the sun always shine on your parade!

Next Week; “Ashes And Death”

Tandra...more than escapist fantasy, it’s a revolution!

Hanther

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