Pixelation
General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Conzeit on July 14, 2009, 05:50:48 pm
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well...I was wondering lately about something I read regarding watchmen, which was that within the limited pallete of comics, most artists (probably like Kirby) tended to use the primary colors while Gibbons on Watchmen employed more of the secondary colors of said pallete.
This makes me wonder....just how large is this pallete? does anybody know what combinations it has and wether it's less than 256 colors?
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I don't think there's a specific "comic color palette", if there'd been some restriction in that sense it would've affected all sorts of printed material. What they mean by that is colors in the general sense. Most comics use primaries (reds, blues, yellows), whereas Watchmen opted for secondaries (greens, oranges, purples) to further emphasize the somber tone.
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In one of Bill Watterson's commentaries on Calvin and Hobbes he mentions a color index that newspaper comics use, I think it was a little over 100 different tones, plus gradients. I think this is done for the sake of simplicity for the colorists more than anything, since technically the "pallette" for comics is just red yellow blue and black. Any other colors have to be made by dithering. Hence Superman, Spiderman, etc are red yellow and blue so their colors will be bold and clean. This is what makes Watchmen's color choice unconventional, favoring mood over "clean" color.
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Ben's got it pretty dead-on, most comics had a black key with around 3 colors (sometimes more, sometimes less), which could for a long time be chosen by the printer but eventually came to more standardized choices and eventually our good old cmyk. because halftone was harder to use than flat colors, many old comics and pulps preferred the latter. still, in any case, you can assume a black key followed by 3 color choices and possibly several colors achieved by a regular overprinting of 2 shades. this isn't likely with a lot of old books though because of the dominances, red and blue together made nothing but a very expensive black, while yellow in red made nothing but red and yellow in blue didn't make a very good color. by the 70's halftone and stuff had become far easier resulting in as many colors as you were willing to pay for.
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I was just wondering what kind of restrictions there were and I imagined it was something based on several passes like what you propose....I kind of just wanted to see a pallete of what would be the most common colors in this enviroment....I find the color index Bill Waterson mentioned quite interesting...I just want to replicate the kind of coloring paradigm those comic artists would have been in.
What would be a good way to replicate it in a pc? taking a wild gess I imagine several CMYK layers on photoshop with a 50% alpha blending....?
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You could offset each color layer at the end slightly so they're not all perfectly aligned - that would really give it the sort of pulp comics look.
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Scott McCloud had a palette in his book Understanding comics that was 3 hues (CYM) and 4 shades of each (~25, 50, 75, 100%). I believe this was prior to the later CYMK system and used flat colours instead of half-tone patterns. From these hues you could mix and get a limited variety of blue, red, green shades. All of this is from memory, I don't have the book on me and couldn't find a scan of the specific section.
Ben2theEdge's suggestion would would too. There are heaps of scans of old comics online too. It shouldn't be that hard to estimate a palette from comics that best fits your idea if you select one era and one publisher.
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Here is a watchmen palette I pulled from another site. The colors seem to be more or less accurate to what can be found in the books, though too many shades of one color seem to be provided. Maybe you can try to pull the correct basic colors from this? The purple/pink range seems to be fairly accurate, the greens seem to be off.
(http://www.capecity.jasondunbar.com/cpcc/images/watchmen-palette.jpg)
Going over the books I notice the reds tend to go to either a magenta or a orange tint, so I'm assuming most reds are either red+magenta or red+yellow or yellow + magenta. I'm guessing most of the colors are mixed and that is what your source refers to as secondary colors.
I'm going to pull some actual pages later to see what we can find out.
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I highly doubt that it was printed with a process varying from how stuff normally are printed, thus CMYK. Printing stuff with more spot colours = expensive.
I also really do not see anything superspecial about the Watchman comic in terms of colour usage, compared to european stuff from the same time for example.
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@Gil: That's actually the color palette for character creation in the City of Heroes MMO- you can see the skyscrapers in the background.
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http://jonnycrossbones.com/tutorials/how-to-color-like-a-little-old-lady/
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@Gil: That's actually the color palette for character creation in the City of Heroes MMO- you can see the skyscrapers in the background.
I saw a site advertising it as a watchmen palette. It actually comes pretty close to being what's being used in most comics. I imagine the MMO uses some sort of CMYK based palette.
I never heard of that MMO though (I don't play online games), so I wouldn't know.