Risk

I tried a couple new things in this comic. If you compare the bears’ costumes to how they appeared when we last saw them, you’ll see the colors have shifted, especially Malutki’s. I wanted to emphasize his moral decision to break with Masha, so I colored his clothes with a palette completely opposite Masha’s.

I’ve read a bit about color scripting. I’ve been aware of it since seeing Aladdin as a kid. To me, the sequence after Abu touches the forbidden treasure kind of hits you over the head–blue = mystery. red = danger. It wasn’t until I studied James Gurney’s notes on color scripting in Imaginative Realism that I realized you could do it more subtly.

The Red-Orange vs. Cyan scheme of this comic, where the story is moving to a climax, is my attempt to do that. As always, I still have a lot to learn.

Finally, I tried a different approach to the linework. I added a kind of sepia fade around the ink lines to give them a Rackham-esque feel. Not satisfied with the results, but this experiment has me thinking of other ways I could punch up the lines.