Page 107 from Lynda Barry’s graphic novel, What It Is

In their book, Graphic Design: The New Basics, Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips discuss how color can set a mood or environment in a graphic novel or can simply make one object stand out more than another. Lynda Barry uses different hues of several different colors in her graphic novel. On this page in particular, you can see that there is a darker mahogany-like red on the left side of the page that Barry used for the plants which she then contrasts with the blue background behind it to make the plants more noticeable. On the right side of the page, there is a different hue of red that is more of an orange color because the red looks like it was mixed with the yellow. This provides a nice compliment to the blue and black object sitting on top of the orange area because blue and orange are on opposite sides of the color wheel. Barry uses primary colors to make some of the main objects stand out more and then she uses second and tertiary colors to fill in the background. She also makes sure that the objects she wants to stand out in her images are fully saturated hues of colors like the blue background in the middle of the page behind the word “imagery” and the red bird that is sitting directly below that. Hues can become desaturated by adding shades of white, black, or grey to existing colors. Barry chooses to desaturate hues of background colors so that the main objects in the image can pop out more. She gets the reader to focus on different aspects of the page by using a variety of different color techniques to set the mood and provide meaning in some ways to her graphic novel.