Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU

Rodolphe Topffer’s “The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck”

Color can show a lot about any image. it can be used to guide the reader’s eye, it can be used to set a focus point in the image, or it can be used to tell a story. In Rodolphe Topffer’s “The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck” the background of all the frames and the pages are a warm tint. A lot of the images in the frames are mainly black and white with only a few spots that have color in them. The few spots that do have color in them are desaturated and don’t really pop out to the eye. Only things that really do pop out to the eye is when there is red in the picture where everything else is black and white. Also when red is the only color in the frame where it is all mostly blue and green. This page mainly has primary and secondary colors. All the primary colors and only one secondary color which is green. The blue and green hues interact with each other by making the two seem like one subject which is kind of confusing to the eye because with how desaturated all the colors are it makes it hard for the audience to focus on a subject. The red hues in the blue interacts by contrasting each other and creating a focal point. Same with the red hue and the yellow hue in the first frame. The red is a lot darker than the yellow which draws the reader’s eye to the person. This is a simple use of primary and secondary colors but at the same time a complicated use. It’s simple because only a few important spots are colors, but its complex because of how desaturated it is. That makes all the colors blend into one subject.

A page from Chris Ware’s graphic novel “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth”

In Chris Ware’s graphic novel, “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” there are many  different examples of how multiple colors interact with on anther. On this specific page, you can see the contrast between the gloomy gray color and the bright yellow, which seems to be the focus of attention throughout the comic. The buildings and the background around the main character and the object he is holding in the comic are saturated. Specifically in the frame in which the character is holding the key chain in this hands between his laps. The red hue in the image becomes a shade because of the black that is added to the red creating a  dullness to the color.  Throughout this comic page you can also see many other forms of color intensity being used. For example in the frame in which the character is seeing the key chains and reaching for one, you can see that white has been added to the yellow hue making the color appear brighter, as well as black being added to the read to make it appear dull. The dullness of the red glove also makes the yellow of the key chain brighter, making it seem that it is what the reader should be focusing on. On this page you also notice that the tint of the sky/background is very light. This is because white has been added  to create the lightest hue this color could produce. Throughout this  entire page you can see multiple colors contrasting with one another to emphasis certain aspects of the story and also to set a certain vibe to the story ( in this case the vibe is a bit gloomy).

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.