Colored girls

It's always a good idea to preserve continuity with color comps. If you're going to paint in watercolors, you should always do your comps in watercolors. This makes it much easier to match your colors on the finished painting. It's even better to write down color formulas or combinations used to achieve specific colors. The reflective and translucent quality of different mediums can wreck havoc with colors and perception, and this goes double for the computer. You throw in the differences between reflected and projected colors and you're begging for a headache.

So, I did this comp on the computer with a sweet Japanese ink and paint program called SAI Paint Tool. It was fast and so convenient, and it's a great program for tablet PCs. The only real drawback was trying to match colors on the finished piece, and that was a real headache. I wonder why?

The colors needed to be bright but just south of psychedelic. I always thought the 60s made it okay to use bright colors, but when we got to the 80s it had spun out of control. The 70s got it just right, and that was the feeling I wanted. Laura "Colorista” Martin works across the hall from me here at the studio, so I called her in for a second opinion, and after a bit of tweaking you could actually hear the colors sing.