Colour Research # II - Visual Emotions

Colour will again play an important role in the outward emotions of the characters. As my great love will always be “Bande Dessinée (BD)”, which I would assume would translate to something like a graphic novel, I am genuinely happy to find storyboarding quit similar to it. The intense use of visual language to represent movement and emotions is something present in BD which I would like to mirror in my storyboard. The strong emphasise on these visual cues will be portrayed through intense colour language.

Here I will try through some examples portray my view of some emotions and how they can be represented through visual symbolism.

First though I will have a look at some famous BD artists and try and find some recurring patterns which should invoke a certain school of thoughts. This can allow me to either try something different or accept conventions and work with them. There are many absolutely stunning authors/artists out there and the amount of work available is staggering. I will start looking through a few of them. These don’t portray emotions as vividly as I intend to do, focusing rather on facial expressions and minimal signs to represent to mind set of their characters. The first image come from a book called Souvenirs d’un Elficologue, drawn by Jean-Paul Bordier. It uses subtle lines to represent shock and quick movement. We might have though in the second image that the character was simply being angry. Yet with the addition of the lines we reach another level of intensity that is quit interesting. It would be interesting to identify which type of emotional signs can be used, while mixing them with strong symbolic colours, which should result in quit a potent extreme of exteriorly portrayed emotions.

The second set of images where drawn by one of my favourite artists. Juanjo Guarnido. The series is called Blacksad and represents a fictional 50’s America using anthropomorphism to symbolically represent the characters. Blacksad, the main character is depicted by a black cat with a white nose. All other characters are represented by animals that fit their main trait. The artists strong use of emotions through facial contortion is interesting as well as the movement implied through dynamic lines. These images explain my initial goal, which is to represent emotions through lines. I then will emphasize these lines through colour and some added depth to the shapes.

 My next step was to draw a few faces of my own and experiment with emotional sighs as I shall call them. They do not have any specific motif for now. I want to do this quit organically and let emotions come through the mark making. This is a beginning and I am running out of time. Ill spend more time on it tomorow.

I tried using soft colours but they don't work and just look like cheap 90's style signs. I will do more drawings using traditional methods as I belive it will look much better that way. And I will take my time.