Let's Get Outta Here

This is a comic that I posted quite awhile ago, but I never really like the original colors too much. I decided to rework it and makes prints before I headed out to APE in two weeks. It has probably been the most frustrating comic for me to color. I'm not very confident working with color and my general solution is to try and keep my coloring simple. It's rare that I get over five colors on one page. More than that and things start to look awful. However, with this comic having a simple color palette just didn't work because one thing that having all the same colors in the panels does is unify the page. It makes it look like everything is happening in the same place. That unification is detrimental to this comic, because it is based on every panel having a drastically different setting. A large color palette was necessary.

But a large color palette can create a mess and while having the panels too unified is a problem, so is having the panels seem completely disparate. The pattern I ended up coming up with was this. The foreground characters in the first panel are red. The foreground characters in the second panel are blue. From there I alternate cycling through the color wheel with each panel. The odd panels moves from red to orange to yellow to green, etc., and the even panels move from blue to purple to pink, etc. This results in each panels foreground color being far removed from the one previous, but still creates something of a checkerboard pattern that keeps the whole page together.

I don't even want to admit how much time I spent tweaking all these colors. There were a lot of times when I thought about just doing it in black and white.

Here are some failures.
But I think I have it now, and I should have prints ready for APE (the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco on 10/16-17).